PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
Wrong resort.
Plus the wonders of life pavilion makes far too much money per square foot as a pavilion center twice a year then it does as any other function…
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The Spirited Back Nine ...
- Thread starter WDW1974
- Start date
Wrong resort.
Plus the wonders of life pavilion makes far too much money per square foot as a pavilion center twice a year then it does as any other function…
Mike S
Well-Known Member
To be fair, you didn't specify the resort. You just said "nothing ever comes back"
On WoL, if Inside Out is a big success which I'm sure it will be I doubt Disney would make more money with it as a festival center rather than having it open 365 days a year and tied to Pixar. How much money do they make off of it exactly during each festival? Any kind of ballpark figure?
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
To be fair, you didn't specify the resort. You just said "nothing ever comes back"
On WoL, if Inside Out is a big success which I'm sure it will be I doubt Disney would make more money with it as a festival center rather than having it open 365 days a year and tied to Pixar. How much money do they make off of it exactly during each festival? Any kind of ballpark figure?
Disney have zero interest in doing anything with the former WOL space beyond what they're currently doing with it.
The Empress Lilly
Well-Known Member
Except that this is the usual nonsense.
Captain EO, Horizons, Disneyland subs, Electrical Parade etc etc. Everything comes back, from rides to parades to shows to movies.
Smiddimizer
Well-Known Member
To be fair, you didn't specify the resort. You just said "nothing ever comes back"
On WoL, if Inside Out is a big success which I'm sure it will be I doubt Disney would make more money with it as a festival center rather than having it open 365 days a year and tied to Pixar. How much money do they make off of it exactly during each festival? Any kind of ballpark figure?
I don't think there's enough "human anatomy" theme left in the building to justify salvaging it.
Smiddimizer
Well-Known Member
Except that this is the usual nonsense.
Captain EO, Horizons, Disneyland subs, Electrical Parade etc etc. Everything comes back, from rides to parades to shows to movies.
Horizons? Heh, that'll be the day
The Empress Lilly
Well-Known Member
Yes sadly, WDW seems to have been understood to be mature investment for too long by Disney.I suggest you to be very careful when using inflation calculators. Except for a few consumer goods, they rarely portray an accurate representation of the true cost of inflation.
When Disney opened the Magic Kingdom in 1971, it wasn't only building a theme park. It was constructing an entire infrastructure including draining & clearing swamp land, building a monorail, 2 hotels, roads, and utilities. Do you really think that anyone could do that today for $2.3B?
Meanwhile, that $400M in 1971 represented 230% of the entire company's revenue for that year. Roy Disney was serious about investing in Orlando, and he drove the company to its limits to do so.
Conversely, the $2B being spent at WDW represents less than 5% of the company's revenue in 2014.
Stated differently, the $2B being spent over the next 6 years at WDW represents less than one-third of the $6.5B spent on stock buybacks in 2014 alone.
The company has priorities and Orlando is not one of them.
Corporate Disney is investing nothing more than the bare minimum to fix 2 theme parks that have been allowed to languish for over a decade.
But is it meaningful to compare the initial WDW investment to company size of 1971 with today's situation? Apple computers once invested 250% of their entire company's revenue on a single computer in the 70s, but surely it would be absurd to spend hundreds or even tens of billions for a iPhone in the 2010s?
The Empress Lilly
Well-Known Member
If only! Or at least a New Horizons, or something that is to Horizons as Horizons was to CoP. We can dream!
Horizons was brought back from the dead during the nineties, resurrected like a zombie boss.
Travel Junkie
Well-Known Member
The challenge with adding a limited number of attractions to an existing theme park is that those attractions tend to draw more Guests than they have capacity for. Let's look at Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (SDMT).
touringplans.com estimates that SDMT has an average hourly capacity of between 1500-to-1600 riders per hour. At 1600/hour, that translates into 22,400 riders in a 14-hour day (9-to-11).
The Magic Kingdom's (MK) average daily attendance is over 50K, leaving most Guests frustrated at not being able to ride SDMT.
Meanwhile, the MK's attendance is up about 5%, translating into an extra 2500 Guests. Guests don't ride a single attraction and leave; they ride multiple attractions. Assuming a relatively modest 10 rides per day at MK, that works out to 25,000 extra riders.
Attractions such as the SDMT and Frozen meet-and-greets add capacity but they often fail to keep up with increased demand.
The same phenomenon could happen at Disney's Animal Kingdom (DAK) and Disney's Hollywood Studios (DHS) as new lands are added. New attractions will draw more Guests, almost certainly making the parks feel more crowded.
A goal of the upcoming additions at these 2 parks is to turn them into full-day parks. Even if total gate clicks increases modestly, these parks will feel more crowded throughout the day since people will stay at them longer.
Crowd levels are the single biggest source of customer dissatisfaction. In order to keep people coming, Disney needs to keep people happy. Disney needs to find ways to make the parks feel less crowded, not more crowded.
Disney needs to increase WDW capacity in a meaningful way in order to relieve some of the strain at the current theme parks, while also adding capacity for future growth, growth that will result in increased revenue and profit.
A fully-realized 5th WDW theme park will add significant Guest capacity to support at least an additional 10 million gate clicks annually. New lands at DAK and DHS are not going to do that.
Yes, DAK and DHS need new lands.
However, by the middle of the next decade, WDW will need a 5th theme park.
Until WDW does the following things and still has capacity issues, you won’t convince me that it needs a 5th gate:
- Fill the other parks with experiences people want to see. With 4 parks, people usually think they need a week to see them all. However with a lack of quality experiences in 3 of the 4 parks, people end up at MK. As other’s have said MK is really the only park suffering from overcrowding. DCA 2.0 relieved a lot of pressure from DL out in California. Think of what a proper DHS and AK could do for MK? Disperse the crowds among the 4 parks in a more equal fashion and the urge for adding a 5th gate dissipates. A very interesting number I would like to see is the number of unique visitors each park gets per year and time in each park per visit. How many week long visitors are spending a week at WDW, but only spending a few hours at DHS and AK, a day at Epcot and 3-4 days at MK?
- Add more distractions to the parks. Especially with the addition of FP+ you have more people wandering the pathways. Anyone who thinks there is an adequate number of entertainment options in any of the WDW parks sans Epcot has not been to DLR or TDR. There are many underutilized spaces like the Diamond Horseshoe itching to host a nice show which adds capacity and gives more variety to the park.
WDW has proven that they can not adequately maintain and update 4 parks. How would they be any different with 5? I actually think that if WDW had it to do over again they wouldn’t even build a 4th gate. Instead of building AK, if they properly built out the other 3 parks, the resort would be in better shape than it is today. More is not always better.
danlb_2000
Premium Member
Captain EO.
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
*blocked*
Disneyhead'71
Well-Known Member
Never mind
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Soarin' Over Pgh
Well-Known Member
Sorry I cut your post to bits but these two are important.
The first... Exactly. In addition to being busier than ever (in terms of capacity) but now you also have a lot less in lines, so they're left wandering about. Or, they have reservations for dumbo at 1:00 and haunted mansion at 1:30 and they're dashing across the park to get to their destination. I don't think what we are seeing, with crowds being large (in more ways than one) is going to go away any time soon. The more people "reserve from their couch" the less line they are being held captive in, the MORE reason Disney should have to add more entertainment to the parks. Even street entertainment. Anything to hold the crowds attention (preferably off a main walkway, though) and hold them in place, allowing others to flow around. Fast pass plus is/was Disney's chance to try something new, but they need to maintain the massive amount of guests and keep them entertained, not aggravated, in the walkways and open spaces while they are waiting in line, or waiting for their reservation times, etc. They're failing to do this.
Ok, whew. The second part. I agree with you that they already have four parks and one is being kept well (compared to the other three, at least) and it'll be years at ths point until we see some serious construction wrapping up in those three parks. Disney, again, has to keep people entertained and even more so while half of the park is under construction. I don't think its an easy problem to solve at ths point. They should have started construction on DHS, Epcot and DAK years ago, to add more to the parks, flesh them out, and make their per-day numbers better than they are. Instead they've cut rides, cut entertainment, added fast pass plus to rides in these parks with precious few rides to begin with (and really, no need for fast pass or fp+) and have created their own nightmare that they are now facing.
Adding a 5th park is a good idea, number wise, and Parentsof4's long, detailed posts regarding this are spot on, but I'm not convinced that right now it's what they need to be focusing on. They have three parks, two of which are under going some surgery, one directly affecting guests, the other, eh, not so much, and one park who is being held up on booze and food. The two under the knife are in desperate need, and have been, but it's taken them so long to work out the details that the construction time will greatly affect their number$, both capacity and how much people spend in the parks.
The dog only has four legs and standing on one and a half just isn't working, the dog needs to rest that leg and lean on the others for a while.
However, it doesn't seem to make much sense to have one fully realized park (yeah, I know, it needs more, etc etc) and three incomplete parks, only to add a fifth park and let it languish with the others for who knows how long.
GoofGoof
Premium Member
In some ways the problem of less entertainment and less "distractions" comes from the commando touring mentality. I agree that WDW has encouraged this mentality with FP+ and reservations but it's also partially the guest's mentality coming in. For example, there are plenty of non-ride things to do at AK. Probably enough to fill a whole day. But you hear people constantly saying its a half day park because it only has 6 rides. For some people, rides are what counts. People arrive at rope drop and run from ride to ride ignoring the environment around them and then when they are done all 6 rides it's 1PM and they leave the park. Later they complain the park is only a half day park without enough things to do to fill a whole day. Unfortunately it seems this mentality has won out over the people who like to go and take their time exploring the parks. MK is the one park that has enough rides to support the commando style. If you went from ride to ride without stopping it would actually still be hard to hit every ride in a single day. If you want to stop and enjoy some of the smaller entertainment and distractions plus parades and fireworks you really need 2 full days.
I think the blame is shared between the guests themselves and Disney.
I think the blame is shared between the guests themselves and Disney.
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
Small attractions add capacity without significantly boosting attendance. That is what is needed throughout Central Florida. A fifth gate doesn't increase people's time in the area and would still require such smaller experiences.
Different interior layout.
the.dreamfinder
Well-Known Member
PhotoDave219
Well-Known Member
Like this
Now imagine all that wide open spaces filled with strollers & ECVs
CDavid
Well-Known Member
A higher capacity monorail is simply a monorail which carries more passengers. Am I missing something (probably obvious) with your question?
Longer trains could, in theory, operate out of the existing stations with no modifications, although the idea becomes far, far more practical and efficient even if you do nothing but lengthen the platforms - which in turn further increases the total number of passengers you can move. The Walt Disney World monorail design makes openings between cars impractical, so the way you operate trains which are longer than the station platform is by either spotting the train twice at each station (the front cars load, monorail pulls forward to load the rear cars) or else where all cars do not stop (open) at every station (for instance, only cars 1-6 are spotted and doors open at the Polynesian; Only cars 4-9 open at the Grand Floridian, etc.).
I get your point, but among the exceptions, I don't think anyone has mentioned the Tiki Room yet.
Except that this is the usual nonsense.
Captain EO, Horizons, Disneyland subs, Electrical Parade etc etc. Everything comes back, from rides to parades to shows to movies.
Wait a minute - hold everything!!! Horizons is coming back ?!?
Please don't play with our emotions like that. Please...
lazyboy97o
Well-Known Member
No, not like that. Such trains would not fit the current stations or clearances. But just removing the division within each car would increase capacity.Like this
Cesar R M
Well-Known Member
I wonder, they do not allow to have interconnected monorail cars?
Instead of having separate cars having connected by a flexible tunnel and make the thing have more cars!.
the monorail stops right in the middle and the people then spread out.
the current monorails at WDW look REALLY INEFFICIENT due of their way they are built and shaped.