Thanks for that.
To be honest, I am still a little sceptical this market could support a Shanghai or WDW sized resort just based on how many international visitors it would need to attract to compete with the numbers those resorts bring in. Apparently Warner Bros. World on Yas Island attracted 1.8 million visitors in 2023, so maybe a Disney theme park could do reasonable multiples of that. I just struggle to see where the 10 million+ visitors would come from if you were trying for a larger resort and it makes me think a little of other international resorts that have struggled following very rosy projections about how many people would flock to a Disneyland just because it was a Disneyland. Hong Kong Disneyland, for example, reached 7.6 million at its peak despite being in the centre of a far more populous region and being virtually next-door to an airport that handles more than twice as many passengers a year than that of Abu Dhabi.
You obviously know the market much, much better than I do, so there quite probably are things I am not seeing!
Just from the GCC free movement area (citizens of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, and Kuwait, can work, live, and visit within the various member countries without hassle or permit, much like the EU) you've got a population bigger than the population of Spain and Portugal, most of whom have the money to be able to visit such a park. That's not including international visitors from within the wider Middle East, India, North Africa, and Europe. Or elsewhere. Right now do a lot of Americans go? No. But considering that between the two (or three, if you consider Dubai's new airport really operational yet) main airports in the UAE many American cities have direct flights to the country, it's not an impossibility. And certainly Europeans have even easier access than we do, while this will almost certainly grab the attention of every moderate to high wealth theme park fan in the world who will, or Disney hopes they will, plan a trip there unless they have ideological concerns. You add the Disney name and marketing on top of it, and there's no reason why a full-blown resort, with proper investment, couldn't have reached 10 million visitors a year. Would it have cannibalized Paris? Maybe a little, but Paris is also far more accessible to Western Europeans. This isn't a Brazil situation where heavy investment would have being a knife in the gut to a major market.
As for existing parks, most of them are size limited. Motiongate and other parks in Dubai proper have less of this as an issue, part of the reason why I truly believe Disney should have tried their hands at a more ambitious goal, but it is still important to consider. You don't see a lot of Western marketing for WB AD despite the fact that it is probably the only park in the regionbuilt with true Western theme park standards in mind. Arguably if they would have plopped that down in Orlando, it would have automatically have been a world-class park with five times as many visitors minimum as it gets now. But the UAE as a whole is still developing as a tourism destination, and most other parks are nowhere near as good. I have faith that WDI will actually make an effort here and not make it suck.
As for Hong Kong, well they have some very particular issues the UAE doesn't. For one thing, The tens of millions of people nearby have a far easier time getting to it, both in terms of physical access and paperwork, because Hong Kong requires all mainland Chinese to have extensive paperwork to visit. The UAE doesn't care. While it's not visa free for westerners yet (hopefully that does change), it is a free visa on arrival. Hong Kong gains a point here. They are legitimately visa-free, but for most people are in a terribly out of the way location to actually visit unless you're in the area. The fact that Hong Kong gets more people in through their airport, is less of a function of being able to say HKDL isn't doing well as a theme park, and more to say that they have a really good airport. And that's not even talking about the frequent closures, lack of investment for years, and general apathy in the Disney fandom for the resort, all of which have played a role in Hong Kong effectively being viewed as the red-headed stepchild of Disney resorts.
Another funny fact is that the local airport for AD has a US pre-clearance facility, the only one outside of North America. So Americans will be able to fly home as domestic passengers, saving them gigantic amounts of time compared to visiting, for example, Paris. Granted the US government has continually tried to expand the number of preclearance facilities internationally, but it has been slow going even under other administrations.Personally I hope they work towards Europe, Japan, and maybe Dubai, but who knows.
This deal makes some sense because Disney and Universal been looking at the Middle East for probably a solid 20 years as a future option, but the structure of the deal without Disney having an equity stake or full ownership, never mind the scale of the resort, leaves me scratching my head and wondering if Bob is chasing the bag rather than an investment that could pay off in 20 years with a resort that rivals Tokyo in terms of prestige and Orlando in terms of size. They could absolutely do it, they have the money, the land is cheap, and you have a line of skilled professional designers and project managers who will work on this project that have experienced working in the industry in the Middle East. Kind of crazy they don't actually, from the point of view of someone who is thinking long-term rather than short. The size constraints alone are going to wreak havoc on this investment long-term. Expanding out into the ocean will only get so far...
