Wonderla’s Chennai bet starts paying off early

Chennai: Wonderla Holidays, an amusement park operator, said its newly-launched Chennai park has ramped up quickly, emerging as a meaningful contributor to the group's performance within months of opening and reinforcing management's confidence in the city's long-term growth potential. The Chennai park, which opened in Dec 2025, attracted about 75,000 visitors in its launch month, supported by holiday demand and promotional activity around the opening. Footfalls in the March 2026 quarter reached roughly 191,000, equivalent to around 64,000 visitors a month — a run rate that management said was comparable with some of the company's more established parks in Kochi and Hyderabad. Chennai Park's average revenue per user was the highest across the portfolio, the management said during the Q4FY26 earnings call.The park generated revenue of Rs 29.4 crore during the March 2026 quarter, out of the company's total quarterly revenue of Rs 135 crore. It also reported an EBITDA margin of about 30 per cent in its first full quarter of operations, with management expecting margins to expand gradually to more than 40% over the next three years as utilisation improves.Chennai's performance remained resilient in the opening quarter of FY27 despite broader macroeconomic uncertainty and heatwave conditions in parts of the country. Management described initial trends in Chennai as "very strong", while cautioning that a fuller assessment would require at least a year of operations. The BSE-listed company expects the Chennai property to mature over the next three to four years and eventually rival Bengaluru as one of its two largest parks by scale and revenue. The management also said Chennai's existing familiarity with water parks and amusement parks had worked in its favour. Unlike markets where the concept has to be introduced from scratch, Chennai already had competing water parks, making it easier for Wonderla to expand the category and ramp up footfalls. The company added that it opened a new attraction, the Sky Wheel tower, at the Chennai park in April as part of ongoing investments aimed at expanding rides and improving visitor experience.Wonderla said it would continue to focus expansion on large tier-one cities, where deeper urban catchments and established demand could support faster scaling of footfalls.