Susan Mudie, recently appointed new CEO of Rainbow's End. Photo / Dean Purcell
Transforming Rainbow’s End from an amusement park with an assortment of rides into an interconnected theme park - that’s the goal of its new CEO Susan Mudie, who believes she can take the thrills into the next generation.
The distinction between the two is critical for Mudie, who has worked for six years at the park before rising to the top job back in September.
Working in business development and marketing, Mudie led from the front, spearheading its customer service team evolution to better fit the requirements of a modern park during Covid-19.
She then utilised her marketing strategy expertise under previous CEO Karen Crabb to understand the inner workings of the park, aggregating data from across the park’s platforms.
“The business was looking to understand what the next stage of transformation could look like,” Mudie said.
“So we commissioned research and also purchased buyer data to build a market segmentation and understand our opportunities for growth within that segmentation framework.”
After roughly six months of crunching the numbers, Mudie gained some meaningful insights into the barriers of entry and a potential pipeline for what the park could look like.
It also gave her an important statistic, “We had an average visitation of maybe two-and-a-half years. And so the question was, what would happen if we could reduce the time to visit to one?”
She said that thanks to well-developed documentation and operating processes, the park is perfectly positioned to capitalise on its opportunities.
Mudie explains that while new rides invite park-goers through in bursts, it’s what happens in between the attractions that keep them coming back, adding that it’s often those with the least amount of money coming to the park because of the value proposition.
Tickets to the park currently range from $19.99 for a spectator to $71.99 for an Adult Superpass for those aged 14 and up, with variable rates for families.
Mudie said the heavy lifting for the park’s revenue has come from ticket sales at the gate, but the “focus on total park offer has helped us double in-park revenue over the last five years”.
She explained that some recent investment in the park is significantly cheaper than a new ride, while also being tied to commercial returns.
“I think previously the growth strategy for the park had been put a new ride in and build it and they will come like the Field of Dreams,” Mudie adds.
“When we looked under the hood, we realised that actually the total offer is really important to people.”
She hopes to develop a better understanding of how people move through the park and gain better insights by integrating artificial intelligence to break down the data.
That data can then be utilised for several uses, whether that’s a dashboard showing queue times or heat mapping where park-goers visit, which she says is particularly useful for planning restrooms.
She reveals that the park has the same number of bathrooms available now as it did 20 years ago when the park had 76% of the guests it currently has.
However, it’s not just data driving her transition from an amusement park, it’s a need to respond to the wider macro trend of themed experiences alongside the park’s design.
“It starts with evolving the communication of park layout and organisation, moving from a collection of rides to rides within guest precincts or zones,” Mudie said.
“The path to the ride is part of the journey, and when we do those things, what we’ve learned is that we sustain the visit.”
Mudie wants to make better use of the theme already seen in the park’s colour-coded zoning, explaining that she wants the rides in each zone to come with a corresponding experience.
However, she doesn’t want to rely on the colours of the rainbow themselves.
“More interesting to me is looking at each colour within the rainbow. When you do this, it opens the opportunity to use colour to communicate experience,” Mudie said.
Mudie explains that newly designed characters will have their presence ramped up over the next three years.
“Each colour gives us clear personality differential between the zone experience, and relaunching our characters, anchored within the colours of the rainbow, gives us a suite of personalities to help decode the park experience.”
She also has plans to more efficiently use the limited space available within the park itself, hoping to offer new attractions and experiences where possible to feed back into the wider park design.
Included in those new attractions is the iconic Pirate Ship, which will return to the park in late 2025. However, it took big discussions before becoming a reality.
“That came up from a product lifecycle presentation I did a couple of years ago. I presented a five-year plan to the board, and I took them through a product management framework and strategy analysing the market, analysing our business against the market, and defining those insights,” Mudie said.
“But the important piece you need to look at is the market demand for it.”
Mudie explained that the bespoke attraction couldn’t be maintained to the standard that it needed, eventually leading to its removal.
However, she believed that using the park’s life-cycle model, the demand for the ride should have meant the closure of the ride for maintenance, not its removal.
Roughly a quarter of the park’s operating costs are dedicated to maintenance.
“I finished that model, I finished the presentation, and then I said to Karen, I think we need to bring her back. She was like, all right, let’s see how we get on.”
A business case was developed and put in motion to get the ship back in the park, but Mudie intends to bring it back at the highest specifications to ensure it can last for the next 30 years.
To do this she is making use of the legacy at her fingertips, consulting with one of the original installers of the Pirate Ship and the designer who built the Gold Rush ride.
Mudie believes her role as CEO is to deliver what the business needs, and while she is excited about the opportunity, her sights are set on what comes next.
“We’re at the point now for the next stage of growth, and it’s not just about growth, but about delivering a better experience,” Mudie says.
“If we want to keep this park transforming and moving forward to a contemporary standard, we need to be a theme park, and that means different investment.”
Rangatira Investments currently owns Rainbow’s End after becoming the majority owner back in 2012.
Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.
The Government has committed funding to the sector in an effort to support future plans.