The world of water attractions is larger than meets the eye – at least, that’s what I learned when I started looking into water parks for this blog.
Based in the United States, there exists an organization called the World Waterparks Association, whose main objective, according to their About page, is to educate and expand networks in the water attraction industry.
Further browsing on their website would reveal that this is an extensively governed organization. Where I want to direct my focus to for this article is the Awards section under their community page. Not to gloss over the rest of the intriguing categories, but what caught my attention was the “Leading Edge” award, where committee members could be awarded “for creativity in the development of new themes, facilities, programs, services or operational concepts in the water attractions industry.”
Creative water park ideas
A quick skim through the award-winners of 2023 would reveal that indeed, these waterparks seem to be deserving of being awarded for innovation. From the top, some of the winners include a Christian camp that re-vamped their pools to include a sensory area with toys and minimal splashing, a water park that became the first of their kind to integrate VR technology, and a water park that simply decided to execute “Idaho” as their theme, by creating potato-themed equipment. There was also one winner from Vietnam, that gained attention for dragon-themed water slides. I’ve inserted a few images below, so that we have a better idea of what the scale of these award winners are like:
Camp IdaH2O | Roaring Springs Water Park – Boise, ID
Camp Barnabas – The Christian Camp with a pool
What all the winners have in common is that they are the first of their kind to not just execute an idea, but had executed it effectively. They were able to identify what kind of technologies or themes were missing from water parks still, and were able to apply it to themselves.
But surely, there are still new themes and technologies waiting to be applied to the water park world – perhaps in a different article, I might chronicle how I might aim for a creativity award, one day.