They artificially increased spending per guest this quarter by selling $200 lightsabers and $50 alcoholic beverages to the superfans that showed up. But they didn't spend millions to set up a virtual queue that they expected to only use for about eight hours total... they expected to need it for those revenue-driving crowds for the entire summer.
Not only that, but they say “Per Capita Spending” was up. What group of visitors spends the least per gate click? Annual Passport holders. What happens when the Annual Passport Holders don’t come? Naturally the per capita spending should rise. This may not even reflect increased spending on the part of most guests, but just reflect a different mix of guests visiting.
That’s a wee speculative, but I think it makes sense.
@ParentsOf4 would be able to comment further.
DHS is expected to come in at 1.1 billion. DLR is significantly over budget and incurred an insane $100,000,000 additional costs (approx) in demo of major portions of RotR and reinstallation of said portions (the inside of RotR currently is in full disarray). I don't have those numbers from any outside source that I can link you to, but other insiders can likely verify them.
You’re being generous with that number. What about their new fancy parking garage and the infrastructure investments? What about the work they’re doing at Disney California Adventure to “balance out” the two parks? It turns out they didn’t have anything to balance out.
Let’s be clear, this is a humiliation. While I’m still bullish on the potential of Galaxy’s Edge in the long run, the rollout of this land has been beyond abysmal. I didn’t expect this to happen. For the last four years I’ve been thinking that Star Wars was a sure thing. That this was going to be bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. Instead, we have attendance down. Star Wars made attendance go
DOWN. How many people, besides our resident trolls, were anticipating this? Who could have imagined that summer of last year would be bigger than this year?
The park has 20% more capacity and instead of making use of it, it’s emptier than it was before. This is mind boggling. I didn’t see this coming. Analysts didn’t see this coming. Disney didn’t see this coming.
How many of you plan vacations around when new stuff opens so you can avoid the crowds? It’s insane!
So no, this was NOT a good quarter. Analysts have every right to be wondering what happened to the mythical Star Wars Land that didn’t need advertising. This was not supposed to be a transition quarter, this was supposed to be a huge legacy moment for Iger. The narrative was the division formerly known as Walt Disney Park’s and Resorts would lead profit growth offsetting the high costs of launching the streaming service. That narrative has just been called into question.
Once again, I remain optimistic of the short to medium term. But I also think Disney better be doing some soul searching. This really was worrisome.
www.google.com
apple.news
