DirkFunk

Executives dictate to the parks and creative more than any other time in history what goes and what stays. That makes the futures of all these parks increasingly predictable. None of the people that talk (and plenty do) say anything about Dragons heading off to the scrap heap.

Not to derail this thread too far, but I'm really excited about getting rid of Chick-Fil-A if for no other reason than that there will now not be an abandoned building half the weekend next to what is possibly the park's best attraction. Love love love that move. (also still stoked about Valravn)

Are you kidding??? Magic Kingdom used to get so much grief because quick-serve was pretty much ALL they had for the longest time... - Casey's Corner - Columbia Harbor House - Cosmic Ray's - Gaston's Tavern - Pecos Bill - Village Haus - Sleepy Hollow - Friar's Nook - Lunching Pad - Tortuga Tavern And that doesn't even include many smaller kiosks or even Be Our Guest, which is also a quick-serve during the day, but harder to get into. I mean, with all that, Really??? You couldn't find quick-service food options in the park!?!??! What I've found is that people that may be unfamiliar with Disney's park structure and are more familiar with the Six Flags/Cedar Fair methodology can be intimidated, for lack of a better word, by Disney's indoor quick service counters. If someone finds the process of opening a door and entering a building too formal a step to procure chicken fingers, then all hope for them is lost. Disney ain't the problem.

And here is where I disagree the attendance is indicative of profit because I believe many of the season pass holders who frequent the park most often do not spend money in the park. I know families who will spend more in one day at a park than I will spend in 20 visits. Just look at how many times in this thread that frequent season pass holders tell people interested in SFGAdv to leave the park for lunch and eat at Wawa Everland is in the top 20 for attendance and lots of that is made of season pass holders. I do notice a lot of pass-holders (including whole families of my students who go almost every other weekend) tend to just go for a few hours grab a quick few rides and then leave without spending anything. The shuttle buses are always packed even in the evening with families showing up with season passes for a free night parade and fireworks show. You just described nearly all amusement and theme parks in the world, even Disneyland. Only the Orlando Disney parks are any different. The bolded is the difference here. A Busch Platinum Pass at the cheapest park in the chain is $200 USD. A Cedar Fair Platinum Pass is, last I checked, $209 USD. Disneyland annual pass w/no blackout dates is $779, I believe? Six Flags America gate price is $62.99. Their gold pass (includes parking, entry to all parks in chain, etc)? $66.99. Their quarterly reports over the last two years push that memberships (basically layaway season pass sales) and season pass sales are their primary points of growth in place of per cap spending (which has decreased). This is not some wild conspiracy theory.

And here is where I disagree the attendance is indicative of profit because I believe many of the season pass holders who frequent the park most often do not spend money in the park. I know families who will spend more in one day at a park than I will spend in 20 visits. Just look at how many times in this thread that frequent season pass holders tell people interested in SFGAdv to leave the park for lunch and eat at Wawa That's a great philosophical argument, I suppose. As far as actual pertinence to a company that is using season pass sales as their primary growth driver: http://investors.sixflags.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=61629&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2098324 ..it doesn't actually mean anything. Like I've said, I dunno, 10-15 times already, what you're talking about is the model everyone else is using, and what Six Flags is doing differentiates from that model significantly. I don't think it is particularly intelligent; you point out the fact that season pass holders don't necessarily spend more per visit, and that's true and also shows up in their model. But they seem to think that they have a better shot of showing revenue increases each year by selling more season passes and seeing those people return often and spend less (because that's precisely what happens) than by trying to sell a premium product at a premium price.

There have a ton of issues historically and presently which affect the brand image of Six Flags. Delaying opening of rides until 2-3 months of the season has passed is not something that positively affects this, I'm fairly certain of that.

They need to make season passes cheap because the buying public thinks Six Flags is crap and won't pay the kind of prices they will for comparable players in the market there. They'd do all of the exact same things with regards to increasing parking/food/merch prices and various in park upcharges even if the season passes weren't as cheap because increasing prices and creating new revenue streams with existing customers is how a mature industry like regional theme parks continues to show growth even when attendance is generally stagnant. If you need proof, look at everyone else. At some point, Six Flags will hit a ceiling on the number of season passes that they sell at present pricing and they'll need to start selling the same (or nearly the same) number for more money in order to establish revenue growth. TL;DR Six Flags isn't "subsidizing" season pass cost with high food prices. If they thought they could sell season passes for $200 instead of $75, they'd do it in a heart beat and still tag you for $17 for a hockey puck burger and fries. They can't though because the market won't bear the cost.

The pricing structure of their season passes is a huge problem. Also prices are roughly the same as 20 years ago (cheaper due to inflation) there are nowhere close to making up for it with their parking fee increases. The pricing structure exists because the assumed value of a day at Six Flags is negligible. Like I pointed out before: compared to the rest of the sector, all of those players have been looking to go the opposite direction as far as season pass pricing is concerned. You could buy over a decade of entry to SFMM for the cost of a single 2015 Disneyland annual pass. This wasn't always the case. Attendance is absolutely indicative of profit when your business plan is entirely centered around repeat business on cheap season passes spending money in park. Attendance dropped for years and was often severe; Worlds of Adventure and Six Flags America are the most glaring examples. I'd argue Astroworld is dead because of the poor planning and execution of their expansion plans at other parks, not because of any tremendous failings at that specific one. It just happened to be on real estate worth money and the management of the company at the time was desperate for cash flow to ward off an otherwise imminent bankruptcy. As we know now, that decision got shareholders to back Redzone and depose them, and the rest is history.

Six Flags went bankrupt because their attendance nose dived and the brand bordered on toxic. It wasn't some strange and unforeseen series of events that led to that. They ran their parks like crap and people stopped going. The park attendance has been rising every year since 2010. Thats more than half a decade, so please explain that to me. Six Flags Great Adventure claimed an attendance of 3.8 million people in 1999. In 2009, Six Flags Great Adventure ended the year claiming an attendance of 2.6 million. They lost 30% of their overall attendance in a decade. Yeah, as of 2014, they gained back 150,000 of that 1.2 million people that used to go. Even if extending the season with the new Holiday In The Park event gets them to 3 million, that's not even halfway to where they were in an era where the cost of a season pass, adjusted for inflation, was something like 30-40% higher than what it is now. You could say that Six Flags is still in the process of rebuilding their brand. You might also say that Six Flags has simply decided to take a different sector than everyone else in the market by intentionally running crummy parks that don't cost anything to get into. To put these numbers in perspective: Six Flags Great Adventure lost a number of guests during their operating season (while keeping prices stable or dropping them against inflation!) than total number of turnstile spins at Worlds Of Fun or Valleyfair.

Six Flags went bankrupt because their attendance nose dived and the brand bordered on toxic. It wasn't some strange and unforeseen series of events that led to that. They ran their parks like crap and people stopped going.

That is terrible rationale. Promoting a new ride that you know isn't going to be running is always, always a bad idea. Six Flags does it because they're are notoriously cheap. How is it being cheap? It very well could cost them the same amount to build either way. It might even cost them more to wait longer depending on the demands of the contractors. My assumption is that they pick up cheap employment from laborers laid off when winter arrives. That would explain the late starts in a lot of northern markets. OK, I understand your point now. But since the construction is contracted out work with a bid process, the contractors are the ones that would be saving money if they hire cheap labor. If I'm bidding on construction and I think I can use winter layoffs to my advantage, I can put in a bid for the work at a lower amount than my competition with the caveat that I start later. If that bid is going to anyone but Six Flags in this industry, chances are I'm not winning it because they're concerned with selling a quality product at a quality price. If that bid goes to Six Flags, they're not in that business. They've been selling a product of questionable and sometimes miserable quality for the same exact price for roughly 20 years (no lie, just compared season pass prices at SFGAdv and they're lower now than in '99 for top tier, SFA is only $2 more) to a stagnant/shrinking consumer base. They're gonna take low bidder and not care when the work gets done.

That is terrible rationale. Promoting a new ride that you know isn't going to be running is always, always a bad idea. Six Flags does it because they're are notoriously cheap. How is it being cheap? It very well could cost them the same amount to build either way. It might even cost them more to wait longer depending on the demands of the contractors. My assumption is that they pick up cheap employment from laborers laid off when winter arrives. That would explain the late starts in a lot of northern markets.

Since we're in a mode of writing things that sound condescending: Your understanding of the situation could best be characterized as weak, perhaps even outright incorrect. Obviously they spent more money than revenue was brought in. That's indisputable. But all companies, ALL COMPANIES, generally carry some sort of debt. Most individuals do as well. The issue wasn't merely that they spent borrowed money. The issue was that they weren't able to sustain any measure of growth from the significant increase of attendance those expansions brought about because they sucked at running amusement parks. If it is a smart policy with definite potential for bringing guests back in, then why isn't Cedar Fair (who's financials in the Ouimet era speak for themselves) copying it? Or SeaWorld? Or Herschend?

It says something then about Six Flags that it thinks its customer base is so dumb that they'll manage to fry themselves climbing up onto photovoltaic cells.

Take it up with park management then, despite what we say they don't care what enthusiast think for the most part. 95% of people on here disagree with what Six Flags does a majority of the time. But will Six Flags change their ways? No. The general public doesn't care or notice when rides should/shouldn't open. You don't think the general public notices? Six Flags went bankrupt in recent memory, shed most of its parks and ended up permanently closing two (nearly a third) either attempting to delay the inevitable or in the immediate wake of filing Chapter 11. They've presently returned to their prior strategy of giving away season passes to try and increase per cap spending but refined that previous failed strategy by matching it with a "don't spend much" approach based around ride rotation, flat ride construction, mass purchases, and heavily promoted ride rehabs. So yeah, I'm not terribly concerned about taking it up with management. I'm sure plenty have and will.

Their rationale is garbage (also I doubt that it is even accurate) and there's a reason no one else in the industry intends to seek to replicating it. And when you buy advertising time or space to promote a new ride in a timeframe in which you know full well there is no chance for it to be running, you are in a real sense promoting something that isn't going to operate in that time frame. They know that, and the purposely vague language is indicative of their general contempt for customers.

That is terrible rationale. Promoting a new ride that you know isn't going to be running is always, always a bad idea. Six Flags does it because they're are notoriously cheap.

The whims of real estate developers and politicians have played a role in many a park's demise, whether on public/private land belonging to someone else or not. There's significant benefits as to why some do it; no one can afford the kind of real estate Centreville or Victorian Gardens sit on, for example. Also saves on infrastructure costs, which are the barrier that will probably forever keep something like Bell's from going back up after Jerry Murphy ran them off in an attempt to score himself paydays.

Yeah, no joke. Marriott acquiring Starwood is great for me, probably bad for a lot of people there looking to hang on in the market. I look over at the Nickelodeon Suites and they're debranding as Nick and going to Holiday Inn because, let's be real, how easy is it to charge a premium when the city is awash in $100/nt hotel rooms?

Kinda surprising to see the firm owning the chain make any moves like this with GWL after it spent most of the decade losing money and nearly getting turned into a penny stock. They're gonna be in tough I think given the market.

Premier doesn't have that kind of money to spend. It is tremendously unlikely that Kieran Burke could go back to banks and ask for the kind of billions he did before when he went bankrupt the first time. CNL Lifestyle, OTOH, is basically a dumpster fire that Premier manages for them because the market for such managerial companies in the US is very, very, very limited and they do not nor ever will work to have that expertise themselves. They're a private equity firm. They don't do that.

Closing Astroworld directly led to Dan Snyder's takeover of the company and is, in retrospect, one of the single dumbest and worst moves in recent industry history. Only the closing of Opryland is dumber. Just remember that any idiot can run a company into the ground and liquidate assets for pennies. It doesn't take special training or know how.

I heard a pretty hilarious story about a coaster enthusiast going there, seeing the worst ride operations he'd ever seen, and that Dan Koch somehow determined what car he drove in to the park with and left a hand written "sorry" note on the windshield. So there's that. Honestly, for a lot of enthusiasts, there simply isn't reason to go to Alabama, which is probably why this is a dead thread.

In all seriousness, have you guys looked at camping?

Is that actually enforced though? I know a lot of chains are supposed to follow that policy, but on my trip down to KD and Carowinds last year my buddy and I had no issues and we're both between 18 and 21. Depends, basically. Consider internal rules about minimum age to reserve a hotel room to be basically equivalent to laws in any civilized society. There's a lot of laws, but they aren't always enforced. What it comes down to is how much of a risk you're willing to take that the rules won't have to apply to you on any given occasion like this.