Lets say that on average they get an extra 300 people a night coming in and having dinner (I think this number is low)... lets say their profit margins on dinner in the park + some people buying alcohol is ~$15 per guest (again I think this is low... That's $4,500 a night or $1.6 million a year.
Ok, let's not even dispute your numbers.. just go with them. Let's assume a window of 4pm to 10pm. Labor pay starts at $17/hr.. even a very lightweight 33% cost on that, $22.61.. that means $135/head in labor for the shift. That's barebones. Now how many more positions are added? At least the 4 lands.. let's assume at least 3 heads on shift between rotation, breaks, spots, etc.. so at least 12. That's $1620. Now build in your margin.. you're not in business to break even.. Lets assume target of at least 45%... roughly 2350k. And this is all assuming it doesn't require keeping staff that they otherwise are reducing at the venues with the lower demand in this time period.
Now build in the cost to add the technology and maintain it.. and staff it. Even with these crayola level math.. you can see it's not chasing a lot of money.
Now you have all this OpEx money chasing a very small percentage of your actual revenue. That makes it high on the list of areas you trim when you need to find an extra 5-10% of savings some random quarter...
With your 300 new patrons, how much is that vs their normal turnover? Would they make even more money by simply limiting hours or scaling down during these later hours?
That's the crux here - adding money is an easy win - but what gets scrutinized and manipulated the most is your SPEND. If spend can't be linked to sufficient revenue, or worse, can be easily cut without affecting the core business.. it's always at risk. Their most attractive way to do things is to extra more money with the same OpEx (or less). inviting people into CP doesn't reduce OpEx.. it increases it. That means it starts behind the eightball.
With higher demand, maybe now they can open up more food/merch places inside Celestial park. Once capacity is high enough, you can open it up to the general public without APs... now you've created another city walk type environment, except it also is a free advertisement for EPIC universe.
The thing is, you need to actually create demand. And I'd argue what you have there is not worth adding how much in parking and time to visit when you are right there in the center of everything International Drive.
So to create demand they do what.. 'open up more food/merch'? That means spending millions to build it out, and run it, and then hope the patrons show up. Again, big spend to create demand - this isn't monetizing existing demand.
It boils down to - Would people come to CP as a free standing attraction? I can't imagine why anyone would on a recurring basis... and the people that would.. are going to be canabalized by your actual Epic ticket offers.
Maybe you could make it interesting by offering conversions.. Give people a CP pass/dining voucher in situations where you try to upsell them to an Epic ticket on-premise. But it still seems like a lot of sunk money to build out.. for a product the customer would need a lot of convincing to invest in.
Imagine a family of 5 taking their 8-16yr old kids to CP - and then having to tell them "sorry son, no you can't get on any of the rides.. we only came for dinner..."
Who is the target audience? The after 4pm Epcot WS crowd? I just don't think CP has enough gravity to pull it off.
I just think it's gotta be a tough sell unless you can show you can stuff the dining locations or bars -- and I don't know why anyone would go unless they were already there at Helios
Why would USO design the park this way and be actively working on the facial recognition tech if they didn't think it might be worth it?
Because the technologies could be used in different ways than this possibly?
