Seasonal staff: your park's first loyalty program starts in October
One French park lifted its seasonal return rate from 10–20% to 45%. Parc Astérix keeps nearly half. What they changed, and four things to do before you close for winter.
In a few weeks most regional parks will lock the gates for winter. Attendance gets tallied, the Halloween props go back into storage, and you say goodbye to two hundred, four hundred or twenty-five hundred people you have just spent six months training. Then in January you launch a hiring campaign to find exactly the same number of hands. Most parks treat those as two separate jobs. They are one job, and the time to do it is now.
45% instead of 10 to 20
La Mer de Sable, a regional park north of Paris, hires about 200 seasonal workers a year. Its director, Antoine Lacarrière, has been frank that staffing was “very problematic” for a long time and that from 2023 the park had to “completely rethink” how it recruits. The outcome, reported by French trade outlet TourMaG in summer 2025, fits on one line: 45% of the previous year’s seasonal staff came back, against 10 to 20% before.
At Parc Astérix, which is opening 2,500 positions for the 2026 season, close to half of seasonal staff return from one year to the next. The park has a name for them, the “irréductibles” (the indomitable ones, straight from the comic books), and gives them priority rehiring. Its HR manager, Fathia Gueucier, said in 2025 that the park had seen no staff shortage outside a few hard-to-fill trades such as food service and maintenance.
One returner in two means half the recruiting effort, but that is the smaller benefit. The bigger one is a team that knows the procedures, the shortcuts and the regulars on opening day.
What guests see when the team is new
Lacarrière describes the cost of an unfilled position in concrete terms: too few operators means breaks that are poorly covered and technical teams pulled off their own work. From the guest’s side that reads as a ride opening late, a queue that crawls, a snack bar shut at 3 p.m.
Everything you invest in your guest experience score is delivered by people who are often young and arrived in April. A second-season operator knows how to calm a frightened child, spot a lost family, and explain a technical closure without reading from a card. A first-season operator will learn that in July, when you have the least time to teach it.
What they changed, in order
None of these parks found a trick. They worked through the reasons people don’t come back.
Pay first. La Mer de Sable raised wages 17% in two years. No recognition scheme makes up for a pay gap with the distribution center down the road.
Schedules. Parc Astérix moved to cycles of four days on, three days off. La Mer de Sable reorganized its restaurants to offer continuous shifts with no split: the long gap in the middle of the afternoon, far from home, is one of the first reasons food-service staff don’t sign up again.
The commute. Parks are rarely next to a train station, and a 19-year-old seasonal worker doesn’t always have a car. Astérix runs free shuttles from several regional stations; La Mer de Sable partnered with a carpooling platform. Less eye-catching than a bonus, and more often the thing that decides a second season.
The way in. Le PAL, in central France, hires its roughly 400 seasonal staff without résumés, from age 16, through games and role-play. Nigloland holds group interviews at a landmark spot inside the park, with department heads in the room. Someone picked for their smile rather than their diploma shows up with a different idea of what the job is.
Before you close: four moves
Next season is won in the last three weeks of this one.
One: the exit conversation, with a single useful question, “what would bring you back?”, asked by the area supervisor and not by a form. You will learn more about your rosters than in ten meetings.
Two: a dated offer. The people you want back should leave with a role and a start date in mind, not a “we’ll be in touch.” In France the law nudges employers that way: in the leisure and attractions sector, absent a specific agreement, a seasonal worker who has done the same season two years running is entitled to have the contract renewed when a matching job exists, and must be told so. Wherever you operate, check your own rules, then turn the obligation into a promise.
Three: a real step up for year two. A pay line, a lead role, training the newcomers, first pick of shifts. Coming back has to be worth something people can see.
Four: winter. A message in December, an invitation to the preview of next year’s new attraction, a referral bonus for bringing a friend. Five months of silence undo what six months of season built.
Show the team what it did
Then there is what a payslip can’t say: proof that the work mattered to someone. Reviews that mention a first name, read out at the morning briefing, do that. So do postcards. When guests write a card in your colors at the park exit, certain lines keep turning up: “the lady on the little train was lovely,” “thank you to Lucas, who found the teddy.” Pin them up in the break room. Read three aloud at the end-of-season party. A seasonal worker who sees themselves in a guest’s handwriting has one more reason to come back in April, and it costs you nothing.
Parks track guest return rates to the decimal. The staff return rate usually sits in a spreadsheet nobody opens until January. Work it out this week. It is the first loyalty number your park has, and the others depend on it.