One of the benefits of being an employee at a wave pool with multiple locations is that you can work your way up to the destination of your choice. Lisa Groves was the customer service Queen Bee at URBNSURF Melbourne, maintaining the hive by checking in visitors, assisting with gear rentals, and providing a friendly face for the business. About a year ago, she began considering a move to Sydney. After some uncertainty and intense conversations with HR, she received the green light to relocate to URBNSURF Sydney just a few months before the park’s opening. Lisa quickly packed her bags, made the two-day drive, found a shared apartment and started her new role just five days after arriving in Australia’s most populous city.

How did you end up here?
I’ve moved up from Melbourne to help set everything up, assist with the training, and improve overall CX.

And what is CX?
CX is customer experience. So we look after the customers when they first come to the park. We’re checking them in for their sessions, helping them with hire gear, and just being the happy, fun, public-facing workers of the business.

Wait, you moved all the way from Melbourne to Sydney just to work here? That’s interesting.
Yeah, so I started looking at potentially moving up probably about a year ago after I did a trip to Sydney. I was like, ‘I love Sydney,’ and I knew that the wave park was coming, but there was a lot of questioning, like, when’s it gonna open? Is it opening soon? The opening date kept getting pushed back, and then I got comfortable in Melbourne again. I was like, nah, I don’t want to go. And then all of a sudden, it was December 2023 (editor’s note: the Sydney wave pool opened in May 2024). I had a rough conversation with HR about it, and then in January, they were like, ‘Yep, we’re happy to have you come up.’ So I moved into my shared apartment and then started on-site five days later.

Wow. Quite a whirlwind of activity. And were you in the same role in Melbourne?
Yes. I was a team leader in Melbourne, so I mainly dealt with rentals. But then I also did admissions and guest services. Guest services includes our ticketing, phone systems, emails, and phone calls.

What are the differences that you notice here between the two cities of Melbourne and Sydney?
I think our backdrops are a lot nicer. All the greenery with the trees is a lot nicer. We don’t see the airplanes. Melbourne’s got the airplanes all the time, and it’s in an industrial area. It seems like there’s a lot more greenery here in Sydney. It’s a more modern-looking area, rather than in Melbourne. We’ve also had more of a retro sort of look to Melbourne with all the shipping containers. Whereas here, it’s like a big, proper double-story building. It’s a lot more compact than Melbourne, so we don’t have as much space as Melbourne does, but it hasn’t affected the waves at all. People are still getting really long rides. The wave pool itself is the same as in Melbourne.

And then what about the customers? How do customers in the two cities differ?
Yeah, I think Melbourne people are a bit more on the chill side. So far, we have found that Sydney people are eager and excited to get in the pool. It’s like, ‘Come on, let’s speed up the process.’ So I feel like you get rushed a bit more with the Sydneysiders. I think that’s just because of the excitement coming through with them.

What is the most common thing that you help people with?
Just moving them around in sessions. A lot of people tend to overestimate their abilities and book themselves into harder wave settings than what they’re actually capable of doing. So we do a lot of downgrading of sessions because people will go out and then say, ‘Oh, this is a lot bigger than I expected.’ Then we’ve got to bring them down to an easier level so they can work up towards a higher setting. That’s probably the biggest request.

Give me an example of something you did this week that kind of stands out in your mind.
We had a customer—a family with two kids, gun surfers, about six and eight. They were a beautiful family to deal with, but they had a lot of issues with our system. For some reason, our waiver just didn’t want to work for them. So I grabbed my laptop, and we sat inside the park and went through it together, fixing up their whole situation. Their interaction with us was just really pleasant and super nice, and it was nice to have that time away from the hustle and bustle of check-in and be able to pull a customer to the side and say, ‘Okay, let’s fix this. Let’s sit down and work it all out, so next time you come back, there’s not a problem. You just walk straight through, okay?’

What advice would you give to someone to make their experience as smooth as possible here at URBNSURF Sydney?
Allow plenty of time. It’s a bit hard to find this place at the moment because online maps may send you in a different direction. So allow time to travel here, then allow time to check in. Sometimes, if they haven’t done their waiver beforehand, they’ve got to sit there and do the waiver, which is full of details they’ve got to fill in. And then there’s the stuff to get ready to surf. Don’t forget your bathers, don’t forget your towel, and don’t forget your wax. Have a little checklist of everything you need to bring. And yeah, just come and enjoy it. It’s a pretty cool experience. There aren’t many wave parks in the world where you can just book in and go surf.

And then wave settings. Do you have a favorite wave setting?
Well, it depends on what I’m doing. If I’m bodyboarding, I love it on the advanced turns. If I’m on my hybrid board, then I’m either on cruiser or a progressive turns session. Cruiser is like the fun, easy, chill one, and then progressive turns is like, okay, let’s try to push myself a little bit more.

And the wave itself, does it feel different from Melbourne?
It does. The take-off is steeper. That’s the biggest difference I’ve noticed: the take-offs are steeper. But on the cruiser wave, you can ride it from the circle dots up at the point all the way into shore on an open-face wave. Whereas in Melbourne, you’re angled more and heading into the rip. Here, if you know what you’re doing, you can get all the way in, which is why it feels like a longer ride than in Melbourne.