Honestly if DHS refreshed Indy and replaced Mermaid, BatB, and Frozen with good shows, it would be a very good park. If they replaced Launch Bay with something meaningful it would be a great park.
Honestly, and I say this as not the biggest Chapek fan, he may actually be the right CEO for this situation. We'll see what happens as time goes by if there is significant cutback, lack of expansion, etc, but I think what he did with Q2 is nothing short of impressive. For anyone who says that it was accounting trucks and cheats didn't read the financial report. Operationally, they made a small profit. The losses they experienced were due to a write down. That's probably the only accounting trick that was really there, and that's one that made them appear weaker in the short term because it made it look like a $5 billion dollar loss, but in a long one will help them with their tax situation next year. Your predictions may prove out in the long term or they may not, we will see, but judging just on the situation we had in March April and May, and what the results were yesterday, it's about the best they could have possibly done and it will help them survive this. Whether they return to more normal levels after this is over is an open question, and you may be proven right in the long term, but we will see.
Absolutely not. When this first started I thought of v-shaped recovery might be possible. If I made April it was clear that it wasn't going to be. Hypothetically, let's say there is a vaccine by January and most people are inoculated by April. Obviously that's a rosie scenario, but it's one being talked about right now by Fauci and others. In that situation, I think there will be a modest recovery that looks like the start of a v, just by virtue of the fact that all the restrictions are gone. But then it will probably plateau for a while, maybe years, before it starts to climb again. But who knows, it's impossible to predict as we have never been in this situation before. But no, I don't believe in the v-shaped recovery.
The other factor to consider is the possibility of a bailout of the US tourism industry by the government. There had been talks of a $4,000 tax credit, some recent talks of a government rebate to the businesses themselves to lower their prices, etc In order to stimulate tourism. We can't count that possibility out and have no idea what the effect of that will be.
All this is to say but there are way too many variables and way too much unknown for anyone, myself included, to have a crystal ball and to see what will happen in 3 months time, 6 months time, 1 years time, 3 years time. We're dealing with a crisis that the modern world has never experienced before. Even with the Spanish flu, it was a completely different beast because our cultures and economies were not so intertwined. it's going to take a long time to see how this ultimately shakes out, and a lot will depend on how quickly we can resolve the covet situation and get back to some sort of normal, assuming that we can resolve it.
All of this is scary. I do agree that the reservation system is a nightmare. So so broken.