Immersive experiences bubble up at Grapevine Mills From the cover
What you need to know
Opened with mall Attractions/former retail Parking Grapevine Mills
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Dig World, a construction-themed attraction, debuted at Katy Mills mall in 2022. In late 2024, o cials began scouting a second location. Grapevine Mills and Katy Mills are owned by Simon Property Group. Joe Szymaszek, Grapevine Mills general manager, got in touch with Dig World co-founder Alex Carroll, who grew up in Dallas, through the Simon connection. “I said, ‘We’ve got a site we’ve been saving for the right use,’” Szymaszek said. “When you get a chance to bring in something unique, that quickly escalates the process.” A 2.8-acre tract by Homewood Suites has remained empty since 1997. Szymaszek said the land had received inquiries for years. “We could’ve done a lot of things on this parcel, but it didn’t make sense for what we were trying to do at the mall,” he said. In early 2025, mall o cials announced Dig World would open in Grapevine. It is the third immersive destination, joining Meow Wolf and Bubble Planet, to open in the past four years.
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Attractions and year they opened
1 Rainforest Cafe: 1997 2 AMC Theatre: 1997 3 Sea Life Aquarium: 2011 4 Legoland Discovery Center: 2011
5 Round 1: 2016 6 The Escape Game: 2017 7 Fieldhouse USA: 2017 8 Peppa Pig World of Play: 2019
9 Meow Wolf: 2023 10 Bubble Planet: 2025 11 Dig World: 2026
SOURCE: GRAPEVINE MILLS COMMUNITY IMPACT
What they’re saying
“We continue to look for ways to keep us on the cutting edge of adding entertainment that you can’t nd elsewhere in the metroplex or really in a multistate radius.” JOE SZYMASZEK, GENERAL MANAGER AT GRAPEVINE MILLS
seal the deal. “People think malls are dead; we walked in here on a Saturday, and you’re shoulder-to-shoulder, and you have a two-hour wait for Rainforest Cafe,” Carroll said. According to city data, the mall averaged 707,726 visitors a month in 2025 and peaked with 1.15 million visitors in December.
Giacomarro said the partnership between Merlin Entertainment, which operates half of the immer- sive experiences at the mall, and Simon has been transformative. Carroll said when Dig World was searching for a new location, one of the rst targets was Frisco. He said the work of Simon, the city of Grapevine and Grapevine Economic Development helped
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