PowerPark is Finland's largest amusement park, spanning over 160 hectares with more than 40 attractions. Hundreds of thousands of visitors come through the gates each year, and an increasing share of them buy their tickets online.

As digital sales grew, the limits of the existing system became harder to ignore. What had started as a workable setup gradually became a bottleneck for visitors trying to buy tickets and for staff trying to manage operations on the ground.

PowerPark partnered with Kodan to replace it with something built specifically for the job.

The challenge

Tickets, wristbands, and accommodation were sold through an external e-commerce platform not designed for high-volume ticket sales. It lacked the marketing capabilities the park needed, struggled during peak traffic, and pushed customers off the PowerPark website to complete their purchase.

Internally, the fragmentation extended to operations as well. Gate validation, accommodation management, and sales monitoring lived in separate places, creating extra coordination work without adding value.

With visitor numbers growing and online sales becoming increasingly central to the business, the gap between what the system could do and what the park needed it to do kept widening.

The goal

The goal was to build a platform designed specifically for PowerPark's operations, one that could handle high transaction volumes during peak periods, simplify the purchasing experience for visitors, and give park staff reliable tools for validation and sales management.

Everything in one place, built to hold under pressure.

The solution

Kodan designed and built a new digital ticketing and booking platform, integrated directly into the PowerPark website. For the first time, visitors could purchase tickets, wristbands, and accommodation without leaving the website, all through a single shopping cart and payment flow.

The ticket experience was rethought from delivery onward. Instead of static PDF attachments, customers receive a link to a mobile-friendly ticket page containing their ticket information, a QR code for gate entry, and a live status indicator showing whether the ticket has been used or is still valid. The page works on any device and is also optimised for printing.

For gate operations, Kodan developed an Android scanning application used by park staff. Connected to the same backend as the online store, it enables real-time ticket validation and supports mass scanning during busy entry periods. Accommodation bookings were integrated into the same purchasing flow and connected with PowerPark's existing Hotellinx environment, so staff could continue managing availability and operations through familiar tools. Analytics and management tools were built alongside the platform, giving PowerPark visibility into sales data, ticket usage, and the ability to transfer records to financial systems.

How it was built

The platform was built on top of PowerPark's existing WordPress environment rather than replacing it. The front end for both ticketing and accommodation sales runs on WordPress and WooCommerce, extended with custom code and integrations to support the scale and specificity the park required.

A central part of the work was bringing multiple systems into one coherent whole. Ticket sales, accommodation bookings, validation, and reporting needed to function together reliably while still connecting with existing operational tools such as Hotellinx.

The system also needed to perform under heavy load. Campaigns and peak season traffic place high demands on both purchasing and gate validation, requiring a stable and consistent experience across both online and on-site use.

The project turned out to be more extensive than initially anticipated. Integrating the existing WordPress environment with multiple systems and tools, including Hotellinx, into one coherent platform required careful coordination. Development progressed in phases, with an initial version released early and refined under real conditions. An approach that allowed problems to be caught and addressed before they became entrenched.

After active development, PowerPark joined Kodan Skaala, Kodan’s dedicated service for maintenance and small-scale development.

Results

The platform's first real test came during PowerPark's Black Friday campaign. Sales increased by 14% compared to the previous years, and the system handled hundreds of transactions within minutes without performance issues. The infrastructure held exactly as it needed to.

Since then, online sales of PowerPark's online store have continued to grow, and the platform has become the foundation for PowerPark's future digital expansion, including planned integrations with self-service kiosks and partner systems via API. PowerPark is also a Kodan Skaala client.

"Kodan helped us achieve a significant boost in ticket sales, user experience, and scalability by designing and building our new ticket sales and accommodation booking systems."

Image source: https://www.powerpark.fi/info/aineistopankki/