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Section III THE AQUARIUM CONCEPT e This section of the report presents an analysis of the aquarium concept in the United States. Planning Parameters for Aquariums There are a number of parameters that require attention for an aquarium to be successful. These are discussed below. Scale of Development An aquarium must have the proper scale of development if it is to achieve the optimum level of success. Scale relates to aquarium capacity. As will be shown later in this report, the scale of a aquarium must be consistent across the board regarding both entertainment components and support facilities including exhibits, food service, gift shops, etc. If the scale of an aquarium is too small, the capacity of the facilities will be taxed and over-crowding will result in less than optimal attendance. If the aquarium's scale is too large, capital investment will have been wasted resulting in diminished profitability. For these reasons, an aquarium should have a master plan that allows for timely aquarium expansion in response to market demand. Requisite Investment Level .. There is no single figure that represents the level of investment required to develop an aquarium. Clearly, there are aquariums of different scales of development. However, there are minimum and maximum parameters for development budgets. A rough rule of thumb holds that an allowance of $1 0,000 is required for each unit of entertainment capacity in an aquarium, excluding land costs. Thus, if an aquarium is developed with a capacity to accommodate, say, 1,500 attendees, then the cost of improvements is likely to be in the range of $ I 5 million. In fact, if much less than this amount is spent, there is some question as to whether the aquarium will have sufficient entertainment value to qualify as an aquarium. On the other hand, there is a limit regarding the upper range of investment for an aquarium. In our experience, there are very few markets that can justify an investment level for an aquarium above $20 million in entertainment development (excludes building structure) . Before a project reaches the "bricks and mortar" stage, it is absolutely imperative that the project have a feasibility study and a master plan. We have noted that the scale of aquarium components be consistent with one another. This consistency is necessary to insure that the aquarium's development program make judicious use of capital investment. We have witnessed unfortunate cases where this was not the case and the aquarium's development budget did not square with the project's end product. - Feasibility Study for a Proposed Aquarium at Sunny Isles, Florida Page 4