MAPIC finalist: ADVENTICA - leisure concept of the year

The finalists for the prestigious MAPIC 2023 global awards have been announced for November 2023 in Cannes, France. Launched in 1996, the MAPIC Awards recognise excellence, innovation and creativity in the retail property market, celebrating the most beneficial, sustainable and visionary projects of the year. Brands, creative ideas and real projects from around the world compete in 14 different categories. The 2023 Awards jury is made up of 13 members from different countries around the world (Portugal, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Sweden, Germany and Austria) and different business sectors.

One of the four finalists for the MAPIC Award for Leisure Concept of the Year is ADVENTICA, a chain of family entertainment centres (FECs) from Lithuania. This is the first time in the history of the MAPIC event that representatives from the Baltic States have been shortlisted for the final. This category rewards the best leisure concepts for originality and excellence over the past 12 months.

The story of the family amusement park began in Lithuania in 2020. After almost a year of construction and installation work, the first ADVENTICA family entertainment centre of almost 4,500 square metres opened in Vilnius, in the OZAS shopping and entertainment centre. The beginning was anything but easy, as both the opening and the operation were accompanied by the first and second waves of the Covid-19 epidemic.

The second ADVENTICA family amusement park (2100 m2) was built in Riga (Latvia) in the OLIMPIA shopping centre. Its operations were also severely restricted during the pandemic. In October, an ADVENTICA family entertainment centre was opened in Chisinau, the capital of Moldova. With more than 2,500 square metres of leisure space, it has already exceeded even the wildest plans and forecasts and has become a centre of attraction for the people of Chisinau. ADVENTICA is not stopping there! At the very beginning of 2024, another park will open in Bratislava, the best shopping centre in Slovakia. And this is not the end of it.

November and December this year will be particularly busy. As soon as we were ranked among the four best leisure concepts in the world at the MAPIC Awards, our diaries were filled with meetings. Even during the three-day event, it will be hard to find time to see the show itself and listen to presentations from experienced entrepreneurs. The world's largest shopping centre operators, individual shopping centres, interested investors, existing and potential suppliers and trading partners are all eager to meet. In December, there will be many remote meetings and visits to various stakeholders.

We compare the fame we have achieved in entertainment to a Nobel Prize - "realising that we are among the best in the world is still a big challenge for us. Late in the evening, before the opening of the first centre in Vilnius, we joked uneasily that even if no one came, at least we had built an amusement park for our children! When we built ADVENTICA in Vilnius, we asked everyone for help: suppliers for postponing payments, partners for understanding the delays, the state for support during the closure of Covid. After the pandemic, when everything was back to normal, we said to ourselves: "Our time for asking is over! It is time to move on and deliver!"

Today we are optimistic about the future. We are expanding our contacts throughout Western Europe, looking for sites in Scandinavia and scouting the Middle East. Every few days we receive enquiries and requests to open ADVENTICAs in different cities around the world. We have visited dozens of shopping centres over the past few years. Today, our top priority is to maintain the highest quality, choose new locations with precision and implement perfectly what we have in mind. After all, everything is a game! This is the motto of our company. And the game is only just beginning.

The winners of the MAPIC 2023 Global Awards will be announced on the evening of 29 November 2023.