Holiday Lettings news - Lapland New Forest theme park closed

Lapland New Forest theme park closed

A Christmas theme park in Dorset has closed after just one week. Lapland New Forest was the subject of thousands of complaints to the county's trading standards department following its opening last Friday.

Visitors to Lapland New Forest are being turned away at the gates despite having paid up to £30 each for tickets. Families arriving at the Dorset attraction yesterday were met by a woman shouting "Santa's dead", according to reports in The Times.

Over 50,000 tickets to the Christmas theme park had already been sold and it is not known if disappointed visitors will be able to claim a refund. The site's management has advised people to keep checking their website for more information.

Those that were able to visit in the week it was open complained that the Lapland theme park did not live up to expectations. The ice rink had melted due to a broken generator and other attractions were of a poor standard. Anyone wanting to visit Santa's Grotto had to queue for up to four hours and was charged an extra £10 for photos once they made it inside.

The entrance to the site has now been coned off and the park's reindeer, husky dogs and donkeys have been taken away after contractors called in the police saying they had not been paid.

A source at the site said: "When staff turned up...they were turned away from the gate and told everything was being packed up. The donkeys and other animals were loaded into horseboxes and the fairground was taken down....It has been chaos."

Meanwhile, Lapland New Forest's director, Victor Mears, blamed the media for the site's closure: "With my deepest regret and sincerest apology I am left with no option but to announce that I am forced to close Lapland New Forest. This is due to intentional organised crowd manipulation and event sabotage during and since our first trading weekend.

"The unscrupulous and inaccurate negative bias of media broadcasts of both local and national press and television companies [has] contributed significantly to fuelling widespread public concern, frenzy and distraction....We are all deeply upset at the outrageous lies and slander we have endured."

Mears added that he hoped to pursue the matter to the "full extent of the law".

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