All-Age Indoor Playground: 8,000 m², Child Pays 47% More

The resort brand Senbo opened an 8,000 m² indoor play and sports centre in Tonglu, Zhejiang, on 17 October 2026, after half a month of trial operation. On the booking pages that went live with it, a child ticket costs RMB 188 and an adult ticket costs RMB 128.

That inversion is the most useful detail in the project. The usual ladder puts the child below the adult: Altitude Arlington lists a junior morning pass at $11.99 against $19.99 for a standard 90-minute session, as we noted when we priced that fit-out. Senbo has done the opposite, and the adult is not a spectator at that price. The venue expects the parent to climb, jump and slide.

The building is not a new build. It occupies the shell of Fanta Island, the resort’s existing children’s playground, and the operator’s own release describes the work as a repositioning rather than an extension. A children’s park became an all-age entertainment centre without adding floor area.

Two things had to move to make that work. The age bands moved, and the temperature moved with them. The finished venue runs three bands at once: roughly 30 °C in the adjacent indoor water park, roughly 15 °C in the sports and toddler zones, and −15 °C on the ice floor, with a −6 °C ice bar inside the cold box.

What follows separates the figures that can be checked from the ones that cannot, and works out what each implies if you are considering the same conversion.

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1. What opened, and which figures can be checked

The operator’s release, carried by Beijing News on 20 October 2026, gives four figures that matter: about 8,000 m² of floor area, an ice lake and igloo totalling 1,670 m², three audience zones, and year-round operation. Everything else comes from ticketing pages that were live in the same week.

The two sets of sources use different taxonomies, and the difference is worth keeping. The release groups the venue by audience: an ice zone for all ages, a sports zone for teenagers and adults, and a toddler zone for families. The ticketing pages group it by level: an ice lake below, a snow area on the middle level, and a sports and challenge area above. Neither is wrong. They are two cuts of the same building, and the item counts do not reconcile: the release says more than 20 sports items, the booking pages say 23, and the ice count appears only in the latter.

That gap is normal for an opening release, and it is a reason to treat item counts as approximate. The area split is sturdier, because 1,670 m² appears in the operator’s own text and divides cleanly into the total.

The trampoline appears in the sports zone list, alongside high ropes, a zip line, climbing, archery, interactive basketball and a flying theatre. It is one line among 23, not the anchor. That placement echoes what we saw in the multi-attraction box format, where the court is a component of a programme and the programme is what the ticket sells. Buyers sourcing a court on its own should read the placement carefully, because a single item in a 23-item list has a different specification brief from a hall that is nothing but trampolines.

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2. The ticket ladder: why the child pays more than the adult

Three published prices are enough to reconstruct the pricing logic. Adult at RMB 128, child at RMB 188, and the pair at RMB 288. Everything below is arithmetic on those three figures.

The child premium is 188 minus 128, which is 60, divided by 128, which is 46.9%. Put the other way round, the adult pays 68.1% of the child price. In a market where the adult is normally free or pays a spectator rate, this is a deliberate statement about who is buying.

The bundle is where the ladder shows its hand. Take the pair price of 288 and subtract the standalone adult ticket: the marginal price of the child inside the bundle is 160, which is 14.9% below the 188 standalone rate. Subtract the standalone child ticket instead, and the marginal price of the adult is 100, which is 21.9% below the 128. The discount is larger, in percentage terms, for the adult.

The bundle saves only 8.9% against buying separately, which is a thin discount for a family product. Its real function is not the saving. It is to make the adult enter, because the pair price exists only if both tickets are bought together.

Read the ladder three ways and it says three things. First, the child is the non-substitutable user and carries the margin, because a parent will not send a six-year-old into a −15 °C room alone. Second, the adult is priced as an add-on at roughly two-thirds of the child, low enough to overcome the resistance of a parent who intended to sit in a café for two hours. Third, the snow suit at RMB 30 sits outside the ticket, which adds 23.4% to an adult admission and 16% to a child admission, and is close to unavoidable in a cold zone at that temperature.

The pricing rule this implies: charge the accompanying adult only when the adult is a participant. Where the adult is a chaperone with a phone and a coffee, an adult ticket converts a two-person visit into a one-person visit and a lost food-and-beverage sale.

There is a limit to what three prices can tell you. Session length is not published, so revenue per hour of opening time cannot be derived. Capacity is not published, so utilisation cannot be derived. Annual admissions are not published, so nothing here supports a revenue estimate. The ladder describes intent, not performance.

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3. Three temperature bands in one building

The release describes a challenge route that runs from the 30 °C indoor water park, through the 15 °C sports and toddler zones, into the −6 °C ice space, with the −15 °C ice floor below that. That route is not marketing copy. It is a statement about how the building is zoned, and it is the part of the project most likely to be underestimated by anyone copying it.

Start with the envelope, because it sets the floor for everything else. Steady-state heat gain through a surface is the U-value multiplied by the area multiplied by the temperature difference. For the 1,670 m² cold zone at a 50 K difference, −15 °C inside against 35 °C outside on a Zhejiang summer day, a U-value of 0.15 W/m²K gives 0.15 × 1,670 × 50, which is 12,525 W, or 12.5 kW, or 7.5 W for every square metre of ice. Double the U-value to 0.30 and the figure doubles, to 25.1 kW.

Those U-values are illustrations, not design values, and the calculation deliberately leaves out the slab, the doors, the air changes, the lighting, the people and the defrost cycles. A real refrigeration load is several times larger. The point of doing the arithmetic is to see the shape of the problem: a cold box of this size leaks heat in proportion to its surface, and the surface includes the roof, the four walls and the floor.

Moisture is the harder constraint. At 35 °C and 60% relative humidity, the dew point is about 26 °C. Any surface in the building that sits below 26 °C will collect condensate, which means every element of the mid band, and every cold bridge at the boundary of the cold zone, needs a warm-side vapour barrier rather than a cold-side one. Get that backwards and the insulation becomes a reservoir.

The hardest detail in this particular building is likely to be the water park interface. Pool air at 30 °C carries far more moisture than the rest of the building, and the wall it shares with a 15 °C sports zone is a condensing surface on the pool side unless it is detailed as a separate thermal envelope. That is not a reason to avoid the combination. It is a reason to put the interface on the drawing before the equipment list.

One operational consequence is visible in the ticketing terms: the admission is single-entry. A guest who leaves the cold zone and warms up in the sports zone cannot return without paying again. That turns circulation into a sequence rather than a loop, and it argues for placing the cold zone at the end of the route, which is what the published challenge route does.

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4. What a 20.9% ice share does to the rest of the floor

Divide 1,670 by 8,000 and the cold zone is 20.9% of the floor. That leaves 6,330 m², or 68,135 sq ft, for the sports zone, the toddler zone, circulation, back of house and the entry. Across three floors the average is about 2,667 m², though the floors are plainly not equal: the ice lake sits on one level and the challenge zone on another.

The last two rows need care. The 275 m² figure divides 23 items by the whole non-ice floor, which includes circulation and back of house, so it understates density. The 139 m² figure assumes the sports zone occupies 40% of the total, which is an assumption we have invented for illustration and which the operator has not published. Use neither as a benchmark. Use them to see that a 23-item programme on this footprint produces something in the order of 100 to 300 m² per item, which is the range where sightlines start to fail and supervision posts start to multiply.

The layout pattern that follows is a cold core with a warm ring. Cold zones have the thickest envelope, the fewest openings and the highest cost per square metre, so they want to sit against an external wall or a roof, not in the middle of the plan where they force two expensive boundaries. The 23-item sports zone is the opposite: it needs height, sightlines and circulation, so it wants the generous span. Putting the ice at the end of the route and the sports zone in the middle is the arrangement the published route describes.

What is not published is the part a designer would most want: the per-zone areas, the ceiling heights, the structural grid, the floor loading on the ice slab, and whether the middle level was rebuilt or reused. We are not going to reconstruct a floor plan from a press release, and any drawing that claims to show one is invented.

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5. The gates: 90 cm, 150 cm, 60 and over

An all-age venue is enforced at the door, and the booking terms show exactly where the lines fall.

None of these figures comes from a standard. Height gates of this kind are commercial policy: they decide who pays which price, and the operator sets them. Standards govern the design of the equipment, the impact attenuation of the surfacing and the supervision regime, not a universal entry height, and any supplier who quotes you a single legal minimum height for a trampoline park is quoting policy as if it were law.

The gates do create design obligations. A 90 cm child ticket means the toddler zone has to work for children who are barely walking and for children of 110 cm in the same visit, which usually means two equipment scales rather than one. A 150 cm adult gate makes the 23-item zone a teenager and adult space, and supervision there is about throughput and rule enforcement rather than hand-holding.

Supervision is where the item count turns into money. Using the density range we worked through in the labour-cost analysis, one monitor per 5,000 sq ft of active play area down to one per 1,500 sq ft, and taking half of the 86,100 sq ft as active programme, the range is 8.6 to 28.7 posts. At 3,650 opening hours a year and a loaded cost of $19.33 an hour, the May 2025 occupational wage for recreation workers multiplied by the 1.25 part-time benefits load, each post costs about $70,500 a year. The range is therefore $607,000 to $2.03 million, before a single ticket is sold.

Two caveats. Only active programme area counts towards that density, not the whole floor, and the density figure is a planning heuristic rather than a published rule. The number is useful because it shows that a 23-item programme is not 23 items of revenue; it is 23 positions to watch.

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6. Captive demand: what a resort gives you that a high street does not

Senbo operates six parks in China and lists Tonglu as its seventh project, with a further site in Guangde due in the first half of 2027. The resort has opened in phases, with two hotels and the water park arriving before this venue. A guest arriving today is already inside a destination that has sold them a room.

That matters because the arithmetic of an 8,000 m² box on a leased high street is brutal. At the United States retail average of $24.79 a square foot from CBRE’s second-quarter 2026 figures, 86,100 sq ft carries about $2.13 million a year in rent. At RMB 128 a head, converted at a working rate of 7.1 to the dollar for this arithmetic only, that is $18.03 an admission, and covering rent alone takes 118,400 admissions, or 324 a day, every day of the year.

Apply the occupancy-cost convention that rent should sit near 12.5% of revenue and the picture gets worse. Rent of $2.13 million implies revenue of $17.1 million, which at one ticket price means 947,000 admissions, or 2,595 a day. No single-ticket box does that. The conclusion is not that the project fails; it is that the project works because the box is not paying retail rent, and because revenue is not one ticket but a room, a water park, food and a second visit.

The transferable lesson is a condition, not a compliment. If your site sits inside a hotel, a resort or a mall with a strong weekend draw, an adult ticket at two-thirds of the child price is defensible, because the adult is already on site and the marginal cost of their admission is a wristband. If your site is a leased unit that depends on walk-in trade, the same ladder will cost you admissions: the adult who would have sat in the café and bought coffee now reads a price at the door and turns around.

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7. What this venue does not tell you

The list of unknowns is longer than the list of knowns, and pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose a reader who has actually built one of these.

There is no published capital cost. Nothing states what the conversion of Fanta Island cost, how much of the existing fit-out was retained, or what share of the budget went to the cold envelope and the refrigeration plant. There is no published capacity, no dwell time, no session length, no annual attendance and no energy consumption. There is no per-zone area except the ice. There is no statement of whether the ice plant uses a direct or an indirect system, and no refrigerant is named.

Compliance is also not a single question here. A trampoline installation inside the sports zone falls under the trampoline-park standard in force in the destination market, which in Europe means EN ISO 23659 and in the United States means ASTM F2970. The soft-play and climbing elements fall under the play-equipment and surfacing standards, EN 1176 and EN 1177 in Europe. The refrigeration side falls under EN 378, which covers refrigerating systems and heat pumps rather than buildings. An ice rink of this kind is not covered by any trampoline standard, and the building itself, its egress and its fire strategy, is covered by none of the three.

Those regimes do not translate into each other, and a certificate issued against one of them says nothing about the others. We deliberately give no dimensional thresholds here, because the values differ by edition and by market, and a wrong number is worse than no number. If a supplier offers you a single certificate for a mixed venue, ask which asset it covers and which edition it was tested to. The verification steps behind that question are set out in our safety standards page.

Finally, this is one venue, in one market, attached to one resort, priced through third-party booking pages rather than an operator rate card. Prices on those pages change with season and promotion. Treat every figure in this article as a snapshot taken in the week of 20 October 2026.

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8. Converting a kids’ playground: the order of decisions

The most common mistake in a conversion is to start with the equipment list. The order below is the one the Tonglu project implies, and it puts the two decisions that cannot be reversed first.

First, test the catchment before the concept. An all-age box needs adults who will pay, and adults arrive on a different schedule from children. If your site cannot fill weekday evenings with people over 160 cm, the adult ticket will not sell and the child ticket has to carry the whole profit and loss.

Second, write the ticket ladder before the layout. Decide which band pays, which band is discounted and whether the pair is bundled. Only then can you size the zones, because the paying band needs programme density and the discounted band needs sightlines.

Third, count the temperature bands. Each band adds an envelope, a transition and a set of doors. Two bands are a detail. Three bands, including a sub-zero room next to a 30 °C pool, are a building services project that belongs in the feasibility study, not in the fit-out tender.

Fourth, keep the toddler core and add the top band. The conversion here did not delete the children’s programme; it added a programme for teenagers and adults above it, and a cold attraction beside it. Deleting the toddler zone to make room for older users usually trades a reliable weekday morning for a weekend-only peak.

Fifth, decide what the old fit-out can carry. Floor loading, ceiling height, structural grid and drainage are the four items that decide whether a conversion is a refit or a rebuild. If the existing slab cannot take the point loads, no amount of design work will fix it later.

If you are planning a conversion and want the zone ratios and equipment schedule tested against your own floor plate, the design team can work from a dimensioned plan. The design-to-delivery process starts with the building, not with a catalogue.

Get a free design and quote →

Two things are worth checking before you commit. The indoor playground equipment range shows how a toddler zone and a soft contained play structure are specified at different scales, and the 22,000 sq ft layout breakdown shows what happens to zone ratios when the floor shrinks.

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FAQ

How much does it cost to convert a children’s playground into an all-age venue?

No figure has been published for this project, and we will not invent one. The cost lines that move most are the cold-zone envelope and the refrigeration plant, the extra supervision posts created by a larger programme, and the ticketing and access-control system needed to enforce height bands. A conversion that adds no climate band costs a fraction of one that adds a sub-zero room, because the second case is a building services project rather than a fit-out.

Should adults pay to enter an indoor playground?

Charge the adult only when that person is a participant, and charge nothing when they are a chaperone. The Tonglu venue charges RMB 128 for an adult against RMB 188 for a child, which works because the adult is expected to use the sports zone and the ice. In a leased unit that depends on walk-in families, an adult gate fee tends to reduce party size rather than raise revenue, and the margin is better taken in food and seating.

What height should a child be to use a trampoline park?

There is no universal legal height. Standards govern equipment design, impact attenuation and supervision, not a single entry height. Operators set their own bands and publish them: this venue sets the child ticket at 90 cm and above for anyone under 18, and the adult ticket above 150 cm. Ask any supplier to separate what a standard requires from what their own policy requires.

How much does it cost to run an ice zone inside a family entertainment centre?

Operating cost is driven by the envelope before it is driven by the refrigeration machine. Steady-state heat gain is the U-value times the area times the temperature difference, so a 1,670 m² floor at a 50 K difference loses between 12.5 kW and 25.1 kW through the envelope at illustrative U-values of 0.15 and 0.30. Add doors, infiltration, lighting, people and defrost, and the real load is several times higher.

Is an all-age indoor playground more profitable than a kids-only one?

No public profit-and-loss data exists for either format, so the honest answer is that nobody outside the operators knows. What changes structurally is revenue per visit, because two admissions replace one, and cost per zone, because a programme for adults needs more supervision and more height. Test it on admissions per day rather than on ticket price: a venue that needs 300 admissions a day to carry its rent will not be saved by a 47% child premium.

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Sources

1. Beijing News, “From children’s park to all-age entertainment centre: Tonglu Senbo Aoneng Xueyu opened on 17 October”, 20 October 2026 — bjnews.com.cn
2. Jiangnan Times, same operator release, 20 October 2026 — jntimes.cn
3. Ctrip attraction listing, Tonglu Senbo Aoneng Xueyu, ticket prices and opening hours, accessed October 2026 — ctrip.com
4. Hangzhou Citizen Card marketplace listing, ticket terms, height rules and snow-suit rental, accessed October 2026 — mp.weixin.qq.com
5. CBRE, “Q2 2026 US Retail Figures”, published July 2026 — cbre.com
6. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, occupation 39-3091 — bls.gov
7. US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, released 9 September 2026 — bls.gov
8. ASTM International, F2970-25, standard practice for trampoline courts, scope and status — astm.org