DirkFunk

Wow, they've spent hundreds of millions of dollars to construct the worst thing. That's incredible.

Tall, wide, or both?

Plenty of cities can and have sustained amusement parks. Opryland and Six Flags Astroworld actually made money after all and were demolished because of exceedingly bad decisions made by owners. Could Austin sustain a small park? Sure; El Paso, Lubbock, and Amarillo all support parks with smaller populations and less money if I just look at Texas. The thing is that it would be something closer to the amusement parks that get thrown into Traders Village locations in Texas with a mishmash of ARM/Larson rides than Kings Island. Anything else would be too expensive to build in this day and age.

Also keep in mind that admission was free until March 31st, the day of the Turkish local elections. Ah, yes, election day. When Erdogan gets an opportunity to review the ballots, I'm sure that the opening of the park will prove important in flipping the unofficial results that have the opposition party winning by 3-4 percentage points to the rightful winner. After all, how could all those people vote for the wrong guy if they were enjoying the 2,117 rides and attractions?

Pretty wild that a theme park that was the target of grift investigations and thought to be impossible to profit on wound up being the most successful opening in history. We can certainly trust this because President Erdogan is an exceptionally ethical individual with only the best in mind for his constituents and would certainly never have a regime that would demand false information being transmitted to the world at large for the purpose of elevating Turkey's stature. Just as all the thousands and thousands of people he has had imprisoned or executed were really trying to bring down the nation he is so single handedly capable of leading into the 21st century.

Lance Hart seems like a nice guy, but I can't stand his writing on Blooloop. It's pretty much always bad. Social media has an effect on killing water rides? Interesting logic jump. Seems like the more obvious possibility is that the rides removed are old.

Great thread. Question for you: I recall the guys from House of David in Benton Harbor, MI having a PTC train (or at least part of one) and talking about how they got blueprints from Little Amerricka yeeaaaaaaars ago when they were early into the process of rebuilding the park. Did you ever have any conversations with them?

Anyone want to buy a theme park? https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-03-14/dubai-developer-said-to-weigh-sale-of-largest-indoor-theme-park

Probably not because this is Europe and parks more often than not close early (like 6PM closings on Saturdays). Gardaland is a big park with a ton to do. Movieland is far less packed but you'll want to do everything, screen attractions included (not tons of em), because they're just bonkers. What screen things do they have? Terminator and Police Academy? I mean dude they have a Police Academy ride. With italian actor lookalikes to the people in the Police Academy series. This is real and exists in Italy in the same place with a knockoff Medieval Times and a knockoff Hard Rock. And the water park with the death slides that don't kill anyone because they don't put metal rings w/nets over them but just let them fly like 4 feet in the air!

It's closer to Maverick than Xcelerator, except the ending kinda sucks. Katun (the invert) is super good. TBH Gardaland is the "better park" but I find it sterile and kinda bleh compared to Mirabilandia and Moveland Park being filled with all the weird. Seriously, go to Movieland Park. The Knight Rider Jet Boat attraction is one of the greatest things ever.

If you want to drive 5 hours to Europa or 7ish to Tripsdrill/Skyline/Holiday Park, be my guest. You'll need to make sure the car is kosher to drive throughout the EU and buy a permit to use freeways in Switzerland and Austria each once you cross the respective borders. Personally if it was me, I'd go to Lake Garda for my parks and enjoy the fact that northern Italy is preposterously gorgeous. Maybe drive into Switzerland and Liechtenstein using local roads since that's the best driving in the entire world. LOL I wouldn't waste my time at Skyline vs. driving around multi-thousand foot cliffs and castles and s#it.

Isolating this. You paid a base rate of $387.40 a night for a two queen bed room on a Monday night in the absolute offest of offseason dates. I have to travel to Iowa this weekend, and I assure you having looked, there likely isn't a single hotel room in the entire state that costs $387.40 a night at base rate. Not even a presidential suite in Des Moines at the fanciest hotels in the city. That's more than my base rate for a two queen bed room last month on a weekend at Disney's Boardwalk.

Well, the closest good/big parks are probably the Lake Garda ones of Gardaland and Movieland Park. Otherwise, you could fly within Europe and go to Germany (Cologne is an obvious one with Phantasialand and Movie Park), Stuttgart (Tripsdrill, Holiday Park, and Skyline being closeish by), and Vienna (Prater) would probably be cheapest. Milan itself though is no hot spot.

So apparently IMG Worlds of Adventure got a bunch of really bad red carpeting everywhere for some reason? Any of the UAE people hear why or when?

Dollywood, Silver Dollar City, and Adventureland in Iowa would like to chat with you.

The things Cedar Point has been getting (and much of the chain, for that matter) have been fairly well rumored mongered about 2 years in advance. IIRC they slid in teaser slides of RMCs in the 2015 Winter Chill Out presentations.

It was a trend in the 70s. You ever see This is Spinal Tap? They play Magic Mountain (pre Six Flags) as one of the scenes (second billing to generic puppet show, of course)o. Milli Vanilli was caught lipsynching when their backing tape got stuck at Lake Compounce on space that's now the Boomerang. Most of the parks jettisoned the concerts by the 90s; why I have no idea, maybe security costs? Maybe value of the real estate? Darien Lake's is the only one that runs a real concert series of value.

Dude, I historically loved Universal Orlando more than WDW. But I haven't been back since they put in the metal detectors to get into Citywalk *and* on the coasters.

Yes and no. You have to understand that "Dueling Dragons being removed" isn't just about a park knocking down a ride. It goes much deeper than that and is a discussion a lot longer than I have the time for at the moment... What, are you saying that it isn't worth being stripsearched to ride a slightly better themed version of Cheetah Hunt?

Enthusiasts are spoiled because most chains at least try to have their new attractions which they market open with the park? Why open all your rides in the park? Tell people that if you come back in July, the other half of the park will be open that's not right now. That'll bring 'em back and sell passes. Don't be entitled and suggest this is a bad idea. Yeah, I mean it isn't like they report their earnings on a quarterly basis to shareholders and summer is considered a peak period of operation for them thanks to schools being out or anything. Why would they want to pop the attendance numbers then? It's only when their audience is available to come. Nothing important. Definitely a great idea to delay return on your investment as long as possible too. If I owned shares in SIX, I wouldn't at all be frustrated to see that revenue from their capital expenditures could only be properly marketed for the last 4-5 months of a fiscal and calendar year, especially when you've got like, I dunno, 60ish days in that entire span of time to be open and make money in the Chicagoland area? BTW: Orlando parks don't cost $100+ a day because they're necessarily better, they're $100+ a day because the market is distorted by Disney. Fun Spot one day wristbands are something like $50, and that place ain't at the level of a Cedar Fair or Six Flags park priced similarly.

That's important to know: at some point they can't turnover everyone forever of course, and the shortages will be more and more pronounced. Personally, I found it totally insane that the funnel cake place at SFMM had a line of at least 70-80 people at 1:45AM on a Saturday this past October. Even if half those people are season pass dining, the other half are paying $10+ for literally dough and sugar. However, keeping Tier 2 people is essential, and I'm sure that it's probably gone a long way to helping ensure they don't move to an actual restaurant or hotel to get paid a lot more. It probably has been, frankly - I think almost every park has made a trade off there except those that did something about it (shout out Adventureland Iowa and Herschend). Have they adequately analyzed that the loss of revenue is less than the cost of the staffing? The assumption most make is "of course they have, these are professionals," but that was also the rationale used in shielding Schlitterbahn from blame when Verruckt ripped that kid's head off ("They're professionals, of course it's safe!"). Six Flags is a whole different company now than what it was in the 90s when it was run into the ground at the executive level, but the park management types are pretty much all still there and entrenched in their ways from those earlier eras. Again, it went bankrupt. You don't go Chapter 11 unless there's catastrophic f'ups at all levels, so you can't assume that analysis was or has ever been done.

Super pumped the dark ride is coming back. I wonder if they'll be able to make some upgrades too?

I don't understand what is difficult to understand here. If your business model is built off volume sales, and the volume of customers decreases, the only way you aren't going to see a decrease in revenue is if the remaining customers increase their rate of consumption at a rate equal or greater than than the number of customers departing. If it's known that you aren't raising prices appreciably in order to spur exactly this kind of change on, then the only way you aren't going to see drops in revenue is if independently of everything your customers simply change behavior to spend more. That's a crap-ass bet to make.

There's definitely not a single reason for labor force participation on the whole to be declining (it is, FWIW), but in the case of younger people, the primary offset is school enrollment as the return on investment from education has grown appreciably since the 1980s. Even if the reason though was "Kids are lazy now and play these goddamned video games!", that doesn't matter. You'd need to find motivating factors at that point to move them into the work place for you. If the return on investment from education makes it tough for low skill positions to be filled, then what is the obvious counter that has to occur to bring the market back to a position of balance?

SV literally drew no one. Why can be speculated and argued at length, but them's be the facts. Mystic Timbers drew a lot of people. Gutting that building would be a total waste of that space IMO. Which of course is why I'm convinced at some point they'll do it.