How do you build a successful theme park?

Business Daily

BBC

News, Business

4.4 • 796 Ratings

🗓️ 10 September 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Around the world, entertainment companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on shiny new theme park rides and attractions. It's a highly competitive market.

They're big money-spinners for the owners and can help boost local economies too. We look at why a medium-sized town in southern England could soon become a magnet for thrill-seeking tourists, and we travel to Sweden, where a theme park with a very local flavour has been celebrating its 100th anniversary.

But what happens if you live next door to the planned site of a major new attraction? And do the promises of new jobs and improved infrastructure in an area always come to fruition?

If you'd like to get in touch with the programme, you can email us at [email protected]

Presented and produced by Elizabeth Hotson

(Picture: People hanging upside down on a roller coaster track. Credit: Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Elizabeth Hotson and welcome to Business Daily from the BBC World Service. On today's
0:07.7	programme, I'll be looking at why a theme park giant chose an unassuming town 100 kilometres from London
0:13.3	for its next mega project. Bedford is ideal for people who are coming through London. London
0:19.2	is a hub in terms of travellers from America
0:22.5	and everywhere else coming into Europe. How industrial machinery can provide fun for all the family.
0:29.0	So now we come up to the smaller Camatic diggers. They've been adapted for basically like a
0:34.1	skittles set. And why intellectual property is big business
0:37.7	when it comes to merchandise.
0:39.9	The reason you're picking an IP
0:41.6	to do your attraction on
0:43.2	is because it would already look great on a T-shirt.
0:46.5	It already probably does look great on a T-shirt.
0:49.2	You'll be hearing all about that
0:50.5	and much more in Business Daily from the BBC.
1:09.0	Music about that and much more in Business Daily from the BBC. That's the sound of a roller coaster whizzing by.
1:11.9	It's called the Valkyrie and is part of a multi-million dollar investment in rides
1:16.0	at the Lissaberg theme park in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.
1:21.7	Because from Sweden to Shanghai, there's more competition than ever
1:25.3	to create the best and most profitable attractions.
1:28.3	The latest salvo in the theme park wars has been fired by Entertainment Giant Universal,
1:34.3	which already has five attractions worldwide and wants to put a neglected corner of southern England on the international map.
1:41.3	The location in question is Bedford, a medium-sized town with a population of just over 90,000,
	...

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