DirkFunk

How much? You have my attention.

I should start a Google Doc with links to all this stuff from the past so that I don't have to repeat it. Rasulo pretty much said this verbatim about why MyMagic+ was developed instead of several hundred million dollars in new rides 3-4 years ago. Disneyland isn't Disney World, and increasing resort revenue there is a whole different game. Meanwhile, at WDW, "More hotels" = more DVC best anyone can tell. DVC makes money even when no one stays in it due to yearly fees and initial buy. He might also be referring to Flamingo Crossing, which isn't exactly anything game changing. Spending on infrastructure and capacity when the park is slammed with people is exactly the right thing to do. None of those things are "game changing" moves intended to push the needle significantly and alter the distribution of attendance. All of it combined is probably half the cost of MM+.

The population of Florida continues to grow very healthy and probably will for a long time, the world population continues to grow, emerging markets continue to grow (though the ones close to Florida, such as central America and Brazil, are in a big slump right now. They will recover eventually). It might not be worth it to build a new park right now but eventually it probably will be. I agree with you they should be cautious because what is the point they start cannibalizing their own business...but lets say in 2040 or something if they add another park and all 5 parks are busy all the time it would be hard to argue that they aren't making more money. I think the big challenge WDW faces isn't economics, its keeping everything fresh and up to date when there is so much there. Of course that's a whole other discussion. It isn't hard to argue that they aren't making more money. It is actually very easy. Unless a 5th park has a substantial effect on the number of nights stayed on property and has a proportional increase in ticket price for multi-day/multi-park tickets, the actual revenue to Walt Disney World doesn't change so much. The expenses to obtain that revenue do, though. Let's throw something else out there: regardless of how you feel about the TEA numbers, last year they looked like this: MK: 20,492,000 EPCOT: 11,798,000 DAK: 10,922,000 DHS: 10,828,000 It doesn't take an MBA to realize that the bottom two parks at WDW basically equal the attendance of the first park. So let's be clear here about what the situation at WDW is. Magic Kingdom is the draw. The other three parks are really overflow/dining zones. If you manage to build something at one of those that greatly increases attendance, it probably comes with an increase of attendance at Magic Kingdom because everyone still wants to go there. MK can barely handle more people than it got in 2015. This is the inherent purpose behind MyMagic+: Spend money to bring up guest satisfaction without causing attendance to increase so dramatically that the infrastructure is no longer capable of supporting it. The Disney superfans will tell you that increasing capacity with more rides is the solution, but that does nothing for the basic infrastructure deficits with the capacity of the monorail or bus system.

Magic Kingdom is doing generally fine, but when you're getting 20 million people through the turnstiles, a 5% decrease may not be immediately noticeable to you, but certain is to the folks who run Parks and Resorts. Their spiffed up version of the numbers for Q4 of the last fiscal year was a 4% "shifted" drop and 10% actual dip in attendance. In order to keep growth margins above 5%, how do you do that when people aren't going? You get the ones that do to spend more via increased hotel/ticket/food pricing and creating additional upcharges. Also - is a park like Studios still busy? Yeah. Any park that consists of 3-4 shows and 5 rides and has >5 million people going to it is going to be busy. Half the park is walled off. If 30,000 people show up, there's only so many places for them to go right now. People love scapegoats and they'll try to blame something. Listen: Eternal attendance growth that keeps profit above the margin for inflation is not realistically possible. There is a point where even Disney World will arrive at in which everyone in the market for their product already buys it. They might have gotten to peak theme park! It might be that no giant spending on a new theme park will increase margins.

That place is a totally confused smashing together of pre-existing hotels. A lot of money needs to be spent to make it not a disaster. If they don't have it, I don't know what they'll do.

Operating and maintaining the cabanas, along with staffing (part timers don't have access to the same sorts of plans as full timers, and who says full timers will maintain/operate them?) probably wouldn't cost more than $200K a year (assume 20K for startup/repairs, 4 full time $10/hr employees w/fringe rate of 40%, 6 college program kids @ $9/hr on 6 month contracts = 190320), and operating at 75% occupancy for 12 months, you're talking over $700K in direct income plus additional income from food/beverage purchases made in the cabanas. That's half a million dollars before you add in the other indirect spending. HAVING SAID THAT: This being tested at the exact same time as Express Bus Service (through backstage!), the Ice Cream Social Cruise, a new festival at EPCOT, and the Monorail Food Tour is not an accident. Attendance is dropping overall at the parks and they are trying to keep their revenue margin high by getting the people there to spend more money any way they can. There will be more and more and more special events to try and drive business. Is that necessarily bad? You make that call for yourself.

February, dates not released yet.

No one ever designed transfer track for it in the first place. Lot of structural work to do for a ride that is currently not the big draw. Maybe down the line?

Who says he bought it at IAAPA? Unless they specifically stated that, odds are good the purchase was made far before then.

There is zero possibility whatsoever the footprint is smaller. No one really knows what the cost is of maintaining one because one has not yet been built, much less 20. If Skyline can produce a significantly larger ride with much higher capacity at the same cost as Larson's smaller attraction, then there will be a line out the door from people buying them and we won't have to debate this. That being said, this ride wasn't on the market 3 years ago, much less this company.

I'm sure they are extremely upset that they didn't purchase a different, untested, likely more expensive and labor/space consuming product unavailable to the market at the time that they made their acquisitions.

We're talking about areas that are off limits and info that's coming from local authorities and TEMA. There's plenty of times where the media doesn't even bother to look at a wiki page, but it isn't like there's a 800 number to get straight talk from the fire about what it consumed.

Part of the issue here is that while there's millions of tourists to the area every year, the actual area involved (especially Gatlinburg) is far enough away from a major population center that it is difficult to do things like get aerial shots of the fires. Lots of power loss and have led to cell phone cameras being inoperable too.

Earthquake is probably the ride in real trouble.

This is extremely bad. The initial eyewitness reports for Gatlinburg are not good. as I typed this: EDIT AGAIN: Ober Gatlinburg at least is standing on the mountain from their facebook page.

MLS is definitely no great shakes, but it's also managed to survive for 23 years and easily beat the best days of the NASL. Unless interest in soccer completely goes away, the league isn't going anywhere.

In 7 years when most of this stuff is actually done. I do look forward to "Actually, I love screens and screen based attractions now" talk though.

It is something you'd see at Six Flags. Six Flags Great Adventure circa 2008, to be specific, when they were put on the old ride pad for Spin Meister. Lots of aspie Disney fans are clutching their Mickey hugboxes and complaining about class warfare. A) Disney Parks were designed from the ground up to keep poor people out. If you're upset now, its because you've become the riff raff you used to rail against. Feels good, huh? B) Disney isn't actually conspiring with some sort of elite banking illuminati group to please only them. ESPN subs are in the toilet and attendance was down or flat for all 4 quarters of the last Disney fiscal year. To keep profit margins high and attractive to investors, the only way to do that with falling attendance is to increase prices and create new revenue streams. This, like the ice cream social on the Riverboat for $49 and creating yet another EPCOT festival are all intended to increase passholder visits and per capita spending by all guests.

http://www.kshb.com/news/exclusive-independent-investigators-examine-verruckt-one-month-after-caleb-schwabs-death Schlitterbahn could settle for the max and you'd never find out.

Listen bro, the fun never stops. NEVER. Not even solar heat death can stop Ocean City, NJ fun.

Cedar Fair doesn't have a set percentage which is intended to be reinvested in any one specific thing. I don't disagree with what Superbatboy necessarily says from a structural point of view, but it is also important to recall that Cedar Fair operates a total of 5 hotels and 3 campgrounds compared to one hotel for Six Flags. Kinzel was in the mindset of never updating hotels and building rides, and he let those places go to hell. Thankfully that's not the case any more.

SF Memberships are an ill conceived idea. They should kill memberships and just offer the same pricing on passes just with payment plans like CF. They're an illconceived idea from a perspective of "what about 5 years from now?" Many executives with the company will be gone by then and have cashed in their shareholdings.

If Six Flags was planning to, at any point in the near future, increase pricing, they wouldn't have advertised the membership based season pass pricing by promoting "pay the same price for life!" Beyond 2018-2020, I'm not sure any real plan exists aside from "cash stock, disappear."

I don't think Disney ever plans to do massive renovations and expansions, they're forced into doing it because of market forces. US Parks attendance was down 10% in Q3 2016. The amount of constant cash expenditure required and the kind of business model EPCOT employs are somewhat unique, and truthfully, I'd suggest it is not a healthy one. They've exhausted the avenues they had, and now they're in a position where the amount of work that needs to be done has built up significantly over a period of many years. The cause is not the desire to spend $4 billion at once, it is an effect of not being able to find other parties willing to spend their money for Disney's attractions over an extended period.

Its garbage. Only uber Disney fans care because Walt probably thought of it in the middle of a wet dream or something like that. Pave it or put in a meet and greet IMO. Only problem is it took Trump getting elected to get people to start thinking my way.