Inclusion by Design: How Morgan's Wonderland Builds Experiences That Work for Everyone
“The sky's the limit with whatever we can create”
Sharon Newhardt
Inclusion Strategist
Morgan’s
8th April
Blog
6 min read
Theme parks are built around delivering a great day out. Behind that simple goal sits a complex mix of design decisions, operational trade-offs, and guest expectations that don't always work for everyone.
Accessibility is often treated as something to solve after the fact, a workaround, a separate entrance, a modified version of what everyone else gets. At Morgan's Wonderland, that approach is flipped entirely.
Opened in 2010, the park was designed from day one to be fully inclusive. The idea was straightforward: guests of all abilities should share the same experiences, not be offered adjacent ones. That thinking carries through everything, from how attractions are designed, to queue layouts, to how every member of staff is trained.
In this chat, we speak with Sharon Newhardt, who leads inclusion and culture across the organisation and works with operators around the world through the Morgan's Inclusion Institute.
We cover what inclusion actually looks like on the ground, where most parks can improve, and how operators can start making real changes without rebuilding from scratch.
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How does designing a park around accessibility from day one fundamentally change the way attractions, operations, and guest experiences are planned?
It starts with universal design principles and working out how those translate inside a theme park. That means finding vendors willing to adapt their rides to meet a much higher bar than the industry standard.
"Our goal is always to get those rides to be 100% roll-on accessible."
Getting there involves real engineering work. Physics, load calculations, structural changes. Not every manufacturer is set up for that conversation, so finding the right partners matters early.
But the bigger shift is cultural. Before any design work begins, the team spends time understanding what disability actually looks like across different people and different conditions. Not in the abstract, but through direct conversations with people who have lived experience.
Those conversations cover the practical stuff: what has worked at other venues, what has put people off travelling to certain facilities, what small details made a visit easier or harder than it needed to be. That feedback shapes decisions that pure engineering thinking would never surface.
The people who rely on these spaces often have the clearest picture of what works and what doesn't. Getting that input before the project starts, and keeping that conversation going throughout, is what changes the outcome.
Whirling Wonder, Morgan's Wonderland
Across the industry, where do you most often see accessibility treated as an afterthought instead of a design requirement, and what problems does that create operationally?
My first encounter with accessibility in the theme park world was at a legacy site, built long before anyone was thinking seriously about it. That experience shaped a lot of how I approach the problem today.
The most obvious sign of a bolt-on solution is the exit boarding process. Guests who need accessible boarding are sent around the back, separated from their group, and then left to wait.
You might be sitting there for half an hour watching everybody get off the ride while you wait for your party to catch up to you.
Technically, they got on the ride. But the experience was completely different from everyone else's. Even when a queue has nothing going on, being pulled away from your group means missing the conversations, the build-up, the shared part of the day.
For parks working with older attractions, there are still practical steps worth taking. One is looking at whether a manufacturer can produce an additional accessible ride vehicle. At Morgan's Wonderland, the Whirling Wonder launched with one accessible gondola. We went back to the manufacturer and added a second one this year. A small change, but a meaningful one.
Queue space is another area worth examining. Most modern queue systems are modular, which means they can be reconfigured. Widening lanes so a wheelchair can pass through without needing a separate entrance is not a large project, but it removes one of the more visible signs that accessibility was not part of the original plan.
Ride rehab periods are also an underused opportunity. When an attraction goes offline for two or three months for maintenance and upgrades, that is a natural window to include accessibility improvements in the scope. It does not have to be a standalone project.
Retrofitting is always harder than getting it right from the start. But most parks have more options than they realise.
On a busy operating day, what does inclusion look like in practice, and where do parks struggle most to deliver a consistent experience for guests with different needs?
I love that question. I approach it by thinking about the full day from the guest's perspective. From the moment they arrive, what are they going to experience?
It starts before they even get to the park. For most guests, the first touchpoint is the website. That's where they're buying tickets or looking up information, so we try to give as much detail as possible around accessibility. For our 4D theatre, which is the only attraction you can't really observe before riding, we created a video so people can decide ahead of time whether it's right for them.
Then once guests arrive, we start removing barriers straight away. People with disabilities always get in free. Coming to a theme park can be expensive for a family, and that financial barrier is one of the first things we wanted to take off the table.
At the welcome centre, guests are greeted and asked if anyone in their group has a disability. They receive a wristband that covers ride access and a fast pass they can use once per attraction if waiting is a challenge for them.
From there, the physical environment does a lot of the work. Wide open space, flat terrain, pathways that are easy to navigate. Even in the playground area, the surfacing was carefully installed so it does not create problems for someone using a manual wheelchair.
But the biggest factor is culture. Everyone who works here goes through inclusion training, from frontline staff all the way up. They learn appropriate terminology, how to interact respectfully, and what actually helpful looks like in practice. That includes things like not grabbing someone's wheelchair and pushing it without being asked.
That training came directly from the disability community, from people with lived experience and from advocacy groups. So when a guest interacts with a staff member, they are meeting someone who understands how to make that interaction feel normal, not awkward or overly managed.
Consistency across all of that, from the website to the car park to every interaction throughout the day, is what inclusion actually looks like when it is working.
WingZ of Wonder - Morgan's Wonderland
Where else can technology help teams better understand and respond to the needs of different guests?
There are really two sides to this. The first is that we are a bit of an outlier when it comes to throughput. Most parks are focused on moving as many people through an attraction as possible in a given hour. We care about that too, but not at the expense of meeting guests where they are.
"Meeting everybody where they are is not always conducive to throughput, and that's OK with us."
That said, technology still plays a real role in improving the experience. Apps, wait time communication, reservation tools, these all help guests plan their day and reduce uncertainty before they arrive. We are also looking at how to expand our digital presence, particularly with our new hotel, where a lot of the guest journey will be facilitated by technology.
One area I find particularly valuable is helping guests understand what an experience will be like before they commit to it. Being able to see, hear, and get a sense of something ahead of time helps people make decisions that are right for them. That education piece matters more than people realise.
The other side is the attractions themselves. We do not have a large roller coaster, and a lot of that comes down to the fact that G-forces, heights, and drops are a genuine barrier for many of our guests. But we still had people asking for that kind of experience. So we worked with a partner to build a 4D theatre that simulates a coaster.
The important part was not just creating the experience, but how it was delivered. We challenged the team to build a wheelchair platform that a guest could roll onto without transferring, and where they would feel the same motion and effects as everyone else in the room. Not a separate version of the experience. The same one.
Looking ahead, there is real potential in the idea of customisable ride experiences. The same ride cycle delivering something more intense for one guest and something more suitable for another, without either of them noticing the difference.
Whether it is communication, pre-visit education, or the attractions themselves, technology gives us more ways to meet guests where they are.
4D Magic Cinema - Morgan's Wonderland
If every park operator could change one thing tomorrow to make their park more welcoming to all guests, what would you want them to focus on first?
If I were to focus on just one thing, it would be this: people with disabilities are just people.
Not guests with a disability first. People first. Just like everyone else coming through your gate, to your counter, onto your ride. They are there to have a fun day with their friends and family. That is it. That is all they want.
Some guests do need accommodations, and that is fine. But that is not the starting point. The starting point is that they are there to have fun, same as everyone else.
The second piece, particularly for leadership, is training. Disability awareness from the top down, so that everyone across the organisation is having the same conversations and knows how to interact in a way that feels normal and respectful.
Different roles will have their own specifics, but the baseline should be consistent. Everyone in the building should be just as glad to welcome a guest with a disability as they are to welcome any other guest walking through the turnstiles.
Looking ahead, what change do you think will have the biggest impact on making attractions more inclusive over the next decade?
There’s a two-fold answer to that. The first is a mindset shift, moving away from thinking purely about how many people you can move through an attraction in an hour, and starting to think about how you create experiences that work for everyone.
A lot of operators do not realise how large the disability travel market actually is. It is a multi-billion-dollar space. When you are not designing for that guest, you are not just missing one person. You are potentially losing entire groups, because the friends and family who would have come with them will choose somewhere else instead.
That cultural shift in how parks think about design and operations is probably the single biggest lever available right now.
The second part is technology. We are already seeing progress in ride systems, materials, and how attractions are built. Even small things, like the materials used on ride wheels, can change how a ride feels and how accessible it is for someone with different needs.
But technology only goes so far if the right people are not in the room early enough. Having someone at the table in those project conversations whose focus is accessibility and inclusion, in the same way you would have someone focused on throughput or creative design, changes what gets built.
That is part of what we do through the Institute. Being part of those conversations before decisions are locked in, not being brought in at the end to review what has already been decided.
The combination of that mindset shift and the evolution of technology is what will move the industry forward. Not one or the other. Both, working together, with inclusion built in from the start.
Final Thoughts
Inclusion is not a feature you add. It is a decision you make at the start and one you keep making as a park grows and changes.
The parks that get this right are talking to the right people early, building it into the design process, training their teams properly, and making sure someone in every project conversation is thinking about it.
A guest with a disability is not a special case, they are just a guest, there for the same reason as everyone else. When that becomes the default assumption rather than the exception, everything else tends to follow.
If you'd like to learn more about Morgan's, visit https://morgans.org/.
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