How Lions Water Adventure Park grew revenue from online and out-of-state guests

Lions Water Adventure Park in Kinston, North Carolina, is built around high-volume summer demand: water slides, a lazy river, a splash pad, a 25-yard competition pool, and open picnic space for families. Running that mix at scale meant online sales, guest self-service, and staff tools had to keep up when bookings spiked—without burying the team in manual changes.

The problem: a short season with no room for friction

Even with a strong local following, the park needed to pull more guests from out of state, keep service quality high enough that people return, and use software that could handle a busy calendar without constant firefighting at the front gate and in the back office.

A water park's economics make that harder than it sounds. The whole year happens in one window—roughly late May through early September—so every open day counts, and a pricing or availability mistake can't sit unfixed for a week. Add the layers a real season needs—weekday and weekend rates, early-bird tickets, special pricing for holidays like Memorial Day, July 4th, and Labor Day, plus camps and groups booking in bulk—and a system that requires manual re-entry for every variation quickly becomes the bottleneck.

What changed with TicketingHub

TicketingHub became the system behind direct online sales on the park's own site: a mobile-ready booking widget so guests can buy on the phone, with support for multiple currencies and routes to sell season passes and tickets through OTAs when it makes sense for demand.

Guest self-service improved with magic links, so visitors can change, reschedule, or cancel on their own when plans shift—fewer phone calls, fewer mistakes, less time lost to one-off admin. Automated confirmations and reminders keep guests informed before they arrive.

For the team, management can work from anywhere on a mobile-friendly view of bookings—useful when decisions happen off desk and during peak season.

How the team runs a season

The rhythm of the park's year now follows a repeatable pattern inside one system:

• Clone the season, don't rebuild it. Each year, the team copies the previous season's availability and adjusts the opening window and closed days, rather than setting up the calendar from scratch.
• Layered pricing without spreadsheets. Weekday, weekend, and early-bird rates live as pricing tiers, and one-off dates are handled with exceptions—so July 4th can carry holiday pricing, and the early-bird tier can be switched off for dates where park policy doesn't allow it.
• Group bookings with proper paperwork. When a summer camp books in bulk, the team can reserve seats with a pro forma invoice and send a direct payment link—no separate invoicing tool needed.
• Sensible access levels. Day-to-day managers adjust prices and availability themselves, while sensitive changes—payment account settings, user administration—stay admin-only.

And when something does slip through close to a busy date—an early-bird rate showing on a holiday where park policy doesn't allow it—support can remove it the same day and show the team how to handle it themselves next time, so the fix sticks.

Staff turnover is a fact of life for a seasonal park, and handovers are part of the setup: when a new manager takes over the account, a free walkthrough call gets them productive without a long ramp-up. Nearly all bookings arrive through the widget on the park's own website, which keeps the day-to-day workload light—most guests never need to talk to anyone to buy, change, or cancel a ticket.

The results

After moving to TicketingHub, the park saw a sharp swing in performance: revenue moved from about $50,000 in 2020 to about $260,000 in 2021, with a large jump in ticket sales—including stronger out-of-state visitation (as reported by The Free Press). Better data in one system also makes it easier to see what sells, when guests book, and how channels behave, instead of stitching numbers together from separate tools.

Pricing stayed aligned with how the park earns: no monthly fee, with a low per-booking cost—so fixed overhead doesn't climb when days are quiet. For a business that earns for three months and plans for nine, that matters.

The takeaway for seasonal attractions

For Lions Water Adventure Park, the through-line is simple: one booking stack for the website, self-service for guests, and clearer operations for staff—so marketing and the gate team aren't working off different versions of the truth. For other seasonal operators, the lesson is that the software choice shows up most in the weeks that matter: when a holiday weekend needs its own pricing by tomorrow, when a camp wants an invoice today, and when next season's calendar should take an afternoon to set up, not a month.