PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
Uh, no it doesnt. You're overthinking it.
-
Welcome to the WDWMAGIC.COM Forums!
Please take a look around, and feel free to sign up and join the community.
A Spirited Perfect Ten
- Thread starter WDW1974
- Start date
Uh, no it doesnt. You're overthinking it.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
Attendance from 1992-2014. Epcot/DHS/DAK simply are not growing and certainly not at the rate of MK.
Though to be fair, MK was already slipping attendance wise before 2001 and didnt show its current growth curve until the travel parkets bounced back, 2004-ish.
Simply put, the all the parks were close in attendance 20 years ago. Now they're nowhere close to one another.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
And everyone can now blame @ParentsOf4 for my current chart addiction. And @KatieG for getting me looking at crowd data & attendance figures.
Bairstow
Well-Known Member
Nubs70
Well-Known Member
We need you to start getting into regressions, descriptive statistics and the like.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
For 20 years, the secondary parks haven't shown any attendance growth. They've hovered somewhere around 10M guests.
You'd think that for a resort that showed an overall attendance growth 74% in that time period, Epcot would do better than 14%. MK growth at 68% in those 20 years.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
This is beginning to feel a lot like Stringer Bell teaching Macroeconomics to his corner boys.
Bairstow
Well-Known Member
... you might, but it hasn't, because growing attendance at the second-tier parks is not one of the core objectives of Disney's strategy.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
What are Disney's core objectives then?
orky8
Well-Known Member
It's a decent analogy, but the problem is, to follow your analogy, people are still gobbling up Disney's "iPhone 4." (Actually, if you think about it, the last time any major addition was added to Epcot, DHS, or Animal Kingdom was before the original iPhone, even.) Unless and until people stop paying the increased ticket prices and/or stop going to WDW -- until WDW actually sees the profit drop, current management has shown little desire to update the product.
Mike S
Well-Known Member
Keeping those parks from stagnating should absolutely be part of their strategy. You cannot stuff most of your guests in Magic Kingdom. Give them real compelling reasons to go to your other parks as well. Expansions like Avatar, more Pixar, and Star Wars should've happened years ago. Not to mention the mess Epcot is in but that can be done in phases one at a time.
Bairstow
Well-Known Member
Beats me, I'd be surprised if it wasn't making as much money as possible for the least amount of investment, because they're doing a bang-up job of that.
They can, they have, and they will.
Travel Junkie
Well-Known Member
One of their core objectives is to keep guests on property their entire trip. The lack of growth in their other 3 parks and the rise of Universal has shown them struggling to achieve that goal.
BernardandBianca
Well-Known Member
I just picked your quote because it stated the concept the clearest. My question is: If I as an independent auditor am standing at the entrance to a park (any park) on property, how do I know if the person going through the turnstile is entering a park for the first time today, or if this is their second entrance into a park (either this same one or another one)? Without more, I have no way of knowing is this is a "first click" or not. So unless they are getting true attendance figures from the company (like OLC), everything they put out has to be a guess. Which is what I believe what they are saying when they state: AECOM obtains the figures used to create the TEA/AECOM Theme Index through a variety of sources, including statistics furnished directly by the operators, historical numbers, financial reports, the investment banking community and local tourism organizations, among others.
hopemax
Well-Known Member
I just didn't get around to it yet, but in a different context. For years we have heard about how Disney has failed to do what they intended...have a 2nd gate = 1st gate in attendance. Tokyo has pulled it off, but that's it. Universal has succeeded in doing it. That leaves Universal with much healthier parks, and a brighter future. WDW is in a bad situation because it leaves all 4 parks needing significant investment. MK to handle the crowds it gets, and the other three to try to improve their position. And it's not like anyone at WDW is going to look at the MK and say, "more attractions, better attractions, longer hours, more entertainment is what drives MK's success over the others,"...I think we're getting.."MK has characters, and character-based attractions so we need to put those everywhere."
Bingo. And each price increase at WDW furthers to drive people to the MK only. I don't think people want to give up going to WDW, but the economics force it. So people give up park hopping, and extra days (although the ticket price is not that much, the room rate/meals is the problem here) and are more frequently drawn to an MK only vacation. Especially among the day guests, and "not THAT into DIsney" crowd. MK is the beginning and the end of WDW.
Back to the Spirit
I am of the belief, that due to the changes in ticket structure and pricing, travel time, age of the children (younger kiddos that won't make it the full day needed, for successful park-hopping), that the amount of actual park hopping at WDW is overstated by fanbois and forum peeps. Therefore MK attendance is largely made up of "MK only" tickets. Either actual one day ticket's or 2 and 3 day tickets that are used only at the MK. I think of the people who do buy multi-day, park hoppers (probably mostly the UK contingent and their longer LOS) would chose MK and Epcot as their "place to hop to" is high but are such a small group, that they are statistically insignificant when compared to the much larger group of people who are visiting the MK, and the MK only.
At the other WDW parks, I think more people are visiting with longer multi-day tickets. There are less Epcot only (during non-Food & Wine times), AK only, or DHS only people, and with a lot less attendance, that anyone that does hop is statistically more important than at the MK. So people with park hoppers that start at DHS or AK, and then go to Epcot can tip the scale a little. I think the gap in attendance gives us a squinty eyed glance at the disparity of 1 or two day tickets (which get used at the MK) and longer multi-day tickets (more likely to have the time to visit the lesser parks).
This is different than at Universal, where I am likely to believe that due to the success of Harry Potter, and the easiness of the Hogwarts Express the primary ticket of choice is a "1 day park-to-park" ticket. Which means the de facto cost for a day at Universal is $147. You see this in the statements of the Universal execs when they talk about operating income being due to increased sales in "park to park" tickets and since that part was up 56%, I believe there are quite a lot of them. I don't believe people buy the 2 park and don't use it, so the Universal parks become much more susceptible to "first click." I expect to see as new attractions open, the attendance at both parks to ebb and flow Right now, USF gets them not only because of DA, but Transformers and Minion Mayhem, when Kong opens, it will probably tilt back IOA's way some.
When I wrote my other theme park geeks, I called the Hogwarts Express the real game changer, because it altered my perception of how to visit a theme park. I tend to view Universal more like a giant Epcot, with a WS and FW spread more apart. It's all one park, with some distance between the areas, but this convenient link between the two parks. So that makes the $147 justifiable because if you take the best of both parks, it's worth it. Way more than spending $90+ at DHS.
orky8
Well-Known Member
Agreed, and this, in my opinion, is when the whole house of cards could come undone. TDO's business model is based on the idea that you never leave their property - don't rent a car, don't eat off site, don't sleep offsite. If, however, Universal eventually becomes compelling enough for enough people, those people then rent a car. When the benefit of DME evaporates, one begins to then question Disney's room rates. And, once you are offsite, the value of the dining plan disappears, and instead of a trickle, Disney could see it losing large amounts of money quickly.
That said, we haven't seen this happen (yet, at least). And, on some level, I think many of Disney's guests are too dumb to connect these dots anyway.
hopemax
Well-Known Member
I don't see it that way. Without the train, I think people would have just bought 1 day, 1 park tickets and used them at USF not at IOA, which would have hurt IOA. Instead, the train exists, people bought hoppers, and thus entering IOA first did not preclude them from seeing the new stuff in USF.
Bairstow
Well-Known Member
The other three parks are growing, just not as quickly.
We don't have enough data to show what kind of visitation patterns guests who visit both Universal and Disney are following right now; whether they're staying on or off Disney property or at one of Universal's resorts for some or part of their stay or whatever.
What does seem apparent is that Disney is profiting from the Harry Potter expansion nearly as much as Universal is.
Perhaps this is why we haven't seen much in the way of new attractions out of Disney in the last couple years, other than the Fantasyland stuff:
Disney doesn't have to give their guests a reason to return to Orlando- Universal does it for them.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
Great question.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
Oh...... you're one of the "Disney is a business" crowd. Here and thought you were better than that.