We must make a list sometime of the original attractions at Disneyland. Then we should separate all the rides/attractions that an adult would have gone to completely on their own, without kids in tow. I think we will find that if Disney hadn't pushed the thought that adults can ride with the kids (family friendly) then Disneyland would currently be a ghost town. Certain things were pretty well defined in the 50's. One of them was proper social behavioral differences between children and adults. The kids had to be convinced that what was there was going to be fun for them. The parents had to be convinced that they wouldn't lose face and social standing enjoying themselves while in the company of the kids. The way to do that is to encourage parents to ride along with their kids. Exposure like that is what allowed later generations to be freer to enjoy something, on their own, that previously would have caused ridicule.
When you locate the pathway to that particular parallel universe where everyone likes the same things, please publish the road map. I'd kind of like to visit there. The only goal that they can possibly aim for is to provide enough different things that people can pick from to provide them with something interesting to do for everyone during the course of a day. However, the other goal is to stay as close as possible to not excluding either the child or the adult. When that stops happening then you will have lost what made the place special.
It is troublesome to some degree, but, everything has got to be factored in. I have said before and I will repeat... percentages mean absolutely nothing. It depends on where it started. For example, revenue wise what would be better 13% of 19,000,000 or 20 percent of 10,000,000? Everything has a ceiling someplace. If Mk is crowded now, what would happen if it continued at 13%? Just the numbers will automatically reduce the percentage if everything remained the same actual, count wise. The comparison (Uni) was much smaller to begin with and had a lot more room for growth. Percentages do not pay the bills, head counts do. It only represents a decline in percentage not in business. There has to be a place where it is not only unreasonable to expect the same percentage of growth and even where it becomes unwise to even try due to the inability to take care of the additional.
I agree, but, I wasn't talking about any particular time frame, the same statistics apply to any time frame you might want to come up with. It was not arguing the numbers, it was arguing the significance of the numbers in relation to what it actually tells us. I used your numbers as a base point, not to cherry pick them. I could have used any number and the same basic thought would have applied.
In a way, I wish that Uni would draw higher numbers, for this simple reason-if the leader in a certain market, whatever it may be, has a large percentage of the market, with no real competition, there is really nothing driving the market leader to continually improve. If the leader starts to lose market share, they realize that improvements must be made to widen the gap again. So, if the numbers at Uni started to increase at a steady rate, even if WDW numbers weren't going down, it would force the bean counters to realize that entertainment $ are being spent more and more at places other than WDW, and one would hope that this would lead to the conclusion that more time, effort and money must be spent in maintaining and growing all aspects of the parks & resorts. If you offer basically the same thing all the time, and you charge more for it every year, and people are still coming in droves, where is the incentive to improve?
Universal has gone from 14% market share in 2007 to 22.4% market share now. They are aiming at 40%-45%.
