So the part of all of this that still has me baffled is why on earth someone at TDO thought this event was even a good idea. Assuming you had 30 parties displaced for this, and assuming 2 adults and 2 kids per table (brace yourself, whole lot of assumptions in play here), you would have generated around $7000 in gross revenue that night, only to displace that guaranteed revenue with a hopefully full 60 person event at $499 each, around $30,000. That's if you can convince 60 people to pay that insane price. But even if you can, you don't walk out with $30K on the bottom line, as an event like this incurs higher food costs, higher labor costs, and higher beverage costs. With the sheer volume of money generated at WDW in a day, even doing the straight math of a $23,000 uptick in profit seems not really worth all the effort. And the other events drop to $249 per person, so that's only $15,000 per event. IF you have 60 guests at each one. The BOG is $399 per person. So even if they could sell 60 seats to each event, this whole event brings in around $160,000 total while cannibalizing revenue from the other venues. (ok, maybe not the tree farm so much....lol) I think the odds of these events selling out is low, meaning you stand to gain even less revenue from this little adventure. I know that someone somewhere in the vast TDO structure thinks that any new revenue is good revenue, but it seems like a lot of effort for little return. Between realistic attendance and cannibalizing sales from the host restaurants, this has the potential to put very little to the bottom line for Disney, which seems to be what they care most about these days.
