Entrepreneur Hennie van der Most invested tens of millions in his Rotterdam amusement park, which may never open

Hennie van der Most still thinks it is a good idea: an 850 meter long slide, right through the giant factory hall. With the elevator forty meters up, from there in a bobsleigh downwards, to set foot on the ground on the grounds of the converted waste center in Rotterdam-Zuid minutes later.

Can’t, the fire brigade said. He had not taken into account that an access to the emergency exit had to be applied every 25 meters.

Van der Most shares his new inspiration at a model in his office on site. He happened to have 250 bathrooms – tapped up with the purchase of a cruise ship – with which he had to do something. And so in the old factory he now wants to create an indoor campsite in addition to the amusement park, with a “appearance as if you were in the jungle”.

“Everyone who comes by is enthusiastic,” says Van der Most.

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The striking entrepreneur is now building his amusement park Rivoli Rotterdam for thirteen years. In March of this year, on his 75th birthday, it should have been time: the festive opening of what his life’s work had become. Were it not for him to say that since six times before: since 2014 he has been postponing the opening date.

A series of setbacks, running investors and broken promises further has gone up and the municipality seems to have had enough. If the amusement park is not open before the end of the year, it will stop.

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Scrap heap

The view must be spectacular, in the upper gondola of the Ferris wheel that overlooks the city. Right on the quay the Majesteous Steamship SS Rotterdam, then the stately Hotel New York, the city beach in the blossoming Rijnhaven, behind it, the skyscrapers on the Kop van Zuid and the Erasmus Bridge.

Van der Most, for example, had seen it – and the municipality too.

It was the alderman who personally called him in 2012, looking for a destination for the vacant waste burner of waste processor AVR. The south bank of the city, who fell behind, was also able to use a crowd puller. The entertainment pioneer was immediately sold.

Van der Most had built up a reputation in buying up a location that has fallen in disuse to breathe new life into it. He converted a potato flour factory into a play city, an old nuclear reactor to amusement park, a hospital to hotel, and a water tower into a rotating restaurant.

But that formula turned out to be finite. The gaze of the Rotterdam city view and another reality unfolds: on the left the scraps of the adjacent recyclar – in a wind fleet, the smell of waste through the amusement park. On the right dated attractions that evoke the feeling of an abandoned ghost park.

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André Rieu

The table in Van der Most’s office is littered with floor plans and building plans, whether or not put on paper by the man himself. Building an amusement park, he says with his glasses on the edge of his nose and in Sallands accent, is a “growth process.” “I had so much space. Then you get more and more ideas.”

Here, he says. “I think so.” On a photo that he fishes from the pile is one of the two towering chimneys of the old waste center. If possible, Van der Most wants to build thirteen attractions at the same time.

The park is a gathering of attributes that Van der Most collected over the years. He spoones it without difficulty: the steel comes from two gigantic show decors that he took over from André Rieu. The floor covering in the theater from a casino he bought in Venlo. Cheese was once made in the planters.

“This,” he says delighted, “I also have lying. A 65 -meter high rocket from Bremen.” Van der Most does not yet know what he will do with it.

If he has an idea today and someone says tomorrow: I have a casino for sale, he will put his initial plan aside

That impulsivity, says colleague Han Groot Obbink a little later, is his strength and his weakness. “If he has an idea today and someone says tomorrow: I have a casino for sale, he slides his initial plan and starts to develop new ideas. That has brought him far, but is now working very much against him.”

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Castle of air

Because in the course of time the setbacks accumulated. A major fire for which he was not insured, financial malaise and above all: endlessly struggling about permits and regulations.

“If a door is so thick,” he says while he keeps thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart, “I see immediately: that’s a fire door. But no, the congregation says, we have to have papers with that. I don’t have that because it is reuse. Why don’t they say: Most, beats, finches.”

That crushed ‘bureaucracy’ – the entrepreneur cannot get out of it. It delays him delay.

A park of broken promises

Van der Most cannot be beaten out of the field: he builds on undisturbed. But in the meantime the patience is getting a little further up to the Coolsingel. “Stop this air castle,” said SP councilor Theo Coşkun earlier this year at a debate. “The merry -go -round turns fried air. It is nothing and it will be nothing.”

“A park of broken promises,” it sounded from Thomas Roskam (Liveable Rotterdam).

The main stumbling block: the leasehold. The amusement park is built on municipal land, which Van der Most has used until 2030. The municipality of Rotterdam believes that he has been granted time long enough and sets an ultimatum: it only wants to extend the lease if the park is open before the end of this year.

But Van der Most, in turn, says that the investors he needs only want to board if there is certainty for the long term. He hits the table with his fist. “Investors say: Most, I want a long -term leasehold. If the municipality gives me that leasehold, it is ready.”

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Enough money to bring the amusement park to a successful conclusion on its own strength, Van der Most, whose assets was estimated at 75 million euros by business magazine Quote in 2017, no longer. He claims to have put 50 million into the project. He sold the majority of his companies a while ago.

Half a year ago he signed a letter of intent with a potential buyer for the amusement park, it unveiled Ad recently. “Someone was interested,” said Van der Most, who doesn’t want to say much about it. Although the conversations would still run, the buyer threatens to drop out because of the negative publicity.

Van der Most already knows that he is not going to meet the deadline of the municipality. “I don’t get it ready on time. Easy. Not.”

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Viable

Even in the scenario that the stalemate is broken with the municipality, the question is whether the park is viable. A published report last week From an independent research agency that took a closer look at the business model at the request of the council, the floor sweeps with the dreams of Van der Most.

The consultants state that the entrepreneur has considerably overestimated the number of visitors. For example, the indoor campsite would not spend the night every year, but around 37,000. The ‘dinner shows’ can count on around 18,000 visitors, instead of the expected one hundred thousand.

The income would also be considerably lower. The annual turnover is estimated at just under 13 million euros, almost half less than Van der Most had calculated. The profit would be 2.3 million – just over a quarter of the net result of almost 9 million euros intended by Van der Most.

“Don’t go for a meter,” says Van der Most about the report. On the contrary: he has a “super earning model”. According to him, everyone is positive about the tours given by the park.

That just did not apply to amusement park expert Erwin Taets, who during a tour mainly saw a party “randomly placed attractions”. “If you walk there, you don’t have the feeling that there is a coherent theme or a reason why an attraction is in a certain place. He did not start an umbrella story, but with a series of attributes.”

Taets, who is a leisure science teacher and presents a podcast about amusement parks, has “great sympathy” for Van der Most. “Every entrepreneur who tries to create something special in this sector deserves all the opportunities for this.” But according to him, the amusement park builder “really goes very much against all theories about experience, experience and immersion that are popular today in amusement park land.”

Quite apart from the fact that it is not yet finished, “Taets concludes,” is not on the way to grow to a park with some form of chances of survival. “

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Corpse

Van der Most himself cannot say how things are going. Here and there a construction worker is still walking on the site to prevent the things going further, the work is still standing still. There is nothing that indicates that the attractions in the park are still running. But until the leasehold will end in five years, the municipality can make the entrepreneur little.

He himself doesn’t want to know anything about the criticism. Of course: he has been ‘naive’. But he does not accept what he had done differently with retroactive effect. “That is looking the cow in the ass.”

In the meantime, Van der Most does not intend to give way to just a thumb. “I am 75, this is my life’s work. I want to make something beautiful out of it and transfer it to a good party. Not to be fun, they are also in between. They think: must be shy about money, then I buy it for little.”

He still believes it is possible. Or better: that it will happen. “Of course the park will go on. I’m not going to burn 50 million?”

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