Demand ana­lysis and eco­nomic feas­ib­il­ity study for a new ice hall in Freiburg

The city of Freiburg im Bre­is­gau is plan­ning to build a new ice sta­dium to replace the old "Echte-Helden-Arena" which is only lim­ited oper­a­tional due to struc­tural reas­ons. In addi­tion to the DEL2 club EHC Freiburg (“Wölfe”), the hall is also used by other clubs and groups for mass and leis­ure sports as well as public ice skat­ing.

In order to define what a new ice rink in Freiburg can and must offer in order to cover local demands, PRO­PRO­JEKT was com­mis­sioned by the city of Freiburg to carry out a detailed demand ana­lysis fol­lowed by a feas­ib­il­ity study and eco­nomic ana­lysis.

Accord­ingly, the rel­ev­ant user groups were iden­ti­fied and their require­ments assessed - both for par­ti­cip­a­tion in DEL2 games and for pop­u­lar and leis­ure sports - and trans­ferred to a require­ments plan with recom­mend­a­tions for spec­tator capa­city, number of ice rinks, stand­ards and func­tions. This then served as the basis for the devel­op­ment of a space pro­gram for the new ice rink.

In the next step, sev­eral vari­ants of the new ice rink with dif­fer­ent sizes and con­struc­tion types were fur­ther tested and visu­al­ized by the experts from Albert Speer + Part­ner GmbH by schem­atic test plan­ning.

In order to assess the prof­it­ab­il­ity of the hall, both the costs (con­struc­tion, main­ten­ance, fin­an­cing, oper­a­tion) and the rev­enue poten­tial (e.g. naming rights, spon­sor­ing, tick­et­ing, hos­pit­al­ity, cater­ing) were determ­ined and com­pared in scen­arios.

In addi­tion, vari­ous imple­ment­a­tion and oper­ator models were expan­ded and eval­u­ated, dif­fer­ences between con­ven­tional and mod­u­lar con­struc­tion were high­lighted, and pos­sible expan­sion options were examined and eval­u­ated.