Trampoline Park Development Shifts East: Four 2026 Builds
In August 2026, Saudi Entertainment Ventures opened its first two fully indoor destinations, in Abha and Tabuk, the opening pair of a programme that runs to 14 sites in 13 cities.
On 15 October, Xventure, a spin-off of the Kiztopia group, said it would open its first Malaysian venue in Penang on 29 October: an 8 million ringgit build of 1,800 m² (19,375 sq ft) split into 11 zones.
Six days later, The Game Palacio opened its 14th venue, at HLP Galleria Mohali in Punjab, with a trampoline park, bowling, an arcade and VR inside a shopping centre.
On the same day, Ground Control Entertainment said it had secured space at Citystars in Cairo for a venue carrying two international IPs it has not yet named.
Four projects, three regions, four operators. The formats differ, the budgets differ by two orders of magnitude, and the climates have almost nothing in common. What they share is the shape of the buyer.
1. Four Projects, Four Markets
SEVEN’s Abha destination is the largest of the four by a wide margin: more than 70,000 m² (about 753,000 sq ft), fully indoor, near Abha International Airport in the Aseer region. Tabuk followed it. Both are integrated complexes rather than single attractions, so the active-play zone sits inside a building that also holds karting, cinemas, restaurants and licensed IP attractions.
Xventure Penang is the opposite case. It takes one floor of a mall, 1,800 m², and divides it into 11 zones and 32 challenges, aimed at teenagers, adults and corporate groups as much as at small children. The operator’s own description of the format is “less playground, more adventure”.
The Game Palacio venue at HLP Galleria Mohali follows the mall FEC pattern that has become standard in Indian tier-two cities: bowling, arcade, VR and a trampoline park, leased inside a shopping centre, as the 14th site in a chain.
Ground Control’s Cairo deal is the earliest stage of the four. The space is secured and the IPs are signed, but the operator has not published a size, an investment figure or an opening date.
| Project | Market | Published size | Published investment | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| SEVEN Abha and Tabuk | Saudi Arabia (Aseer, Tabuk) | Abha over 70,000 m², fully indoor | Part of a SAR50 billion portfolio; per-site cost not disclosed | Open; Abha opened August 2026 |
| Xventure Penang | Malaysia (Penang) | 1,800 m², 11 zones, 32 challenges | RM8 million | Opens 29 October 2026 |
| The Game Palacio, Mohali | India (Punjab) | Not published | Not published | Open; reported 21 October 2026 |
| Ground Control, Citystars | Egypt (Cairo) | Not published | Not published | Lease secured; date not announced |
Two of the four have published a number an outsider can work with. The other two have published a location and a name. That asymmetry is worth noticing, because it is the same asymmetry a supplier sees in an enquiry: one buyer arrives with a budget line and a board paper, the other arrives with a lease and a sketch.
2. Nobody on This List Is Opening a First Site
That is the detail that connects the four. SEVEN is a wholly owned subsidiary of Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, working through a portfolio it describes as SAR50 billion, with 21 destinations planned across 14 cities and at least three openings a year through 2028, potentially four or five. The Game Palacio is on its 14th venue. Xventure opened in Thailand and Hong Kong before it signed Penang. Ground Control has already put a Nerf Action Xperience and a Play-Doh Fun Factory into Qatar, and signed a Saudi centre built around Angry Birds, Miraculous Adventures and Lock Down.
None of that is a market projection. It is a description of who is placing orders. A repeat buyer orders differently from a first-timer, in five ways that a supplier feels immediately.
First, the bill of materials stops being bespoke. A 14-site operator cannot afford 14 different spring ratings, 14 pad profiles and 14 netting patterns, because every deviation becomes a spare part that has to be stocked somewhere. Second, the enquiry arrives with a schedule rather than a wish: this site opens in the second quarter, the next in the fourth, and the equipment has to land in a defined sequence. Third, documentation becomes a line item, because a programme buyer has an insurer and a commissioning team to satisfy at every handover. Fourth, the price conversation is about the whole programme, not the unit. Fifth, and least visibly, the operator starts to care about the second and third year of each site, because it will still be running them.
What this means for a single-site owner is not that you should imitate a 14-site operator. It is that the catalogue you will buy from in 2027 is being written for them. The parts that get stocked, the drawings that get standardised, the certifications that get renewed and the service routes that get set up will follow the programmes, because that is where the recurring volume sits. A one-park buyer who specifies against that catalogue gets spares in weeks. A buyer who specifies something bespoke gets spares whenever the factory next runs that profile.
Where this reading came from: the four announcements listed in section 1, plus two later 2026 data points used as a counterweight in section 7, a US municipal fieldhouse and a franchise appointment. No market-size figure in this article is taken from a research report, because none of the four projects discloses one and we could not trace a primary source for the numbers that circulate.
3. A 70,000 m² Box and a 1,800 m² Box Ask Different Questions
Scale changes what the equipment has to do before it changes what it costs.
At Abha scale, the active-play zone is one room among many, and the constraints sit outside the trampoline: cooling a 70,000 m² envelope in an Aseer summer, moving families between zones without crossing service corridors, keeping egress widths intact when a themed wall lands in the wrong place, and commissioning dozens of attractions in a sequence that lets the building open once. SEVEN’s chief project delivery officer named one of the hardest steps as the move from construction completion to genuine operational readiness, with independent certification where required. That is a programme-management problem, and it is solved before a single trampoline bed is ordered.
At Penang scale, the arithmetic inverts. Eleven zones inside 1,800 m² works out at roughly 164 m² per zone, which is not enough floor for eleven independent structures. So the zones share frames, share sightlines and share supervision positions. The design question is not which eleven attractions to buy, but which eleven can coexist on one supervisor’s line of sight without a blind corner. That is a layout discipline, and it is why the 22,000 sq ft reference layout keeps coming back as the useful middle case: big enough to separate, small enough that every zone has to justify its floor.
The procurement consequence is easy to miss. A programme buyer wants repeated identical units across rooms, because identical parts mean one spares list and one maintenance procedure. A compact buyer wants dense, multi-function units, because floor is the scarce input. Both are legitimate, and they do not describe the same product. A supplier that quotes the same kit to both is telling you it has not read either brief.
4. What a Repeatable Kit Actually Contains
A kit is not a discount. It is a specification that survives repetition. Five things belong in it, and all five are cheaper to agree before the contract than after the first breakdown.
4.1 One bill of materials across every site
What it is A written list of every component type with one part number each, and a rule that a site may not introduce a variant without a change order.
What it decides Whether a bed mat bought for site one fits site nine. Without the rule, three years of small improvements produce four incompatible generations of the same attraction.
What to verify Ask for the part-number list as a deliverable, not as a courtesy. A supplier that cannot produce one has not built a kit; it has built a series of one-off projects that happen to look alike.
4.2 Spares priced at signature, not at failure
The parts that fail first in a trampoline court are predictable: bed mats, spring sets, pad covers at the entry and exit edges, netting panels, foam blocks at the pit face and the bearings on moving elements. Price them when you sign, and put the list in the contract annex. A spare that costs a known amount in month one becomes an unknown amount in month thirty, because it arrives on an emergency freight lane with a production slot that has to be found.
4.3 Documentation that an insurer will accept
As-built drawings, the structural load basis, the impact-test reports with lot numbers, and the inspection and maintenance schedule. This is the item most often skipped by first-time owners and most often demanded by carriers. Our breakdown of what insurers now ask trampoline park operators for covers the same documents from the underwriting side; the list is shorter than most owners expect and harder to assemble after the fact.
4.4 A declared power and climate variant per site
The same attraction shipped to Penang, Cairo and Abha is three different electrical products. Section 6 covers what changes. The point here is procedural: the variant has to be declared on the purchase order, per site, in writing.
4.5 A named service route for year two
Who attends when a blower fails in month eighteen, how long the part takes, and who signs the repair. A programme buyer writes this into the framework agreement. A single-site owner should write it into the order, because the leverage is highest before payment.
5. The One Cost Line You Can Actually Compute
Only one of the four projects published an investment figure, so only one can be turned into a ratio. That is enough to show the method, and the method is what travels.
project cost per m² = total project cost ÷ playable area in m² cost per zone = total project cost ÷ number of zones equipment share = equipment contract ÷ total project cost
For Xventure Penang, RM8,000,000 divided by 1,800 m² gives RM4,444 per m². Divided by 11 zones, it is RM727,000 per zone. Both figures are ours, derived from the operator’s published numbers, not released by the operator as benchmarks. They also carry a warning that matters more than the numbers themselves: the RM8 million is a total project figure, and the operator has not published the split between equipment, fit-out, freight and pre-opening cost. So RM4,444 per m² is a project ratio, not an equipment price, and using it as an equipment budget would understate the equipment line by an unknown margin.
| Published figure | What it supports | What it cannot support |
|---|---|---|
| RM8 million for 1,800 m² (Penang) | A total project ratio of RM4,444 per m², and RM727,000 per zone | An equipment budget: the equipment, fit-out and freight split is not disclosed |
| SAR50 billion portfolio, 14 destinations (SEVEN) | The order of magnitude of a national programme, and the fact that sites are procured as a series | Any per-site cost: the portfolio figure covers 13 cities and mixed formats, including karting and cinemas |
| US$70 million for a 180,000 sq ft complex with a 30,000 sq ft FEC (Henderson, Nevada) | That the big-box format is still being funded outside Asia and the Gulf | A comparison with the Asian projects: the Nevada figure includes sports courts and turf fields, not just entertainment |
| 14th venue (Game Palacio), two unnamed IPs (Ground Control) | That both buyers are repeat operators with a portfolio view | Anything about size, budget or format |
If you want a number for your own project, the honest route is the one in our comparison of five disclosed project filings: take a filing with a published scope, strip out what your project does not include, and rebuild the ratio on your own area. A borrowed ratio from a project with a different scope is worse than no ratio, because it looks like a budget.
6. Three Specifications That Change With the Market
The three items below are the ones that most often force a re-quote between the enquiry stage and the purchase order. None of them is exotic. All of them are cheaper to settle at enquiry stage.
6.1 Power supply: voltage and frequency are part of the product
What it is Most of Asia, the Gulf, Europe and Africa run on 220–240 V single phase and 380–415 V three phase at 50 Hz. North America runs 120 V and 208–480 V at 60 Hz. Motors, blowers, variable-frequency drives and LED drivers are selected against that, not adapted to it after arrival.
What it decides Whether the container that lands is installable. A 60 Hz blower on a 50 Hz supply runs slow, and a 50 Hz motor on 60 Hz runs fast. Both fail early, and neither failure is covered as a defect, because the nameplate was correct for the wrong country.
What to verify A supply letter from the landlord or the electrical contractor stating voltage, frequency, phase and available capacity, attached to the purchase order. Not a verbal assurance that it is standard here.
6.2 Cooling load and dehumidification
An indoor park in Penang or Jeddah runs its air handling every day of the year, and the load is not the same shape as a European park’s. In humid markets a large share of the cooling duty goes to removing moisture from ventilation air and from occupants, not to dropping the dry-bulb temperature. A system sized only for temperature will hold the number on the thermostat and leave the hall clammy, which shows up as condensation on steel and on bed surfaces, slippery flooring at the entry, and complaints in week three rather than month three.
Our analysis of park electricity intensity works from US commercial building data at 12.1 kWh per sq ft a year. That figure does not transfer to a Gulf or Southeast Asian site, and we are not going to pretend it does: the design condition, the envelope and the ventilation rate all differ, and no operator in the four projects above has published a metered figure. What transfers is the method, which is to get the latent load into the MEP brief before the equipment layout is frozen, because dehumidification capacity is cheaper to design in than to retrofit into a plant room that was sized for sensible cooling.
6.3 Steel, coatings and fixings
Coastal and dusty sites punish the parts of a structure that drawings rarely show: weld zones, cut ends, fixing threads and the underside of frames where cleaning never reaches. For a site within a few kilometres of salt water, specify hot-dip galvanised or zinc-rich primed structural steel and stainless fixings for exposed connections, and inspect the coating system at the weld and at every cut, not just on the tube face. Getting this wrong is not a cosmetic problem. Rust bloom at a weld in year two means repainting a live park, which means closing zones, and the closure costs more than the coating did.
6.4 Standards do not translate
ASTM F2970 covers commercial trampoline courts in the United States. EN ISO 23659 covers trampoline parks in Europe, and EN 1176 and EN 1177 cover play equipment and surfacing. They are separate systems with separate methods, and a certificate against one is not a certificate against another. In the Gulf, India and Southeast Asia, the requirement that actually governs your handover is a combination of the local building and fire authority and the standard named in your insurance and inspection regime, and that combination has to be confirmed in writing for the specific project. We do not publish a single global checklist for this, because the answer differs by jurisdiction and by insurer. What we will say is that the cheapest time to ask the question is at enquiry stage. The trust page on how we document safety standards sets out what we hand over, and what we leave to the local authority.
7. What Would Prove This Wrong
The reading above is that the marginal buyer of indoor active entertainment is now a multi-site operator, and that the geographic centre of new capacity has moved toward the Gulf and Asia. Four conditions would break it. Each is checkable within two quarters, which is the point of writing them down.
1. Single-site openings keep dominating the news. If the next six months of trade press produce mostly first-time owners opening one park, then the four projects above are a sample of the visible end of the market, not a description of it. Visible projects are always the large ones; the count of small ones is what decides whether the buyer really changed.
2. The Western big-box pipeline holds its pace. Henderson Sport & Social in Nevada opened in October 2026 as a US$70 million, 180,000 sq ft municipal complex with a 30,000 sq ft FEC inside, owned by the city and operated by a manager with more than 140 venues. Launch Family Entertainment appointed a franchise development vice president on 23 October and said it is exploring more flexible park formats. If capital keeps moving into North America at that rate, the story is capacity being added everywhere, not a shift.
3. The Gulf programmes slip without explanation. SEVEN has been explicit that opening dates are announced only when a destination reaches the required level of readiness. A programme that quietly slides by a year is a programme that stops placing orders, and the equipment demand it represents never arrives.
4. Import cost rises faster than ticket price. These projects are built on a ticket ceiling that is lower than a US or UK park’s. If duty, freight or currency movement pushes landed equipment cost up while the local ticket price stays flat, the payback arithmetic fails and the pipeline thins from the bottom. Our comparison of three franchise disclosure documents shows how much of a US project’s cost is fixed before a single guest walks in; in a thinner ticket market that fixed block is a larger share of the risk.
One more honest limit: we have not seen the equipment contracts behind any of these four projects. Everything in sections 3 to 6 is inference from published descriptions plus what we know about specifying equipment for hot, humid and coastal sites. The inference could be wrong in detail even if the direction is right.
8. What to Do With This If You Are Building One Park
You are not going to run a 14-site programme. Three things from the programme playbook still apply to a single build, and they cost nothing at the design stage.
Write the enquiry as a brief, not a request for a price. State the area, the clear height, the supply voltage and frequency, the design outdoor condition, whether the site is coastal, and which standard your insurer or authority has named. A supplier that receives those six facts can quote something installable. A supplier that receives an area and a budget will quote the cheapest thing that fits the area.
Price the spares list before you sign. Ask for the ten parts most likely to be replaced in the first three years, with unit prices and lead times, and attach the answer to the contract. This is the cheapest form of protection against a two-week closure in year two, and it takes one email.
Decide the second site before you finish the first. If there is any chance you will build again, say so at enquiry stage and ask for one bill of materials that will hold for both. Repeat buyers get standardisation because they ask for it early; single buyers get it by accident, when the supplier happens to reuse the same profile.
If you are at the stage where the area is known and the layout is not, the fastest way to test any of this is to put the site facts in front of a designer and see what comes back. We produce a 3D layout and a quote within 48 hours of receiving the brief, which is also a quick way to find out whether your brief is complete.
Start from how a project runs from brief to handover, or look at the commercial trampoline range if you already know the zone mix. If your site is coastal or your climate is humid, read the materials and coating notes before you fix the specification.
FAQ
How much does it cost to build a trampoline park in Malaysia or the Gulf?
The only published figure among the four 2026 projects above is Xventure Penang at RM8 million for 1,800 m², which is a total project cost and does not split equipment from fit-out. For your own site, build the number from scope: equipment, fit-out, freight and duty, installation, deposit and working capital. A borrowed per-square-metre ratio from a project with a different scope is not a budget.
Does equipment need to be different for a hot or humid climate?
Yes, in three places. Electrical components must match the local voltage and frequency rather than being adapted on site. The cooling system needs dehumidification capacity, not only temperature control, because moisture removal dominates the load in humid markets. Structural steel and fixings need a coating system suited to coastal or dusty conditions, checked at welds and cut ends where corrosion starts.
Can I use European-certified equipment on a project in Asia or the Middle East?
That depends on the jurisdiction and on your insurer, and the two do not always name the same standard. ASTM F2970, EN ISO 23659 and local building and fire requirements are separate systems, and a certificate against one does not satisfy another. Confirm which standard governs your handover in writing before you order, and keep the test reports with lot numbers in the project file.
What is a repeatable equipment kit, and does it matter for a single park?
A kit is one bill of materials with a single part number per component, so any spare fits any site built from it. For a single park the value is in spares and service: standard parts are stocked and shipped in weeks, while a bespoke profile is produced whenever the factory next runs it. Ask for the part-number list and the spares price list as contract deliverables.
How do I know whether a quoted design will fit my building?
Check five inputs before the layout is drawn: usable area after columns and circulation, clear height at the lowest obstruction, floor loading capacity, the route the largest component takes from the loading bay, and the egress width the fire authority will require. A design that ignores any of those five is a drawing, not a plan, and the correction usually costs floor area you had already counted as revenue.
Sources
- Amusements & Attractions (InterGame), “The Game Palacio opens 14th entertainment centre”, 21 October 2026 — amusementsandattractions.com
- Amusements & Attractions (InterGame), “Ground Control agrees deal for Egyptian shopping centre”, 21 October 2026 — amusementsandattractions.com
- Business News Malaysia, “Xventure’s RM8 Million Adventure Park Lands in Penang on 29 October”, 15 October 2026 — businessnews.com.my
- Gulf Construction, “SEVEN starts Saudi rollout with Abha, Tabuk openings”, 2 September 2026 — gc-worldwide.com
- Gulf Construction, “INTERVIEW: SEVEN brings joy to 14 Saudi destinations” — gulfconstructiononline.com
- Khatib & Alami, “SEVEN Abha Entertainment Destination” project record, opened August 2026 — khatibalami.com
- Amusements & Attractions (InterGame), “Nevada entertainment complex spanning 180,000sq.ft now open”, 19 October 2026 — amusementsandattractions.com
- Amusements & Attractions (InterGame), “Launch names new vice president of franchise development”, 23 October 2026 — amusementsandattractions.com
- ASTM International, “F2970 Standard Practice for Design, Manufacture, Installation, Operation, Maintenance, Inspection and Major Modification of Trampoline Courts” — astm.org