I know plenty of folks on Twitter, including a few quoted in this thread, who remember what the parks were like in the 70s and 80s and simply want to hold Disney to the standards it once set for itself.
Really not all that different from a lot of posters here. Same message, just from different messengers on a different medium.
I don’t mind Disney making money.
I don’t mind Disney making
lots of money.
I mind Disney being stupid about how they do it.
What’s been most disappointing about Parks & Resorts (P&R) leadership of late is that, at WDW, they’ve abandoned a strategy that made them successful for decades and have let the latest trends from lean manufacturing and cost accounting dominate their thinking. In doing so, they’ve extracted details that made WDW great, the cumulative effect of which has been to cheapen the product. They’ve stripped it down to the bare essentials, letting a bunch of self-serving “surveys” justify cost-cutting decisions they’ve already made.
Meanwhile, prices have exploded like never before, all in an attempt to get gross margins back up to levels P&R consistently achieved decade after decade.
WDW leadership broke something a few years ago and no one left has any idea how to fix it.
In 1983, Disney had just opened a theme park at a cost greater than their annual revenue while simultaneously maintaining reasonable prices and an outstanding commitment to quality and service.
Despite this or perhaps even because of this, financial performance was better in 1983 than it is today, with Disney realizing a higher gross margin in its P&R segment;
19.1% in FY1983 vs.
15.8% in FY2013.
Back then, Disney had leadership that fully appreciated the theme park business and were committed to the ideas set forth by Walt Disney, not in using Walt’s name as an advertising slogan.
More recently, during what might be WDW’s peak era of financial performance, the years surrounding the 1998 opening of Disney’s Animal Kingdom when WDW expansion plateaued, P&R gross margin consistently ran around
23%.
WDW built and built and built throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and gross margins remained impressive. Yet in recent years with stagnating theme parks and declining quality at WDW, the P&R segment has performed at financial lows.
Today, P&R has a group of “leaders” with no passion for the theme parks and no vision of what to do with them. It’s a group more worried about the sizes of their annual compensation packages than in providing customers with outstanding experiences in order to grow business and earn those compensation packages. They are more worried about keeping their cushy jobs than in driving WDW towards both public praise and financial success.
Scale up WDW’s and DL’s sixfold increase in prices since 1983 and P&R is up to $6B in annual revenue with operating income of $1.2B overwhelmingly from ticket, food, and merchandise sales from just three theme parks.
The folks running P&R now have revenue flowing in from 2 more WDW theme parks, 2 water parks, shopping districts, over a dozen timeshares, tens-of-thousands of additional hotel rooms, Hong Kong Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and 4 cruise ships yet the best they can do is realize another $1B in operating income?
In Disney’s “horrible” year of 2002 when hotel occupancy was down to 76%, P&R gross margin was at
18.1%. Heck, it was at
16.5% as recently as 2008. P&R revenue is up 22.5% since 2008 driven overwhelmingly by higher prices while operating income is up only 17.0%.
Go back to 2008 and they had 1.0M empty hotel room nights domestically. In 2013, they had 2.2M.
They charge more for less yet still can’t achieve results from only a few years ago. They squeeze and squeeze and haven’t realized that “squeeze the customer” is not a long-term business strategy.
Those making the decisions impacting WDW today don’t understand how to make a theme park resort successful. All they know how to do is cut quality and raise prices. They pinch pennies rather than look for opportunities to realize sustainable growth. They play small ball instead of going for the big inning.
Oh, and offend J.K. Rowling so much that she took her product up the road where it was turned into the greatest theme park success story of the 21st Century.
They were handed a Golden Ticket to success and have squandered it on a rubber band.
Only those with their heads buried too far in their smart phones could have thought MagicBands represented the wave of the future. Only those clinging too tightly to their jobs would have failed to shout “Emperor’s New Clothes”.
Maybe they should examine their own corporate history and figure out what made WDW great in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, they might realize that success was based on what was happening inside the theme parks.
The Jetsons and Scooby. But it does bear the question, who owns them? I know they're on Cartoon Network/Boomerang. So...are they TW owned? Would they be up for sale along with the rest of the catalog? And where does Bugs Bunny fit in if at all since I know the Looney Tunes characters are WB owned?
