The first season of the Novi Sad Dino park ended with attendance three times lower then expected, whereas the costs of its operations, which measure in millions, fell on the shoulders of the PUE Gradsko Zelenilo, the Vojvodina Research and Analysis Center (VOICE) recently reported.
The Novi Sad Dino Park opened in the spring of 2016, and the management of Gradsko Zelenilo estimated at the time that it would be visited by 200,000 people. However, the first season ended with around 65,000 tickets sold. Instead of the projected revenues from tickets, which should have ranged between 25 and 30 million dinars a year, only RSD 17.87 million was realized, VOICE says.
Dino and adventure parks are additional features by which tourism workers seek to attract visitors, and entertainment complexes of this kind are increasingly more numerous in Serbia. Up to several dozen million dinars is invested in the construction of these parks, and investors mostly expect to get a return on the investment several years after the opening, depending on how much money was given for the parcel, the construction, the equipping...
Whereas investors claim that this is a profitable business, experts are much more reserved.
– Most such projects here are barely profitable. As a group, we have actively advised and evaluated some of the globally famous amusement parks, such as Wild Wadi Dubai, Six Flags USA etc, and this is a serious industry with big turnovers, but also big business crashes – Srdjan Vujicic, real estate manager at
Coreside, explains for eKapija.
Kopaonik expects results in 5 years
Kopaonik also recently got one such amusement park. The Ski Resorts of Serbia built an adventure park on the mountain, taking up around 2,000 square meters. As the company said for eKapija, the project was realized with the funds of the Ministry of Trade, Tourism and Telecommunications, and the value of the investment is RSD 9.8 million. The Ski Resorts expect the Kopaonik investment to become profitable in five years.
The company, however, couldn't specify how much money is needed to maintain such facilities, considering that the park in Kopaonik opened only recently, that it was still under guarantee and that such expenditures are therefore still non-existent. Furthermore, as they say, they cannot estimate the expected number of tourists by the end of the season either.
In addition to Kopaonik, the Ski Resorts of Serbia opened one such park on the Zlatibor peak of Tornik last year, and, as they told us, the construction of a similar facility, meant for children, is in progress in Stara Planina.
Dinosaur replicas attracting numerous touristsIn addition to the said adventure park, Zlatibor recently got a Dino Park as well. A little over two months has passed since its opening and it has been visited by over 60,000 guests so far, Milica Zec of Dino Park says for our portal.