Manteca’s new water park resort is opening earlier than expected. Take a look inside
While it took more than a decade of planning, negotiating and building for Manteca to get Great Wolf Lodge, the water park resort will now open a full month ahead of schedule.
The new earlier opening date will be July 1. The news was revealed Wednesday morning as select members of the public, city government and media got their first look inside the massive 500-room hotel, 45,000-square-foot family entertainment center and 95,000-square-foot indoor water park resort just off Highway 120 in Manteca.
The walk-through tour showed off the scale of the project, which sits on a 29-acre lot next to Costco off Daniels Street. The entrance to the resort is on McKinley Avenue on the development’s west side. The six-story hotel looms large and guests will first walk into an imposing lobby with 30-foot beamed ceilings.
Murray Hennessy, CEO of Great Wolf Resorts Inc. which owns the chain of 18 indoor water park resorts across the country and Canada, said construction at the Manteca site is about 80 percent complete. What remains is largely finishing work, which includes completing drywall installation and then all of its interior furnishings.
“To open this site a month early, it took a lot of work,” Hennessy said. “We are able to advance the opening date by a whole month for two reasons. First, Turner (the site’s construction company) and the team have done a great job. And secondly, the City of Manteca has been a wonderful partner and they’ve kind of paved the way for us the whole way along. We’re thrilled.”
The new opening date means hiring, which is already underway for management teams, will continue apace. The bulk of the some 600 people it plans to bring on board will be selected through off-site job fairs run by the company. Great Wolf Manteca General Manager Alana Ostrowski said those hiring events should start the last week of April and go into early May.
The resort plans to hire about 500 full-time positions in addition to some part-time workers in jobs ranging from lifeguards to housekeepers, line cooks and gift shop attendants.
The lobby area is a center of activity, with a reception area on its south wall and a large gift shop being built off its north wall. A large fireplace, which has already begun to take shape, sits in the center. The area behind it is used for complimentary children’s, youth and family daily activities.
As guests progress through the lobby, they’ll come across the Barnwood Kitchen, the chain’s farm-to-table style full-service restaurant that has seating for up to 200 people.
All of the resort’s amenities are spread across its three attached sections as you head from west to east across the property: the hotel and lobby, the family entertainment center called the Adventure Park, and then the enclosed indoor water park.
The u-shaped hotel has wings on its north and south sides. Two of the resort’s most popular rooms, the basic family suite and its upgraded kids cabin, had furnished models to show off for the tour.
The basic rooms, which start at $199 for up to four people, feature two queen beds, a standalone sink area and bathroom. The kids cabin has a themed, built-in children’s room with bunk beds and the rest of the suite has a bathroom, queen bed and pull-out couch to sleep up to six (four standard, and two for an additional fee).
Ostrowski said bookings, which started in January, are going strong. Reservations can be made via phone and now also online. The hotel’s attached convention center, with room for groups as large as 800 people, has already booked some events. With the earlier booking dates, rooms will now be offered to the public from July 1 to Aug. 1, its previously planned opening.
Great Wolf appears to be meticulous with its branding, from the paw-prints on the carpeting to various rustic touches and forest themes. The lobby area also has an ice cream shop and candy store, in case the resort’s target demographic is in question.
Guests travel from the hotel and lobby into the Adventure Park. Currently mostly just a large empty room, the space will eventually have a large ropes course at its heart, plus a mini-golf course, attached bowling alley, video arcade and three restaurants.
Then, on the far east side of the project, is the water park. While Hennessy said the indoor water attraction may still look a long way off from finishing, its most complicated engineering — including a mile of piping underneath its floor and installation of its six exclusive water slides — has been completed.
Besides its waterslides, the water park has a Tipping Bucket (which douses the kids and big kids who gather underneath every 4 minutes) a lazy river, wave pool, toddler area and more. The water park was designed to allow parents to see all areas of the 95,000 square foot space at a glance. The idea is to let the kids run free and have fun while dad sips a cocktail in one of the rental cabanas or mom floats down the lazy river.
The waterslides include easy-going body slides for all ages, a thrill-seeking drop-ride that starts with a 30-foot plunge, a dual racing ride and raft rides. All of the slides are accessed through a tower inside the water park, and then the enclosed tubes take riders outside of the building and then back inside to its own splash pool.
Great Wolf Lodge will be Manteca’s first major water attraction since the Manteca Waterslides closed in 2004. The popular pool and slides were a Central Valley favorite for some 30 years. Now, 16 years later, Great Wolf hopes to fill that void. And while there have been grumblings, particularly from locals, about the resort’s policy of only allowing registered guests into the water park, Hennessy said he hopes the community feels welcome.
“I think Great Wolf offers a wonderful opportunity for families to have great memories together,” he said. “This Great Wolf in Northern California is our latest and greatest and it incorporates lots of things we’ve learned in our history with the other 18 lodges that are open and also brings new things and changes. This really will be our state-of-the-art offering.”
For more information or room reservations at the Manteca Great Wolf location call 888-960-9653 (WOLF) or visit www.greatwolf.com/northern-california.
This story was originally published March 4, 2020 at 3:50 PM with the headline "Manteca’s new water park resort is opening earlier than expected. Take a look inside."
