Trampoline Park Session Length: Why the Third Hour Is Cheap

A 180-minute jump ticket at Sky Zone Bismarck costs $33. A 60-minute ticket at the same park costs $20. Divide each price by the time it buys, and the long ticket earns $11 for every hour of court capacity it consumes. The short ticket earns $20.

The mats are identical, the monitors are identical, and the building is identical. The three-hour guest pays 65% more money and returns 45% less revenue per hour of the asset. A gap that size is either an error in the price list or a deliberate trade, and the published menus say which.

We collected five published menus from operators in the United States and Australia, converted every one of them to a price per jump-hour, and ran them through the same eleven-hour Saturday. The result is consistent: session length is not priced against cost. It is priced against the hour of the week the session lands in, and that trade can be measured before anyone prints a menu.

One note on method before the numbers. Nothing below claims what any specific park earns. No operator in this industry publishes session-level attendance, and we are not going to invent it. What follows is what five menus state, what their arithmetic implies, and how to test your own ladder against both.

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1. Five published menus, one shape

Every menu below was read from the operator’s own ticket or pricing page and captured on 2 November 2026. Nothing comes from a discount marketplace, a coupon aggregator or a review site, because those sources restate prices without dates and cannot be re-checked.

Three patterns hold across all five. The first is that time is sold in 30-minute units. Bismarck quotes four durations and starts jump times on the hour and the half hour, so what a guest buys is a slot on a grid rather than a duration chosen freely. Nothing finer is on offer.

The second is that every ladder terminates in an unlimited or three-hour product. Pembroke Pines sells an all-day pass that runs without limit on weekdays and until 8:30pm on weekends. Big Air sells three jump products nationally: a 1.5-hour pass, a 2-hour pass and an unlimited pass. Urban Air skips the ladder and advertises play all day for one price. The long end of the market has already collapsed into a single product.

The third pattern is the one worth money. As duration rises, the price step between rungs shrinks in relative terms while the capacity it buys stays fixed in absolute terms. The next section puts numbers on that.

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2. The price of thirty more minutes

A trampoline court has one scarce resource: a square meter of jumping surface for one hour. Call that a capacity-hour. A 60-minute guest consumes one, a 120-minute guest consumes two, and the number of guests a day is capped by how many capacity-hours the building has, not by how many tickets you print.

So the useful question about any price step is not how much more the guest pays, but how much of the asset the extra charge covers. Bismarck answers it precisely, because the park publishes four points on one ladder, in one currency, on one page.

The calculation runs in one line. The 60-minute rung sets the reference price of a capacity-hour at $20. Each extension consumes a known slice of capacity, half an hour at the first two steps and a full hour at the third. Multiply that slice by $20 and compare it with what the park charges for it.

At the first step the park sells half an hour of court for $4, and the same half hour is worth $10 at its own base rate. At the third step it sells a full hour for $4, which is a fifth of what an hour of court returns on a 60-minute ticket. The third hour is not a loss leader in the conventional sense. It is a discount applied to the most expensive unit the business owns.

The other markets show the same direction with different severity. Highland Heights charges $2.00 to go from 90 minutes to 120, which covers 19% of the capacity consumed. Pembroke Pines charges $12.00 to move from 90 minutes to unlimited, and if an all-day guest stays five hours that $12 buys three and a half extra hours, or $3.43 an hour against an $18.66 base rate.

The pattern in one sentence: the marginal price of time falls faster than the marginal cost of time, and it falls hardest at the top of the ladder, where the guest buys the largest block of the scarcest asset.

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3. What a jump-hour of capacity actually earns

Line the four Bismarck products up by the only measure that compares them fairly, revenue per jump-hour, and the ladder becomes a ranking rather than a menu. A 60-minute ticket earns $20.00, a 90-minute ticket $16.00, a two-hour ticket $14.50 and a three-hour ticket $11.00. A guest who stays three times as long pays 65% more and delivers 45% less per hour of court.

The same calculation on the other two US menus lands in the same place. Pembroke Pines earns $18.66 per jump-hour on its 90-minute pass and $8.00 if an all-day guest stays five hours. Highland Heights earns $20.66 on 90 minutes and $16.50 on 120 minutes.

3.1 The blacklight menu prices time differently, and that is the tell

Bismarck runs a second menu for Glow Jump and prices the same court on different logic. Sixty minutes costs $22, two hours costs $41, three hours costs $53, and the 90-minute rung disappears entirely. Revenue per jump-hour runs $22.00, $20.50 and $17.67, a much flatter line than the daytime ladder.

Check the steps the same way. Going from 60 minutes to 120 minutes costs the guest $19.00 and consumes one capacity-hour that the base rung values at $22.00, so the step covers 86% of the capacity it uses. Going from 120 to 180 costs $12.00 for one capacity-hour, or 55%. Set those against the 20% coverage on the daytime 120-to-180 step, and the two menus are not close.

There is a structural reason. Glow Jump runs in a fixed evening window on two nights of the week, and no pricing decision can create a fourth hour inside it. The park cannot sell more sessions to recover the capacity it gives away, so it prices time near its capacity cost. The daytime ladder sits on a long day with empty hours in it, and there the park can and does discount time to fill seats.

That is the whole trade in one comparison. Session length is a demand instrument, not a cost recovery instrument. It gets priced like a cost recovery instrument only where supply is fixed.

BOUNCE in Cannington makes the same point from the other direction. The venue publishes two full columns, on-peak and off-peak, and the peak surcharge is largest on the shortest product. Sixty minutes costs 38.9% more at peak, ninety minutes 33.3% more, and two hours 29.6% more. If peak pricing existed to cover extra staff cost, the surcharge would be flat or rise with duration. It falls, because what is scarce at peak is turnover, and turnover is what a short session buys.

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4. A full Saturday at four session lengths

Now put the ladder under load. Take a 26,000 sq ft (2,415 m²) park with a concurrent capacity of 100 jumpers, open eleven hours, selling every session full. We use 100 because it makes the arithmetic readable, not because any of these parks publishes that figure; substitute your own occupancy limit and every number scales linearly. The ceiling itself comes from the occupancy calculation, which we covered in how occupant load sets the real capacity of a trampoline court.

cohorts per day     = open hours ÷ session length in hours
admissions per day  = cohorts per day × concurrent capacity
revenue ceiling     = admissions × ticket price
capacity-hours      = concurrent capacity × open hours

Eleven open hours hold eleven one-hour cohorts, 7.3 ninety-minute cohorts, 5.5 two-hour cohorts and 3.7 three-hour cohorts. Multiply each by 100 jumpers, then by the Bismarck price for that duration.

One internal check before trusting the table. Divide each revenue ceiling by the 1,100 capacity-hours in the day and you get $20.00, $16.00, $14.50 and $11.00, the same four numbers as the price-per-jump-hour column. The two models are one model, which is what makes the result usable rather than decorative.

The ceiling moves $9,900 between the shortest and the longest session. That is the size of the decision. A park that switches its Saturday from 60-minute to 180-minute sessions does not lose a little revenue per guest. It gives up 45% of the theoretical take on its best day, and it gives it up at the moment when demand would have filled the shorter slots.

The ceiling is a ceiling, not a forecast. Full fill is the one assumption no park actually meets, which is why the next section decides the question.

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5. The fill rate a longer session has to beat

Because a ceiling is only reachable at 100% fill, the honest comparison is between fill-weighted revenues. A longer session wins only if it fills better by enough to offset the lower ceiling. Divide the shorter ceiling by the longer one and you get the exact margin by which the longer session has to outsell it.

Read the fourth row first, because it is the most common real decision. Moving from 90 minutes to two hours does not need a large lift. It needs a 10.3% better fill. On a Tuesday morning with a mostly empty court, a two-hour session that fills a quarter better than the 90-minute version wins easily. On a Saturday afternoon at 90% fill it cannot win at all, because there is no headroom left to fill into.

The first and third rows set the outer bounds. A three-hour session needs to fill 81.8% better than a one-hour session to match it. That is not a pricing preference. It is close to impossible on any daypart where the court is busy, and entirely possible on a school-day morning, when the alternative to a three-hour guest is an empty court, because 82% better than almost nothing is still almost nothing.

The rule this produces: session length belongs to the daypart, not to the brand. Sell short where capacity binds, sell long where demand is thin, and price the two menus differently. That is what the Bismarck Glow table and the BOUNCE peak column already do.

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6. What short sessions add back

The case for long sessions is not weak, and it rests on costs the ceiling table ignores. Shorter sessions multiply the number of guests handled per capacity-hour, and every guest costs something at the front desk, at the sock counter, at the waiver screen and at the court gate.

Guests per capacity-hour is one divided by session length in hours. A 60-minute park handles 1.0 guest per capacity-hour, a 90-minute park 0.67, and a three-hour park 0.33. Every per-guest cost therefore triples when sessions fall from three hours to one.

front desk cost per day = admissions × (minutes per guest ÷ 60) × loaded hourly wage
transitions per day     = cohorts per day

Put illustrative inputs on it, labeled as ours: two minutes of desk time per guest at a $20 loaded wage is $0.67 a guest. At full fill that is $733 a day on 1,100 one-hour guests and $244 on 367 three-hour guests. The difference is $489 against a revenue gap of $9,900, so the front desk explains about 5% of the decision.

That number matters because it removes the most common defense of the long ladder. Labor per guest is real, and it is nowhere near large enough to justify a 45% revenue difference. Anyone arguing for three-hour sessions on staffing grounds is arguing about 5% of the question.

Two costs remain that no public dataset can settle, and both point the other way. The first is transition congestion. A 60-minute park turns its full cohort eleven times a day; a three-hour park turns it 3.7 times. Each turn puts a cohort at the gate, at the sock bin and at the exit ramp at the same moment, and the lobby has to absorb that pulse. No park publishes lobby area per cohort, so we will not put a number on it.

The second is wear. More admissions mean more mat contact, more sock traffic and more foam disturbance per capacity-hour, and those costs land on a replacement schedule rather than a payroll line. Nothing published links admissions to mat life, so this stays a judgment you make from your own maintenance log.

One more cost is usually missed: cannibalization. A $20 one-hour ticket takes $4 out of the pocket of every guest who would otherwise have bought the $24 ninety-minute ticket. Add the short product only where the longer one sells out, and the downgrade has nowhere to go.

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7. What the data does and does not show

This is an analysis of published menus, and the boundary of that evidence is narrow enough to state plainly.

What it shows The list price of each duration across five menus from three operators, in the currency each one quotes, captured on a single date. It shows how each ladder prices an additional 30 minutes relative to its own base rung. It also shows that the relative price of time falls as duration rises at every menu we checked.

What it does not show Realized revenue. List price is not transaction price: promotional codes, member rates, group rates, school bookings, online discounts and taxes all sit between the menu and the bank account, and none of them is published. We also have no fill-rate data for any park, which is why section 5 gives a threshold to test against rather than a conclusion.

What we deliberately did not do We did not convert the Australian prices into dollars. An exchange rate would add a precision the comparison does not have, because tax treatment and local wage structures differ. The BOUNCE rows stay in Australian dollars and are used for their internal ratios only, which are currency-free.

What is our assumption, not a fact The 100-jumper capacity, the eleven-hour day, the two minutes of desk time and the $20 loaded wage are constants we chose to make the arithmetic legible. None of them is a published figure from any of these operators. Each one should be replaced with your own before the output means anything.

What is correlation, not cause Five menus that share a shape do not prove that each operator reasoned its way to that shape. Price ladders are copied, inherited from franchise systems and revised under competitive pressure. The arithmetic here describes what a ladder does once it exists; it does not explain why each operator built it that way.

One gap deserves its own line. Session length also decides how long a guest stays in the building, and time in the building is what sells food, drink and arcade credit. We have no published measure of spend per minute on site, so this article treats food and beverage as outside the model. A park with a strong kitchen should expect the long session to close part of the gap in section 4, and should measure that itself rather than take our ratio.

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8. How to set your own ladder

Five rules, in the order they should be applied. Each one is a check against your own numbers, not against the table above.

1. Compute your price per jump-hour before you change anything. Divide each ticket by its duration in hours. If your 120-minute product earns less than 75% of your 60-minute product per jump-hour, the top of your ladder is discounting capacity harder than the market does. Across the five menus above, the top rung returns between 43% and 80% of the base rung per jump-hour.

2. Measure fill rate by daypart for two weeks. One number per session, admissions divided by capacity. Without it you cannot apply the rule in section 5, and every argument about session length becomes a preference. Two weeks of counts settles it, and the count is the cheapest data in the building.

3. Split the menu by daypart rather than splitting the difference. Peak gets the short product with a real peak premium. Off-peak gets the long product at a discount that reflects its actual ceiling. BOUNCE already runs two columns and Bismarck runs a separate evening menu. One ladder for all seven days is the design that forces a compromise nobody wants.

4. Price the extension at no less than half the base rate, or do not sell the extension. A 30-minute step consumes half a capacity-hour. Charging a quarter of the base rate for it, as three of the menus above do at their top rung, makes the last hour of the visit the least profitable hour of the day. If demand forces the discount, apply it to the day, not to the hour.

5. Add the short product only where the long one sells out. A one-hour tier on an empty Tuesday is a downgrade, not new demand. A one-hour tier on a Saturday that turns guests away is found money. The same ticket produces opposite results, and the fill rate you measured in rule two decides which one you get.

The physical design has to support whichever ladder you pick. A 60-minute park needs a lobby and a sock counter sized for eleven cohort turns a day, and a three-hour park needs somewhere for people to sit for three hours. Both are layout decisions made before the equipment order, and both are expensive to change afterwards. Our design and quoting process starts with the session model for that reason, and the court configuration follows from it.

Two related calculations sit next to this one and are worth running before a menu is fixed. The number of admissions a day you need before fixed costs clear is covered in the break-even attendance floor, and the way a two-hour party block competes for the same Saturday capacity is in what a party slot actually books. Members change the picture again, because a member who visits 1.3 times a month consumes capacity whether or not a ticket is sold that day, which is the subject of the membership visit math.

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If you send us your floor plan and your intended session length, we will return a layout sized for that cohort pattern rather than a generic one. Supervision ratios and court separation are specified against the standard that governs your market; the summary of how we handle that is on our safety standards page.

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FAQ

How long is a typical trampoline park session?

Sixty to 120 minutes, sold in 30-minute units. The US menus we checked cluster on 90 minutes as the standard single-day pass, with 60 minutes as the entry product and 120 minutes or unlimited as the upgrade. Three-hour products exist, but they usually sit in an evening or blacklight window rather than in the main daytime ladder.

Is a longer session better value for the guest?

Yes, by design. At the Bismarck menu the third hour adds $4 to a $29 two-hour ticket, which is $4 for an hour that the first hour sold for $20. The guest gets a real discount and the park trades revenue per capacity-hour for a higher ticket. Both statements are true at once, which is why the discount is a choice rather than an accident.

Should an indoor park offer an all-day pass?

Only where the court will not fill without it. An all-day pass at roughly 1.4 times the 90-minute price turns a fixed-capacity seat into a low-yield one for the rest of the day. On a quiet weekday it fills capacity that would otherwise sit empty. On a Saturday it removes the seat a second family would have paid for.

How many sessions can a trampoline park run in a day?

Open hours divided by session length, multiplied by concurrent capacity. Eleven hours of trading hold eleven 60-minute cohorts, 7.3 ninety-minute cohorts or 3.7 three-hour cohorts, and no cohort can hold more jumpers than the occupancy limit allows. The admissions ceiling falls as the session lengthens, which is the arithmetic behind the 45% revenue swing in section 4.

Does session length change staffing or supervision requirements?

It changes the number of transitions, not the ratio on the court. Court monitors are scheduled against the number of jumpers present, so a full court needs the same cover whether the session runs 60 minutes or 180. What changes is how often a cohort enters and leaves: eleven times a day at 60 minutes against 3.7 times at three hours, and each turn needs a gate check.

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Sources

1. Sky Zone Bismarck, “Jump tickets” (60/90/120/180-minute pricing, Glow Jump pricing, 30-minute start times). Captured 2 November 2026. https://www.skyzone.com/bismarck/tickets
2. Sky Zone Pembroke Pines, “Ways to Play” (90-minute standard pass, all-day pass, membership terms). Captured 2 November 2026. https://www.skyzone.com/pembrokepines/ways-to-play/
3. Sky Zone Highland Heights, “Ways to Play” (90-minute and 120-minute single-day passes). Captured 2 November 2026. https://www.skyzone.com/highlandheights/ways-to-play/
4. Big Air, “Pricing” (national product line: 1.5 hour, 2 hour, unlimited; prices set per park). Captured 2 November 2026. https://www.bigairusa.com/pricing
5. BOUNCE Inc, “Cannington venue pricing” (on-peak and off-peak columns, 60/90/120 minutes, AUD). Captured 2 November 2026. https://bounceinc.com.au/venues/cannington
6. Urban Air Adventure Park, park homepage (“Play all day for one low price”). Captured 2 November 2026. https://www.urbanairtrampolinepark.com/
7. Big Air Bolingbrook, park page (attraction mix and unlimited pass positioning at a 26,000 sq ft site). Captured 2 November 2026. https://www.bigairusa.com/bolingbrook