Annual preview 2018
Venice, web site and much, much more!
The year 2018 kicks off with the inauguration of Venice and is promising to become a suspenseful year.
After an eventful 2017 the year 2018 promises to become just as eventful, although a little less crowded:
Some of our visitors have given us feedback, that the exhibition has been too crowded for their liking. This applied especially on holidays and public holidays. The amount of people inside the exhi-bition obstructed the view for many others and made the visit less enjoyable. We therefore made the decision to limit the maximum amount of visitors by 15% to make a visit at the Wunderland more relaxing for everyone.
This January will be especially relaxing for all of those, who normally cannot afford to visit the Wunderland due to the entry fee. For the fourth consecutive year it is absolutely fine to say or write “I can’t afford it” in January and be admitted free of charge. After our initial doubts that peo-ple would take advantage of this offer, we have learned that many other visitors even volunteer to pay a higher fee to make up for those, who cannot afford the price in order to support our initia-tive.
The most dominant subject this year will definitely be our new Venice section. It will be ready in February and we will be presenting the results of 15 months of hard labor, condensed into 9 m². Innumerous historical and very elaborate buildings and many little street scenes provide a level of detail we have never achieved before. Our technology department deserves praises, as they have placed a number of sophisticated push button actions into a very limited amount of space. We can hardly wait to present our visitors with the results of our hard work, although there still is much left to do until then.
The same applies to our web site, which is undergoing the process of new design. After relaunching the ticket booking pages last year we will make the rest of the page much more customer friendly and modern this year as well. We estimate the beginning of February to be the time to lay our old web site to rest, so be quick to say goodbye if you feel like it. There will be no need to dress accord-ingly.
We don’t believe in long breaks, therefore we will start building the new section right after Ven-ice’s inauguration: Monaco will be another small section but great challenge at the same time for our model builders.
The special highlight will definitely be the Formula 1 race track. Gerrit and a quite a crew of technical specialists have been working on the software for the past years, entering a whole new era. We haven’t had a project this sophisticated since we built the airport. The first tests are looking quite promising, so you may look forward to the results! Currently we are expecting to be done by 2019, but we won’t promise too much, due to the complexity of the technical challenges.
There are changes within our existing exhibition, besides Venice and Monaco. The biggest project is the rebuilding of the fair in Middle Germany which will be replaced as a whole. We are also reno-vating the Hamburg tram, the circus in Scandinavia and much, much more. Apart from that we are planning to modernize our control center to make adjustments for the gradually growing exhibi-tion. There is good news for all photographers: We will exchange all our ceiling lighting for LEDs this year. It has proven to be a good solution in Italy and Switzerland, so we will apply the concept to the entire exhibition. Not only will we be reducing the energy use, but the light is much more pho-tography friendly than the neon tubes.
Our video team will be busy as well and has already prepared new episodes of Gerrit’s diary and the finishing episodes of Bella Italia. After the great success of the first episode of the Wunder-landians this year, there will be another season with more portraits of Wunderlandians and their work. And of course many other little crazy videos.
Last, but not least, we are feverishly working on our expansion plans. There are some questions yet unanswered, but this year we will decide how to continue after Monaco with the expansion of the exhibition. There will possibly be a big surprise for may but we are investigating all options 2018 promises to become another year full of suspense and excitement for the Wunderland and we hope you will walk this year’s journey with us as well!
