Knott’s Owner Hopes Water Park and Hotel Renovation Bear Fruit

When Knott’s Berry Farm opens its brightly colored Soak City USA water park Saturday, visitors may overlook another new landmark near the slides and chutes: the “Radisson” name atop the former Buena Park Hotel.

For Cedar Fair, owner of the clustered attractions, spending $28.4 million to buy, renovate and re-brand the hotel was as crucial as building its $25.5-million beach-themed “second gate,” filled with water slides and lazy rivers.

Why fix up an aging hotel that often struggled to fill one-third of its 321 rooms? Why, especially, do so in a city where the non-Knott’s attractions are lower-tier operations, such as Movieland Wax Museum, Ripley’s Believe it or Not! Museum, and the Medieval Times and Wild Bill’s Wild West dinner theaters?

As tourist areas everywhere aim to become destinations, places where visitors base their vacation excursions, the bet here is on a bargain mini-resort.

Although Knott’s can expand its local customer base by adding a water park, it needs a hotel before it can pitch itself as more than a one-day side trip to vacationers elsewhere.

And park officials said they will be pitching hard, hoping to increase tourist numbers from less than 20% of total park visitors to 35% or better by next summer.

To help it pull in the out-of-towners, Cedar Fair brought in the Radisson chain in January to lend its widely recognized name to the hotel as well as to manage it and include Knott’s as a destination in its worldwide marketing.

“No one outside of here knows what we have,” Knott’s general manager Jack Falfas said. “I like to think there’s something ‘Camelotish’ when you say Anaheim, Calif.: It means Disneyland. And I want Buena Park to mean a festive city, with Knott’s a resort.”

Sandusky, Ohio-based Cedar Fair, well-regarded for its expertise in operating amusement parks, has expanded its flagship Cedar Point park on Lake Erie to include a water park, go-carts, RV campground and 1,400 hotel rooms. There, as in Buena Park, the company is betting on becoming less of a “pay-by-the-day” operation.

“From my perspective, it’s somewhat of a gamble,” said Robert G. Routh, an industry analyst at the Ladenburg, Thalmann & Co. brokerage in New York who last month enthusiastically recommended that investors buy the company’s stock.

“They are great park operators who are going into another line of business with these water parks and hotels. They’re trying to become a destination. Is that a successful strategy? For Walt Disney [Co.], sure. For these guys, we don’t know.”

Knott’s, which began as a berry stand in the 1920s, soon added a chicken restaurant and over time put in a Wild West “ghost town,” shops, amusement rides, the replica of Independence Hall and became “probably the second-best-known theme park in the country besides Disneyland,” said hotel and leisure industry expert Bruce Baltin.

But as big regional amusement parks proliferated in recent decades, Knott’s became mainly a place for Southern Californians seeking a low-key, low-cost alternative to Disneyland--and no longer much of a draw for tourists, said Baltin, the head of PKF Consulting in Los Angeles.

The park’s plan to recapture some of its former fame comes as Southern California is awash in new and planned attractions, including a $2-billion expansion of Disneyland and the Anaheim Convention Center.

Knott’s believes Disney’s new California Adventure theme park, scheduled to open in February, will help Knott’s more than it will hurt by providing a huge new pool of potential customers who may want something else to do while visiting California.

“They have everything,” Falfas said, “and I don’t want to compete with them. But Disney draws a lot of people. And I’ll be happy to take the little pieces I can, and I can make a good business out of that.”

The list of fresh attractions in the region also includes coastal resorts in south Orange County; new or renovated ballparks in San Diego and Anaheim; redevelopment in Santa Monica, Hollywood and Long Beach; the Getty Center; Staples Center and the Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles; and Legoland in Carlsbad.

“There has been nothing like this wave of projects for at least 30 years. You really have the opportunity to sell Southern California as a new destination now,” Baltin said. “But it sets up a competition to be the place where people are based when they come here.”

So for Knott’s not to get lost in the public mind, its marketers will have to work overtime, Baltin said. “It never was a bad place. It just wasn’t on the radar screen. And the challenge is to put it there.”

Agreeing with that assessment, Knott’s marketing manager Bob Ochsner said the park is using direct mailings in three states to targeted families and ads in newspaper travel sections.

The mailings, saying, “Cool off with a Knott’s vacation,” have been sent to Central California, Arizona and Nevada, where the new Knott’s water slides and nearby beaches are tempting attractions during hot weather. A campaign next spring will target winter-weary Oregon and Washington residents.

Radisson marketing will provide another boost, along with promotions on Knott’s Web site, analysts said.

The hotel is offering various package deals for a family that include hotel lodgings and admission either to Knott’s or to Soak City and can be half the cost of some rival theme park packages.

“Buena Park is traditionally a more value-conscious destination than Anaheim,” Ochsner said.

He said a free shuttle from Knott’s to Disneyland will continue to be one of his top marketing pitches. “You’re only 10 minutes away.”

At 13 acres, Soak City is a relatively small water park, but it will have 21 attractions--from Laguna Storm Watch Tower to Malibu Run--along with restaurants and shops for snacks, souvenirs and surf wear.

The hotel improvements culminate a series of additions that Cedar Fair has made since buying Knott’s for $245 million in late 1997. The Supreme Scream drop ride and GhostRider wooden roller coaster have become the park’s newest icons, and a huge water-chute ride called Perilous Plunge is scheduled to open inside Knott’s on June 30.