Trampoline Park Design: One Zone in a Multi-Attraction Box

On 15 October 2026, Slick City opened its 50th park, in Milford, Massachusetts. The company’s own description of the format leads with large-scale dry slides and air courts, and it does not lead with trampolines.

That same day, SiouxFalls.Business reported a lease signed in a former Hobby Lobby box for NRG Adventure Park, which calls itself an extreme indoor playground. The site had been earmarked for Urban Air, a trampoline-led chain, before that plan stalled. NRG lists trampolines first among its attractions and then keeps going: ball pits, climbing, slides, foam pits, a ninja course, dodgeball, an arcade.

Six days later, in Punjab, The Game Palacio opened its 14th venue. The attraction list runs bowling, arcade games, a trampoline park, then VR.

Three openings, three countries, one week. In every one of those buildings the trampoline is present, and none of the three is a trampoline park in the sense the phrase carried in 2019, when the format meant courts, a party room and a slush machine.

The trampoline has not left the building. It has a different job now. It is one zone inside a box organised around a different anchor, and that shift reaches past the marketing copy into the floor plan, the standards paperwork, the ceiling height you sign a lease against and the price ladder on the ticket page.

What follows treats the three openings as evidence rather than decoration. Each is dated, each is a different company in a different market, and section 7 sets out what would have to happen for the conclusion to be wrong.

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1. Three openings, three continents, one pattern

The wording is the evidence here, so the table quotes what each operator chose to put first, not what a brochure might imply.

The Slick City case is the sharpest of the three because the numbers are public and large. The brand opened 25 parks in 2026 alone and reported 173 locations signed or open globally as of September 2026. It started in Lakewood, Colorado, in 2022, and its European debut came in Nottingham. Two more European sites, in Gothenburg and Vienna, are scheduled for late 2026 under an agreement with the leisure operator Activeon covering at least 26 locations in the European Union.

None of that says trampolines are failing. It says a slide-led format now takes the family Saturday that a trampoline park used to take by default, in the same metropolitan areas, at a similar price point, from the same landlords.

The NRG case is the one operators should read twice. The tenant is a restaurant group, not a trampoline company, and the landlord’s broker described it as a big user for a retail box. The head of operations, Zachary Wittman, put the positioning plainly: the venue stands out because it is more than just trampolines. Seven NRG sites are open and at least eight more are planned.

The Game Palacio case is the mall version. Inside a shopping centre, a trampoline park becomes one line item in a food-and-entertainment anchor, sitting between a bowling lane and a VR bay. As a standalone lease it competes with the centre’s other tenants for the same visit. As a component, it fills a gap in somebody else’s programme.

What these three do not tell us: bed counts, zone splits, capital cost or attendance. None of the three has published a floor plan, and this article will not invent one. The claim is about how the box is organised and what the operator says it sells, which is verifiable. The economics inside the box are not public for any of them.

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2. What changes when the trampoline becomes a zone

A single-format trampoline park is an easy plan to draw. The court is the plan, the party rooms ring it, the café watches it. Put four or five formats in the same shell and the drawing has to answer questions the single-format building never asked.

2.1 The spine replaces the court

A multi-zone venue needs a circulation spine that every zone opens onto and that no zone discharges into. The common failure is a slide run-out landing in the path between the trampoline gate and the toilets. It looks fine on a render, and it produces a collision risk every Saturday for five years, because the run-out cannot be moved without rebuilding the stair.

The rule we use is blunt: no zone’s exit may cross another zone’s entry. On a 22,000 sq ft (2,044 m²) floor, that single constraint usually decides where the mezzanine goes.

2.2 Supervision is counted per zone, not per venue

Trampoline courts, soft play, climbing and ninja fail in different ways. A court failure is usually a fall from height or a collision between jumpers. A soft-play failure is usually an entrapment or a fall from a structure. A ninja failure is usually a grip failure at speed. One staffing number for the whole building cannot cover all four, because the person watching a ball pit is not watching a launch stair.

Zone-level injury data supports splitting the count rather than averaging it, because published work on trampoline park injuries shows the distribution across zones is not flat. We set out what that research does and does not establish in the zone-by-zone injury analysis, and the practical conclusion is that supervision posts belong on the plan, per zone, before the staffing budget is fixed.

2.3 The party room becomes the only shared room

In a mixed-age group, the eight-year-olds want the ninja course and the four-year-olds cannot be on it. The party room is where the group reconvenes, so it does more commercial work in a multi-zone box than in a trampoline-only one. It is also the highest revenue per square foot in most buildings, which makes a party room at the back, past two zones and a fire door, a decision you pay for twice: once in fit-out, once in every under-booked slot.

2.4 A parent has to see two children in two zones

This is the constraint that decides café position. Adults choose where to sit based on what they can see, and in a multi-zone venue they will not sit anywhere that gives them a view of one zone only. If the café faces the trampoline court and the soft play sits behind a wall, the seating stays empty and the supervision drifts to wherever the parents are.

None of those four points appears in a standard. They are the difference between a plan that works on opening day and one that still works in year three.

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3. The compliance boundary runs along the zone line

Once a building holds more than one kind of play equipment, the certification question stops being which standard the venue meets and becomes which zone a component belongs to. That is a design decision with paperwork attached, and it is where mixed-format projects most often come apart.

Three things follow from that table, and each one carries a cost if it is missed.

A venue does not get to pick one route. A building with a trampoline court and a soft-play structure sits under two equipment routes at once. The inspector’s first question is which zone a component belongs to, and the answer has to exist on a drawing, not in a conversation.

Some components sit on the boundary. A ball pit next to a trampoline court is the classic case. Is it soft contained play, or part of the court’s landing provision? The answer changes the padding specification, the supervision post and the test report that gets filed. Decide it during design and record the decision in the handover pack. Decided later, it becomes an argument with an insurer.

Do not translate one route into the other. An ASTM-tested assembly is not evidence of EN conformity, and the reverse is equally untrue. They are separate documents written by separate committees for separate jurisdictions. If a supplier offers a certificate and calls it global, ask which standard, which version, which scope and which issuing body. We keep that verification route on the safety standards page rather than restating a certification list inside an article.

Why this section has no numbers: dimension limits differ between standard editions and between jurisdictions, and a threshold quoted from the wrong edition is worse than no threshold at all. This article names standards and their scope. It does not hand out millimetre figures, and neither should a supplier who has not seen your jurisdiction.

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4. Ceiling height is now set by the tallest element

In a trampoline-only build, clear height is driven by jump headroom and, where they exist, the high-performance walls. Add a multi-level play structure or a slide launch and the governing dimension moves to that element. The trampoline stops being what decides the slab-to-soffit height, which means a project team that checks headroom over the beds and stops there has checked the wrong thing.

Two checks catch most of the problem before the lease is signed.

Measure under the obstructions, not at the slab. The usable figure is the clear dimension beneath beams, sprinkler mains, ductwork and light fittings, in the worst bay of the floor, not the headline number on the letting drawing. The gap between those two figures is regularly the difference between a mezzanine that works and one that has to be lowered.

Treat floor loading as a separate question from headroom. A multi-level structure presents a different load case from a trampoline court, and the two need to be reviewed together by a structural engineer before the design is fixed. In a first-floor conversion, the slab you inherit decides more than the plan you draw.

This is also the parameter with the worst retrofit economics. Padding can be replaced, beds can be re-tensioned, a colour scheme can change in a week. Clear height cannot be bought later. If the anchor you want needs a launch height the building does not have, the answer is a different building, and the cheapest moment to learn that is before signature.

How much is enough depends on the element, the local code and the structural report. We do not publish a single figure for it, because there is not one. What we will say is that the question belongs at site-selection stage rather than equipment-order stage, and that the reference layout for a 22,000 sq ft park shows why the height check comes before the equipment list.

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5. Where the economics move: the second hour

Multi-zone boxes are usually discussed as a way to widen the age range. The more interesting effect is on the price ladder, and it can be shown with published prices rather than assumptions.

Oxygen Crawley opened on 16 October 2026 as the chain’s 19th park in England, and it publishes three session lengths. We covered the venue itself in the Crawley opening breakdown. Here only the price table matters.

The arithmetic is short. £20.45 minus £15.95 is £4.50, and £24.95 minus £20.45 is also £4.50. The operator prices each additional half hour at the same rate, so the second hour sells for £9.00, which is 56 per cent of the first hour. Revenue per admission rises by 56 per cent from the shortest ticket to the longest, while the cost of admitting that guest does not move.

In a trampoline-only venue that ladder is hard to use. Most guests will not jump for two hours, so the 120-minute ticket sits on the page and sells to a minority. In a box with a court, a soft-play structure, a ninja course and an interactive floor, two hours becomes the natural default, and the same ladder converts.

Revenue per admission      = ticket price
Admissions per day         = (playable area ÷ area per guest) × turns per day × occupancy
Revenue per sq ft per day  = (admissions × average ticket) ÷ playable area

Those three lines are the whole model, and they are deliberately empty of numbers. Fill them with your own area, your own ticket ladder and your own measured occupancy. The direction of travel is what matters: extending dwell time raises revenue per admission without raising the fixed cost of the visit, and multi-zone formats are what make a longer ticket credible.

One caveat for anyone building a spreadsheet on this. What follows is arithmetic on published prices, not a revenue claim. Oxygen has not published attendance, and neither has any of the three operators in section 1. Anyone who quotes you revenue per square foot for those venues is estimating, and should say so.

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6. What this does to the equipment package

A single-format order is a list. A multi-format order is a set of interfaces, and interfaces are where budgets and opening dates are lost. The table below is the short version of what we check on a mixed package.

There are two ways to buy this, and the trade-off is real rather than commercial.

One integrator for the whole package. You get a single schedule, a single installation crew and one party responsible when the padding transition between the court and the soft play does not line up. You give up the ability to shop each category separately, and you have to check that the integrator manufactures what it quotes instead of reselling it.

Separate specialists per category. You may get better engineering in each discipline. You also inherit a boundary problem, because someone has to own the transition details, the shared mat edges, the lighting over two zones, the egress path that crosses three suppliers’ scope and the consolidated certification file. On a mixed site, that boundary is where most first-month defects come from.

Whichever route you take, the questions are the same. Ask which legal entity issues the test report, which version of the standard it was issued against, and whether the scope covers the assembled system or only the components. Then ask, in writing, who is responsible for the seam between two zones. Our position on materials and test documentation sits on the materials and quality page, and the sequencing of a mixed install is part of the design-to-delivery process.

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7. What would prove this wrong

A pattern built on three openings is a hypothesis, not a finding. Four things would break it, and the first one is uncomfortable because it comes from inside the evidence.

1. Opening counts. If pure trampoline venues keep opening at the same rate in the same metropolitan areas over the next four quarters, then what changed is press-release language, not the product. We read three announcements. We did not count every October opening in the category, and three is not a random sample.

2. Bed counts. If the number of trampoline beds per new venue is flat or rising, the zone argument fails at the equipment level, however the venue is described. Bed count is the honest measure because it is physical and it gets ordered, unlike a brand description.

3. Disclosed unit economics. If multi-attraction boxes report lower revenue per square foot than single-format venues in the same market, then breadth is a cost rather than a draw, and the operators adding zones are buying insurance they cannot afford. The place to check is franchise disclosure documents with Item 19 financial performance representations, compared inside one metropolitan area rather than nationally.

4. The counter-example that is already visible. Slick City reached 50 parks on essentially one anchor attraction. That is the strongest argument against a naive version of this thesis, because it shows breadth is not what wins and a differentiated anchor is. If trampolines can still be that anchor, the claim narrows to something smaller and still useful: the anchor, not the trampoline, is the thing worth designing around.

What would change our mind fastest is not a press release. It is one disclosure document from a mixed-format operator and one from a trampoline-only operator in the same city, covering the same twelve months. Until that exists in public, the honest summary is that the format has moved and the money has not been counted in public yet.

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8. Summary

Three openings in one week, in three countries, put the trampoline in the same structural position: present, priced, and no longer the reason the building exists.

• The box is now organised around an anchor that is often slides, bowling or a mixed adventure programme, with trampolines as one paid zone inside it.
• That changes the plan before it changes the equipment: a circulation spine instead of a central court, supervision posts drawn per zone, and a café placed where a parent can see two children in two zones.
• Compliance follows the zone line. A building can sit under two equipment routes at once, and components that straddle a boundary have to be assigned during design and documented at handover.
• Clear height is governed by the tallest element, which is usually no longer the trampoline, and it is the one parameter that cannot be retrofitted.
• The economics move through dwell time. Published prices at one new park imply a second hour sold at 56 per cent of the first, which is a ladder a multi-zone venue can actually use.

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9. Three Things You Can Do Today

1. Measure the clear height under the obstructions, in the worst bay.

Take a laser to the floor of the actual unit, under the beams, the sprinkler main and the duct, not the figure on the letting drawing. If the number cannot carry the anchor you want, you have saved yourself a lease. If it can, you have the first real input for a layout.

2. Draw the zone lines and assign a standard to each one.

Before any equipment is quoted, mark every zone boundary on the plan and write the applicable standard beside it. Then mark the components that sit on a boundary, such as a ball pit next to a court, and decide which side they belong to. That single drawing prevents the most expensive conversation in a mixed project.

3. Price the second and third half hour before you fix the ticket ladder.

Write your three session lengths on one line and the price of each on the next. If the marginal price of extra time is flat, check whether your zones can hold a guest for that long. If they cannot, the long ticket is decoration. If they can, it is the cheapest revenue increase available in the building.

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Send us the measured clear height, the floor area and the age range you are targeting, and we will come back with a zone plan that fits the shell instead of one that assumes a shell. If you would rather start from the equipment side, begin with the trampoline systems and the indoor playground range.

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FAQ

Do I still need a trampoline court in a multi-attraction venue?

Usually yes, but as a zone rather than the anchor. A court is a reliable draw for the 8 to 14 age band, it fills floor area at a moderate capital cost, and it gives a group somewhere to split up. What has changed is that it no longer carries the visit on its own in most new builds, so it should be sized against the anchor’s throughput rather than the other way round.

Which standard applies to a trampoline court inside a soft play building?

Both routes can apply, to different zones. In the United States, trampoline courts are addressed by ASTM F2970 and soft contained play by ASTM F1918. In Europe, trampoline parks fall under EN ISO 23659 and playground equipment under the EN 1176 series. The practical task is to assign every component to a zone on a drawing, then test and document against the route for that zone. A certificate for one route is not evidence of conformity with the other.

What ceiling height does a trampoline park need?

There is no single figure, and any supplier who quotes one without seeing your jurisdiction, your equipment specification and your building is guessing. The usable number is the clear dimension under beams, services and light fittings in the worst bay, and it is set by the tallest element in the plan, which in a mixed venue is often a play structure or a slide launch rather than the court. Have a structural engineer confirm both the clear height and the floor loading before you sign a lease.

Is a multi-attraction venue cheaper to build per square foot?

Not necessarily, and the honest answer is that the comparison is not public. Capital cost per square foot depends on the mix, the specification and the building, and none of the operators discussed here has published a cost breakdown. What can be modelled is the revenue side: revenue per square foot equals admissions multiplied by average ticket, divided by playable area. Run that with your own figures for a court-only plan and a mixed plan, then compare the capital cost against the difference in dwell time.

How much of the floor should the trampoline zone take?

Derive it from session capacity instead of applying a ratio borrowed from another project. For each zone, divide the usable area by the area allowed per guest, multiply by the number of session turns per day, then compare the result with the throughput of the anchor. The trampoline zone should absorb the guests the anchor cannot serve in the same hour, not fill whatever area is left over. Any ratio quoted without that calculation is a guess dressed as a benchmark.

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Sources

1. blooloop, “Slick City opens 50th action park as global expansion accelerates”, 15 October 2026. blooloop.com/news/slick-city-50th-attraction-expansion
2. Franchising.com, “Slick City Action Park Opens 50th Park as Expansion Accelerates Across the U.S. and Europe”, 15 October 2026. franchising.com
3. Amusements & Attractions (InterGame), “Slick City open milestone slide park”, October 2026. amusementsandattractions.com
4. SiouxFalls.Business, “Expansive indoor playground to open in Sioux Falls”, 15 October 2026. siouxfalls.business
5. Amusements & Attractions (InterGame), “The Game Palacio opens 14th entertainment centre”, 21 October 2026. amusementsandattractions.com
6. Sussex Express, “Inside Crawley’s newest attraction featuring 40 trampolines and interactive games”, 16 October 2026. sussexexpress.co.uk
7. Standards referenced by number and scope only: ASTM F2970, ASTM F1918, ASTM F1292, EN 1176 series, EN 1177, EN ISO 23659. Dimension limits vary by edition and jurisdiction and are not quoted here.