If that be so, an investor should load up on DIS common stock at the present bargain price.
Ha. I am not providing stock market advice.
Agreed to some extent but you are missing the flip side of crowds - 4 hour waits for B and C ticket rides hurts your business in the long run too.
Every other major publicly owned theme park operator has reported declining attendance (from revenge travel highs) - every one.
Please someone correct me if I'm wrong but the "we want less people in the parks" mantra started well before Covid, all the way back to the implementation of date based tickets. At the quarterly call where they first discussed them, they said surveys showed that people were very frustrated with crowds and long waits and they had to do something to reduce and spread the crowds out or risk losing business.
Unfortunately, we have incomplete data - most importantly in this question - what is the baseline? Was UO not up as high during revenge travel and therefore dropped only 2% to a similar normalized level as WDW or is there truly that big a difference from the same starting point? And how do AP's play into it - UO was selling them (at some significant discounts) throughout while WDW suspended sales for what, a year or 2, and then increased prices. Point is, way too many variables to properly compare.
Can you post a link to this @wabbott ? Thanks!
ehhhh..yeah but they didnt have those. they very rarely had 4 hour waits on the brand new A tickets, and even 4 hours was rare.
As you once very accurately pointed out, with the present system, if attraction lines are minimal, Genie+/LL revenues decline. So there is a financial incentive to keep lines lengthy by whatever means necessary - outages, reduced staffing, running only one side of an attraction, etc. Surely they wouldn't do that, would they?
@gottalovepluto I was trying to figure out this 2% UOR figure you quoted. I am pretty sure the quote was actually that Sea World's attendance is down 2% across its 12 parks and that Comcast only stated lower attendance at UOR and didn't break out a %.
I can't say definitively if Disney or Universal does this but I 100% saw this at Busch Gardens over the weekend. The park wasn't crowded at all both days I went but they ran less ride vehicles and had less staff. Also more food locations were closed.
I mean, I was just exaggerating to make a point, I thought that would have been evident.
Of course there is a very simple solution to this. Increase capacity. Another gate, more attractions, more restaurants. Any business school worth its salt teaches this in Economics 101. Universal Orlando figured it out, surely DIS can.
Yep, that is the best of all answers but given Disney's track record of what, half a dozen years to build Tron, I would fear our 45 years of DVC will run out by the time they complete a 5th gate!!!
I agree. Raising prices to push people out isn't the answer either. There is a limit to how many can afford higher prices. IMO they are starting to get to that point.
Yup, looks like they just meant Sea World, confusing wording
Yup, looks like they just meant Sea World, confusing wording
Thanks Len! And just FYI, I had pulled out all the parks related comments from that call in our stock thread - https://www.disboards.com/threads/dis-shareholders-and-stock-info-only.3881254/post-65123054
And the year started out higher than 2022. So the July-Sept quarter must have been way down in Orlando. Just like Disney is expected to report on the 8th.
There was a thread started a couple of weeks ago about the phenomenon. One poster commented that he saw empty tables at two places. I don't recall seeing that, ever.
