Volume 2, No. 8.   May 10, 2002

New Arrivals

It’s twin tube slides!
Big Kahuna’s in Destin, Florida, announces the arrival of Tiki River Run, May 4, 2002. Measurements: 457 feet long (138 meters), a drop of 54 feet (16 meters), one and two-person tubes. Delivered by ProSlide Technology.

The big crowds that gravitated to Big Kahuna’s first capital improvement in four years on the season’s opening day were prompted by the most effective in-your-face marketing the park could have ever conceived. The park lies right next to U.S. Highway 98, the beach resort town’s main thoroughfare which sees as many as 80,000 automobiles a day. The new tube slides replaced the Big Kahuna ’s original 1987 concrete body slides right at the front of the park, so local residents driving by knew something new was happening.

“People have been watching the construction since the winter, and that built excitement,” said Jenn Minor, the park’s director of marketing. She also purchased advertising across the bottom of the local newspaper’s Sunday front page, a contract she secured for 13 weeks. Thanks to that combination, Minor said, “a lot of people went immediately to Tiki River Run” on an opening day blessed with 90-degree (32 degrees Celsius) sunny weather. Guest comments indicated that first-day riders were well rewarded after the long winter’s wait, Minor said, especially one 12-year-old who proclaimed Tiki River Run “scarily exciting.”

Sounds like a good promotion slogan for a future attraction at the park.

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