Cardiff will soon be home to two trampoline parks, the first of their kind in Wales.
Air Trampoline Park are hoping to open their doors this July near Llanishen Leisure Centre, whilst Infinity will be based in a warehouse and former skatepark off Newport Road.
Marketing manager Lisa Entwistle-Evans tells us that Air will be made up of a hundred interconnected trampolines, along with additional surfaces built into the walls.
“You can literally bounce off the walls” she says. “We’re also going to have dodgeball courts and rebound exercise, so it appeals to a very broad demographic. Everyone from kids to grandparents can come along and bounce”.
The site will also be home to a foam pit, which visitors can safely plunge into from great heights (Credit: Air Trampoline Park)
Air will also be targeting the student market, she says, with plans for a dodgeball league that they hope to roll out across university towns around the country.
Trampoline arenas have proven enormously popular in the United States. The Sky Zone franchise has more than 90 locations across 17 states, with additional locations in Canada and Australia.
“It’s huge in the States,” says Lisa. “It’s a mainstream activity that you might think of in the same way as going bowling, or taking your child to softplay. The UK tends to follow trends like this, so we’re not surprised to see it snowballing”.
Some concerns have been raised around the safety of the sites. Earlier this year the BBC reported that a trampoline park in Midlothian had seen over a hundred accidents within the space of three weeks.
“Safety is of paramount importance at Air” says Entwistle-Evans. “Trampolining is statistically safer than many sports – figures show that incident rates in trampolining are typically 2 in 1000, compared to 21 in 1000 when playing football. Yet it’s still a fairly extreme sport, which is why we’re extremely careful about keeping our jumpers safe”.
“This is a mature market in the US, with stringent national guidelines in place which we are voluntarily adhering to across all park operations, plus we are working with a US operator to make sure all of our policies and procedures are sound”.
