It's a small park: Hong Kong Disneyland faces overcrowding
By Keith Bradsher The New York Times
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2005
HONG KONG When Walt Disney Co. opened its Euro Disney theme park on the outskirts of Paris in 1992, the park struggled to attract enough visitors, and the ones who came spent less than expected.
The new Hong Kong Disneyland, which is scheduled to open to the public on Monday, faces a very different problem: too many guests, too many of whom clog rides while taking lots of photos of each other and clog restaurants ordering long, expensive meals.
A charity day on Sunday that was supposed to test the park's ability to run at near its capacity of 30,000 people turned into a fiasco of hourlong lines for rides, food shortages, inadequate parking and even the partial closing of a large area of the park because of overcrowding.
The English- and Chinese-language media here have been full of unfavorable coverage of the park's modest size, and the financial secretary of Hong Kong, Henry Tang, has publicly urged Disney to reconsider how many people the park could really hold.
"Of course we do not want to spoil the fun of the visitors by making them queue for a long time, or they may not be used to queuing for so long," Tang said this week. "That's why we are discussing with Disney to see if we could have flexible arrangements, like during certain days, when the number of people entering the park reaches a certain figure, they should not let the park become too crowded."
The criticism has clearly irked Disney.
Stopped during a tour of the park on Wednesday afternoon, a group of Disney executives interrupted each other repeatedly in expressing their indignation, albeit in the polite terms of a company that caters heavily to children and to adults with a fondness for childhood.
"To take one day where there were 30,000 people and say, 'Oh my gosh,' would be inappropriate," said Michael Mendenhall, the executive vice president for global marketing in Disney's parks and resorts division.
"The press has made it about size - it has never been about size," said Zenia Mucha, Disney's senior vice president for corporate communications.
The park here is considerably smaller than the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, or Euro Disney; this is part of a new strategy by Disney to try to open theme parks in phases, instead of trying to build an extensive park all at once, as was done in Paris and in Florida before that.
A second phase of construction is under discussion here between the Hong Kong government, which owns 57 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, and Walt Disney, which owns the rest.
The park was open again on Wednesday afternoon for what the company called a rehearsal day, with smaller crowds than Sunday. It was the latest of 17 test days before the park opens to the public on Monday.
The park's modest scale meant that it was possible to stroll at a leisurely pace from the end of Main Street past all the rides in Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland and back to Main Street in just 10 minutes - although that is without stopping along the way, something very few visitors are ever likely to do.
Hong Kong Disneyland has only one roller coaster, Space Mountain, and it is so tame that any children taller than 3 feet 4 inches, or 102 centimeters, are allowed to ride it. Most of the rides are gentle, like the spinning Mad Hatter Tea Cups or the Cinderella Carousel, following Disney research showing that mainland tourists in particular wanted a fairly tame experience.
Visitors seemed to have varying reactions on Wednesday to the park, with people from mainland China voicing greater enthusiasm than Hong Kong residents.
The mainland, with 1.3 billion people compared with the 6.9 million people in Hong Kong, is Disney's real target, and expectations there may be lower, especially as the fading vestiges of central planning have left Chinese citizens inured to long lines.
Wu He-yan, a 26-year-old woman who said she grew up on a farm in nearby Guangdong province but recently used the family's savings to open a small Internet café in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, toured the park after winning a free visit from the pull-tab of a Coca-Cola can.
Clutching a Minnie Mouse purse that she said she had been carrying for a full year, Wu waited in line for a quarter of an hour for the Jungle Cruise and said that she did not even consider Space Mountain because it might be too scary.
"Compared with Guangzhou, the lines here are very short," she said after watching the robotic zebras, elephants, gorillas, and other mechanical animals along the banks during the cruise.
Louie Kwan, a 30-year-old worker at a Hong Kong soy sauce factory, was less enthused as he fanned himself with a park map and waited with his wife, Wang Wei, in a long line to be photographed with Goofy and Pluto.
Kwan said that Disneyland was less interesting than Ocean Park, the local amusement park that has operated for two decades. The cars inside Space Mountain "just keep turning round and round but not going up and down, so it's not exciting," he said.
But the crowds here could prove profitable for Disney. Mendenhall said that visitors were staying twice as long in restaurants as did visitors to the company's American theme parks.
That is partly because the visitors here took more time eating, but also because they ordered more food. Tang said that in the past three weeks the company had added 20 mobile food carts and 600 more seats in dining areas in an attempt to meet the demand.
Disney made a point of trying to address local sensibilities here through steps like orienting the park along lines suggested by a feng shui master.
But the company kept a heavily American tone to most of the park, starting with the Main Street area, and this decision also seems to have been popular: the Main Street Corner Café had a 45-minute wait for a table at 2:15 on Wednesday afternoon, while the Plaza Inn Restaurant across the street, serving Chinese food, had a few empty tables.
Addressing the local penchant for taking myriad photos from every possible angle has been harder. One step has been to install another, stationary teacup next to the line for the Mad Hatter Tea Cups so that visitors can take photos while waiting, and not slow the loading and unloading process.
HONG KONG When Walt Disney Co. opened its Euro Disney theme park on the outskirts of Paris in 1992, the park struggled to attract enough visitors, and the ones who came spent less than expected.
The new Hong Kong Disneyland, which is scheduled to open to the public on Monday, faces a very different problem: too many guests, too many of whom clog rides while taking lots of photos of each other and clog restaurants ordering long, expensive meals.
A charity day on Sunday that was supposed to test the park's ability to run at near its capacity of 30,000 people turned into a fiasco of hourlong lines for rides, food shortages, inadequate parking and even the partial closing of a large area of the park because of overcrowding.
The English- and Chinese-language media here have been full of unfavorable coverage of the park's modest size, and the financial secretary of Hong Kong, Henry Tang, has publicly urged Disney to reconsider how many people the park could really hold.
"Of course we do not want to spoil the fun of the visitors by making them queue for a long time, or they may not be used to queuing for so long," Tang said this week. "That's why we are discussing with Disney to see if we could have flexible arrangements, like during certain days, when the number of people entering the park reaches a certain figure, they should not let the park become too crowded."
The criticism has clearly irked Disney.
Stopped during a tour of the park on Wednesday afternoon, a group of Disney executives interrupted each other repeatedly in expressing their indignation, albeit in the polite terms of a company that caters heavily to children and to adults with a fondness for childhood.
"To take one day where there were 30,000 people and say, 'Oh my gosh,' would be inappropriate," said Michael Mendenhall, the executive vice president for global marketing in Disney's parks and resorts division.
"The press has made it about size - it has never been about size," said Zenia Mucha, Disney's senior vice president for corporate communications.
The park here is considerably smaller than the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, or Euro Disney; this is part of a new strategy by Disney to try to open theme parks in phases, instead of trying to build an extensive park all at once, as was done in Paris and in Florida before that.
A second phase of construction is under discussion here between the Hong Kong government, which owns 57 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, and Walt Disney, which owns the rest.
The park was open again on Wednesday afternoon for what the company called a rehearsal day, with smaller crowds than Sunday. It was the latest of 17 test days before the park opens to the public on Monday.
The park's modest scale meant that it was possible to stroll at a leisurely pace from the end of Main Street past all the rides in Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland and back to Main Street in just 10 minutes - although that is without stopping along the way, something very few visitors are ever likely to do.
Hong Kong Disneyland has only one roller coaster, Space Mountain, and it is so tame that any children taller than 3 feet 4 inches, or 102 centimeters, are allowed to ride it. Most of the rides are gentle, like the spinning Mad Hatter Tea Cups or the Cinderella Carousel, following Disney research showing that mainland tourists in particular wanted a fairly tame experience.
Visitors seemed to have varying reactions on Wednesday to the park, with people from mainland China voicing greater enthusiasm than Hong Kong residents.
The mainland, with 1.3 billion people compared with the 6.9 million people in Hong Kong, is Disney's real target, and expectations there may be lower, especially as the fading vestiges of central planning have left Chinese citizens inured to long lines.
Wu He-yan, a 26-year-old woman who said she grew up on a farm in nearby Guangdong province but recently used the family's savings to open a small Internet café in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, toured the park after winning a free visit from the pull-tab of a Coca-Cola can.
Clutching a Minnie Mouse purse that she said she had been carrying for a full year, Wu waited in line for a quarter of an hour for the Jungle Cruise and said that she did not even consider Space Mountain because it might be too scary.
"Compared with Guangzhou, the lines here are very short," she said after watching the robotic zebras, elephants, gorillas, and other mechanical animals along the banks during the cruise.
Louie Kwan, a 30-year-old worker at a Hong Kong soy sauce factory, was less enthused as he fanned himself with a park map and waited with his wife, Wang Wei, in a long line to be photographed with Goofy and Pluto.
Kwan said that Disneyland was less interesting than Ocean Park, the local amusement park that has operated for two decades. The cars inside Space Mountain "just keep turning round and round but not going up and down, so it's not exciting," he said.
But the crowds here could prove profitable for Disney. Mendenhall said that visitors were staying twice as long in restaurants as did visitors to the company's American theme parks.
That is partly because the visitors here took more time eating, but also because they ordered more food. Tang said that in the past three weeks the company had added 20 mobile food carts and 600 more seats in dining areas in an attempt to meet the demand.
Disney made a point of trying to address local sensibilities here through steps like orienting the park along lines suggested by a feng shui master.
But the company kept a heavily American tone to most of the park, starting with the Main Street area, and this decision also seems to have been popular: the Main Street Corner Café had a 45-minute wait for a table at 2:15 on Wednesday afternoon, while the Plaza Inn Restaurant across the street, serving Chinese food, had a few empty tables.
Addressing the local penchant for taking myriad photos from every possible angle has been harder. One step has been to install another, stationary teacup next to the line for the Mad Hatter Tea Cups so that visitors can take photos while waiting, and not slow the loading and unloading process.
By Keith Bradsher The New York Times
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 8, 2005
HONG KONG When Walt Disney Co. opened its Euro Disney theme park on the outskirts of Paris in 1992, the park struggled to attract enough visitors, and the ones who came spent less than expected.
The new Hong Kong Disneyland, which is scheduled to open to the public on Monday, faces a very different problem: too many guests, too many of whom clog rides while taking lots of photos of each other and clog restaurants ordering long, expensive meals.
A charity day on Sunday that was supposed to test the park's ability to run at near its capacity of 30,000 people turned into a fiasco of hourlong lines for rides, food shortages, inadequate parking and even the partial closing of a large area of the park because of overcrowding.
The English- and Chinese-language media here have been full of unfavorable coverage of the park's modest size, and the financial secretary of Hong Kong, Henry Tang, has publicly urged Disney to reconsider how many people the park could really hold.
"Of course we do not want to spoil the fun of the visitors by making them queue for a long time, or they may not be used to queuing for so long," Tang said this week. "That's why we are discussing with Disney to see if we could have flexible arrangements, like during certain days, when the number of people entering the park reaches a certain figure, they should not let the park become too crowded."
The criticism has clearly irked Disney.
Stopped during a tour of the park on Wednesday afternoon, a group of Disney executives interrupted each other repeatedly in expressing their indignation, albeit in the polite terms of a company that caters heavily to children and to adults with a fondness for childhood.
"To take one day where there were 30,000 people and say, 'Oh my gosh,' would be inappropriate," said Michael Mendenhall, the executive vice president for global marketing in Disney's parks and resorts division.
"The press has made it about size - it has never been about size," said Zenia Mucha, Disney's senior vice president for corporate communications.
The park here is considerably smaller than the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, or Euro Disney; this is part of a new strategy by Disney to try to open theme parks in phases, instead of trying to build an extensive park all at once, as was done in Paris and in Florida before that.
A second phase of construction is under discussion here between the Hong Kong government, which owns 57 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, and Walt Disney, which owns the rest.
The park was open again on Wednesday afternoon for what the company called a rehearsal day, with smaller crowds than Sunday. It was the latest of 17 test days before the park opens to the public on Monday.
The park's modest scale meant that it was possible to stroll at a leisurely pace from the end of Main Street past all the rides in Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland and back to Main Street in just 10 minutes - although that is without stopping along the way, something very few visitors are ever likely to do.
Hong Kong Disneyland has only one roller coaster, Space Mountain, and it is so tame that any children taller than 3 feet 4 inches, or 102 centimeters, are allowed to ride it. Most of the rides are gentle, like the spinning Mad Hatter Tea Cups or the Cinderella Carousel, following Disney research showing that mainland tourists in particular wanted a fairly tame experience.
Visitors seemed to have varying reactions on Wednesday to the park, with people from mainland China voicing greater enthusiasm than Hong Kong residents.
The mainland, with 1.3 billion people compared with the 6.9 million people in Hong Kong, is Disney's real target, and expectations there may be lower, especially as the fading vestiges of central planning have left Chinese citizens inured to long lines.
Wu He-yan, a 26-year-old woman who said she grew up on a farm in nearby Guangdong province but recently used the family's savings to open a small Internet café in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, toured the park after winning a free visit from the pull-tab of a Coca-Cola can.
Clutching a Minnie Mouse purse that she said she had been carrying for a full year, Wu waited in line for a quarter of an hour for the Jungle Cruise and said that she did not even consider Space Mountain because it might be too scary.
"Compared with Guangzhou, the lines here are very short," she said after watching the robotic zebras, elephants, gorillas, and other mechanical animals along the banks during the cruise.
Louie Kwan, a 30-year-old worker at a Hong Kong soy sauce factory, was less enthused as he fanned himself with a park map and waited with his wife, Wang Wei, in a long line to be photographed with Goofy and Pluto.
Kwan said that Disneyland was less interesting than Ocean Park, the local amusement park that has operated for two decades. The cars inside Space Mountain "just keep turning round and round but not going up and down, so it's not exciting," he said.
But the crowds here could prove profitable for Disney. Mendenhall said that visitors were staying twice as long in restaurants as did visitors to the company's American theme parks.
That is partly because the visitors here took more time eating, but also because they ordered more food. Tang said that in the past three weeks the company had added 20 mobile food carts and 600 more seats in dining areas in an attempt to meet the demand.
Disney made a point of trying to address local sensibilities here through steps like orienting the park along lines suggested by a feng shui master.
But the company kept a heavily American tone to most of the park, starting with the Main Street area, and this decision also seems to have been popular: the Main Street Corner Café had a 45-minute wait for a table at 2:15 on Wednesday afternoon, while the Plaza Inn Restaurant across the street, serving Chinese food, had a few empty tables.
Addressing the local penchant for taking myriad photos from every possible angle has been harder. One step has been to install another, stationary teacup next to the line for the Mad Hatter Tea Cups so that visitors can take photos while waiting, and not slow the loading and unloading process.
HONG KONG When Walt Disney Co. opened its Euro Disney theme park on the outskirts of Paris in 1992, the park struggled to attract enough visitors, and the ones who came spent less than expected.
The new Hong Kong Disneyland, which is scheduled to open to the public on Monday, faces a very different problem: too many guests, too many of whom clog rides while taking lots of photos of each other and clog restaurants ordering long, expensive meals.
A charity day on Sunday that was supposed to test the park's ability to run at near its capacity of 30,000 people turned into a fiasco of hourlong lines for rides, food shortages, inadequate parking and even the partial closing of a large area of the park because of overcrowding.
The English- and Chinese-language media here have been full of unfavorable coverage of the park's modest size, and the financial secretary of Hong Kong, Henry Tang, has publicly urged Disney to reconsider how many people the park could really hold.
"Of course we do not want to spoil the fun of the visitors by making them queue for a long time, or they may not be used to queuing for so long," Tang said this week. "That's why we are discussing with Disney to see if we could have flexible arrangements, like during certain days, when the number of people entering the park reaches a certain figure, they should not let the park become too crowded."
The criticism has clearly irked Disney.
Stopped during a tour of the park on Wednesday afternoon, a group of Disney executives interrupted each other repeatedly in expressing their indignation, albeit in the polite terms of a company that caters heavily to children and to adults with a fondness for childhood.
"To take one day where there were 30,000 people and say, 'Oh my gosh,' would be inappropriate," said Michael Mendenhall, the executive vice president for global marketing in Disney's parks and resorts division.
"The press has made it about size - it has never been about size," said Zenia Mucha, Disney's senior vice president for corporate communications.
The park here is considerably smaller than the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, or Euro Disney; this is part of a new strategy by Disney to try to open theme parks in phases, instead of trying to build an extensive park all at once, as was done in Paris and in Florida before that.
A second phase of construction is under discussion here between the Hong Kong government, which owns 57 percent of Hong Kong Disneyland, and Walt Disney, which owns the rest.
The park was open again on Wednesday afternoon for what the company called a rehearsal day, with smaller crowds than Sunday. It was the latest of 17 test days before the park opens to the public on Monday.
The park's modest scale meant that it was possible to stroll at a leisurely pace from the end of Main Street past all the rides in Adventureland, Fantasyland and Tomorrowland and back to Main Street in just 10 minutes - although that is without stopping along the way, something very few visitors are ever likely to do.
Hong Kong Disneyland has only one roller coaster, Space Mountain, and it is so tame that any children taller than 3 feet 4 inches, or 102 centimeters, are allowed to ride it. Most of the rides are gentle, like the spinning Mad Hatter Tea Cups or the Cinderella Carousel, following Disney research showing that mainland tourists in particular wanted a fairly tame experience.
Visitors seemed to have varying reactions on Wednesday to the park, with people from mainland China voicing greater enthusiasm than Hong Kong residents.
The mainland, with 1.3 billion people compared with the 6.9 million people in Hong Kong, is Disney's real target, and expectations there may be lower, especially as the fading vestiges of central planning have left Chinese citizens inured to long lines.
Wu He-yan, a 26-year-old woman who said she grew up on a farm in nearby Guangdong province but recently used the family's savings to open a small Internet café in the provincial capital, Guangzhou, toured the park after winning a free visit from the pull-tab of a Coca-Cola can.
Clutching a Minnie Mouse purse that she said she had been carrying for a full year, Wu waited in line for a quarter of an hour for the Jungle Cruise and said that she did not even consider Space Mountain because it might be too scary.
"Compared with Guangzhou, the lines here are very short," she said after watching the robotic zebras, elephants, gorillas, and other mechanical animals along the banks during the cruise.
Louie Kwan, a 30-year-old worker at a Hong Kong soy sauce factory, was less enthused as he fanned himself with a park map and waited with his wife, Wang Wei, in a long line to be photographed with Goofy and Pluto.
Kwan said that Disneyland was less interesting than Ocean Park, the local amusement park that has operated for two decades. The cars inside Space Mountain "just keep turning round and round but not going up and down, so it's not exciting," he said.
But the crowds here could prove profitable for Disney. Mendenhall said that visitors were staying twice as long in restaurants as did visitors to the company's American theme parks.
That is partly because the visitors here took more time eating, but also because they ordered more food. Tang said that in the past three weeks the company had added 20 mobile food carts and 600 more seats in dining areas in an attempt to meet the demand.
Disney made a point of trying to address local sensibilities here through steps like orienting the park along lines suggested by a feng shui master.
But the company kept a heavily American tone to most of the park, starting with the Main Street area, and this decision also seems to have been popular: the Main Street Corner Café had a 45-minute wait for a table at 2:15 on Wednesday afternoon, while the Plaza Inn Restaurant across the street, serving Chinese food, had a few empty tables.
Addressing the local penchant for taking myriad photos from every possible angle has been harder. One step has been to install another, stationary teacup next to the line for the Mad Hatter Tea Cups so that visitors can take photos while waiting, and not slow the loading and unloading process.
