Is attendance really down at WDW this or…

S

Splash4eva

Well-Known Member
celluloid said:
I don't have the exact numbers(they always fluctuate a bit as I will explain later) but I can see if I still have the DRC training information, which is where it comes from. It did include Swann and Dolphin but did not include DVC, as those are not booked by the Walt Disney Travel company(DRC)

There are far more hotels a healthy occupancy around 192(even though it looks like parts of it died, its better than it was ten years ago) and International Drive between Disney and Universal guests is thriving out the wahzoo and has been healthy for decades. There is a reason so many still survive. Between drivable distance and offsite guests, its definitely far more people not staying on WDW property.


The Parking lots, although some do drive their cars while staying onsite to the parks, can give you a great indication too. Even if two of every fifty cars came from a family or couple staying onsite. Way more drive from off property.


The easiest one is perhaps this. If the theme parks could be supported by just the Disney property hotels in general, then they would have made it a requirement to go.

The basic breakdown would be this. 30,000 hotel rooms is around where WDW is at. It is always flucating for various reasons such as rennovations, emergencies..etc..

take that number and times it by 4. The typical occupancy. Then divide it by 4 since there are four theme parks and you are back with the same number you multiplied the 30,000 by, which is 120,000 people.

30,000 people in each Walt Disney World Theme park would be busy, but not capacity. Let's add a few thousand people for good measure and the large parties that are staying five a room in suites.
Even if everyone went into those parks and stayed at the exact same time it would not hit capacity.

It is all hypothetical and extremely unlikely they could ever get them all full, but even if they magically could, the parks would still have room for day guests and offsite guests.
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How can DVC not be included as a Disney guest? They are literally staying on property at a Disney resort. Either way still doesnt answer the question with any sense of guestimate.
 
J

jpeden

Well-Known Member
In the Parks
No
flynnibus said:
Ppl keep recycling this comment… yet forget to mention how targeted the over 30% discounts are.

Eta: plus disney was telling the market MONTHS ago outlook was soft.
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The discounts keep expanding. They have slowly been trickling rooms into availability for the fall and winter discounts (which tells you people aren’t biting at the categories they currently have on offer) I’ve been watching like a hawk as we are looking for a specific room at a specific hotel for our trip. When we first booked the only thing that worked for us was AKL with the discount. In the past weeks rooms have been made available at:

Contemporary
Bay Lake Tower
Grand Floridian
Boardwalk
Old Key West

And they aren’t getting booked based on the trends I’m seeing in the availability (at least for our week).

And let me clarify - the rooms we want ARE available, they just haven’t added it to the discount list yet. When you look at what’s on offer across the resort for the fall and winter it’s more than I’ve ever seen, especially in this Disney booked DVC rooms (which tend to be the most expensive). A number of one and two bedrooms throughout the fall which normally are extremely hard to come by on cash.
 
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Jrb1979

Jrb1979

Well-Known Member
flynnibus said:
I don't know why you bring that up... lower hotel capacity would also be a justifiable reason to say park attendance is down by constraints.

But beyond you using wrong words... I don't know what you are trying to say.



Unprecedented? I'll point you to the word 'hyperbolic'. Do you need someone to post to you the historic trends of Summer to the thread so you can quote that too?

Yeah, it's amazing they haven't hired you yet... dumbfounding.
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Yes Summer has been trending down the past few years. It doesn't drop this much in one year. Yes it's a combination of things but as I said earlier at the end of the day it's not good news for the Mouse.
 
flynnibus

flynnibus

Premium Member
jpeden said:
The discounts keep expanding.
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The 35-40% ones? The ones that previously were only for FL residents? Or the AP one at 35%? or the Disney Visa one that is 35%, but excluded 4th of July dates? Yet keep getting tossed around like the entire resort is discounted all summer at these rates?

The Visa one is the most widely available of course, but the 35% rate is key deluxes with some moderates thrown in. (moderates which had largely had their rates jumped by the skyliner).

I just take issue with the repeated parroting of inflated facts. Parading around like the resort is at 40% off and still can't sell rooms isn't accurate. Nor is preaching this is 'unprecedented'. Room-only discounts are the bread and butter of Disney's discount model. I think the bigger element is the values and moderates moving up in the discount tree. 35% off some of these ridiculous rates are still ridiculous rates.

Disney bringing back the dining plan and finally bringing back the room promos shows the 'unprecedented' demand had finally cooled and Disney was back to having to try to encourage bookings in the periods it needs to. But Disney isn't at a fire sale level yet.


Personally I think the Pandemic was simply the blip that finally pierced Disney's invincibility shield. The break in patterns meant the addicted finally stepped away and did other things and survived without Disney annual or 2-3 a year visits. That opened them up reacting to all the negative things that had been building.

The issues had been building all along, but many simply wouldn't give up the teet. But with the Pandemic, patterns were broken. Then we had the inflation and struggling job sectors that punished late 2022... and what do we have now? Soft attendance 6+months later. Shouldn't be all that suprising.

The question is more about how Disney reacts... will they just monkey with the discount handle forever? Will they address the services/perks side that has cooled many down? Will they try to make the parks more attractive with new additions?

Personally I think they have so much pent up negativity against them it's going to take a sustained change and more public apologies to try to change the long term trend.

Do you see the next upcoming generation so hooked on Disney they will follow Disney blindly? I think they have already peaked.
 
T

TQQQ

Well-Known Member
I think all the price increases along with the removal of the free perks are catching up to them. I went in April and the additional cost of genie+ and ILLs was staggering for my family of 5 and it was the most expensive trip I’ve ever been on. We are leaving for Hawaii this week and my 13 day trip to Hawaii is less expensive than my 1 week trip to WDW. Once people realize they can likely go anywhere else in the world for less money than a Disney trip, it’s a big eye opener.
 
J

jpeden

Well-Known Member
In the Parks
No
flynnibus said:
The 35-40% ones? The ones that previously were only for FL residents? Or the AP one at 35%? or the Disney Visa one that is 35%, but excluded 4th of July dates? Yet keep getting tossed around like the entire resort is discounted all summer at these rates?

The Visa one is the most widely available of course, but the 35% rate is key deluxes with some moderates thrown in. (moderates which had largely had their rates jumped by the skyliner).

I just take issue with the repeated parroting of inflated facts. Parading around like the resort is at 40% off and still can't sell rooms isn't accurate. Nor is preaching this is 'unprecedented'. Room-only discounts are the bread and butter of Disney's discount model. I think the bigger element is the values and moderates moving up in the discount tree. 35% off some of these ridiculous rates are still ridiculous rates.

Disney bringing back the dining plan and finally bringing back the room promos shows the 'unprecedented' demand had finally cooled and Disney was back to having to try to encourage bookings in the periods it needs to. But Disney isn't at a fire sale level yet.


Personally I think the Pandemic was simply the blip that finally pierced Disney's invincibility shield. The break in patterns meant the addicted finally stepped away and did other things and survived without Disney annual or 2-3 a year visits. That opened them up reacting to all the negative things that had been building.

The issues had been building all along, but many simply wouldn't give up the teet. But with the Pandemic, patterns were broken. Then we had the inflation and struggling job sectors that punished late 2022... and what do we have now? Soft attendance 6+months later. Shouldn't be all that suprising.

The question is more about how Disney reacts... will they just monkey with the discount handle forever? Will they address the services/perks side that has cooled many down? Will they try to make the parks more attractive with new additions?

Personally I think they have so much pent up negativity against them it's going to take a sustained change and more public apologies to try to change the long term trend.

Do you see the next upcoming generation so hooked on Disney they will follow Disney blindly? I think they have already peaked.
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No I’m referring to the fall and winter discounts - the 35% levels keep expanding and they keep adding room types/resorts based on my monitoring of the week we are going in November.
 
CastAStone

CastAStone

5th gate? Just build a new resort Bob.
GhostHost1000 said:
You think hotel capacity isn’t down as well? This was posted here the other day in case you missed it

View attachment 730358


Also you’re correct, Disney has all sorts of data on us. They just don’t use it, model and view it the right way, or make decisions based on it to improve things
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This specific thing is because they used to take most of these rooms a week out and sell them for pennies on the dollar on Priceline and Hot Wire blind deals. They don’t do that really anymore, so availability stays on the WDW site.

It is 1000% accurate to say attendance is down. But that’s not the technical driver of most resorts being available day of, which was frequently true before.
 
CastAStone

CastAStone

5th gate? Just build a new resort Bob.
GhostHost1000 said:
I don’t think they’ll be much different but we’ll see. They aren’t exact numbers anyways so it could be skewed (like wait times) not sure. When epic opens that’ll be interesting to see how that factors in somewhere
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We don’t need the TEA numbers to tell us what is happening with Disney attendance, they publish it in their 10-Qs and 10-Ks
 
MadderAdder

MadderAdder

Well-Known Member
jpeden said:
No I’m referring to the fall and winter discounts - the 35% levels keep expanding and they keep adding room types/resorts based on my monitoring of the week we are going in November.
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The room I wanted wasn’t available when the discount was released but after like 3 weeks I rechecked and it was available. 🤠

Late October. All Stars.
 
CastAStone

CastAStone

5th gate? Just build a new resort Bob.
CastAStone said:
We don’t need the TEA numbers to tell us what is happening with Disney attendance, they publish it in their 10-Qs and 10-Ks
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Here’s the most recent one.
IMG_0653.jpeg
 
JoeCamel

JoeCamel

Well-Known Member
JoeCamel said:
I think many found the enforced hiatus from the obligatory Disney visit to do pretty much the same thing over and over found new horizons that are in different areas. The addiction cycle broken

Long live the king the king is dead.....
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flynnibus said:
Personally I think the Pandemic was simply the blip that finally pierced Disney's invincibility shield. The break in patterns meant the addicted finally stepped away and did other things and survived without Disney annual or 2-3 a year visits. That opened them up reacting to all the negative things that had been building.

The issues had been building all along, but many simply wouldn't give up the teet. But with the Pandemic, patterns were broken. Then we had the inflation and struggling job sectors that punished late 2022... and what do we have now? Soft attendance 6+months later. Shouldn't be all that suprising.
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Synergy!!! :hilarious:
 
Vegas Disney Fan

Vegas Disney Fan

Well-Known Member
flynnibus said:
Do you see the next upcoming generation so hooked on Disney they will follow Disney blindly? I think they have already peaked.
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This is the type of question that should keep the executives up at night, unfortunately with no Disneys (or private owners) involved anymore I doubt anyone cares, the current executives only care about today, they’ll be gone and it’ll be someone else‘s problem.
 
GhostHost1000

GhostHost1000

Premium Member
Vegas Disney Fan said:
This is the type of question that should keep the executives up at night, unfortunately with no Disneys (or private owners) involved anymore I doubt anyone cares, the current executives only care about today, they’ll be gone and it’ll be someone else‘s problem.
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I’m afraid all they think about right now is how can I get the stock price up and make shareholders happy tomorrow. Not the park guests tomorrow or long term
 

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