xstech25

I don't think one earnings miss is that big of a deal (especially when its analyst estimates and not company estimates). However you say the business model has been in place for decades I want to point out that the season pass price right now is the same that it was back when I bought my season pass in like 1995. That's 20 years with the same price. Many people are literally paying the same amount of money at Six Flags parks in 2016 that they did in 1995. And a lot of the parks didn't have water parks back then. While flashpass and VIP tours were not around back then, and food wasn't as expensive, SF should have been able to add these things and raise season pass price like every other company has done. I'm not complaining, I am an equal opportunity consumer of theme park experiences, i'm just pointing out the obvious. Prices of ride parts go up, labor and medical costs go up, prices of supplies go up. SF has had to make up for it by going all Spirit Airlines and it's very obvious (and annoying) seeing commercials and advertisements all over the place. I will also add I don't think their management at the corporate level now is as bone headed as it was back in 2000-2006. That really started the cycle I think they still suffer from today. This should not be necessary for a park to increase profits IMO.

If you have a big theme park with 10+ coasters and water park, are the only amusement park in the whole market of 6 million people, and you are selling season passes for $60 a person...you might have a problem with your business model. Not saying a business with low gate price and a million upsells can't be profitable (Spirit is usually one of the most profitable airlines), but it is an extremely risky way to run a business because your customers are hooked on price. Once the price of season passes goes up people will stop buying, waiting for the deal. They really have to upsell the dining plans, Flash Passes, and whatever else because there is no way they are making money from people buying season passes and just going there and hanging out.

IMO Dragons doesn't have any place in the park and just looks bizarre. It kills the immersion of the area when you get off of the Hogwarts Express to see a random B&M instead of...you know, Harry Potter stuff. A Potter expansion into that spot would make sense. Although I agree it was a great ride back in the days of Lost Continent when it had the cool queue and it dueled. In other news http://www.orlandosentinel.com/business/brinkmann-on-business/os-universal-orlando-theme-parks-20161031-story.html Allegedly Universal put restrictions on the land when they first sold it that it would not be used for new tourist attractions, they re-bought the land back during the recession, and the developer they sold it to/bought it from and still owns parcels of it is saying the restrictions are still in place. Obviously the residents and commissioners have shown they are very pro-development in that area, something tells me he's looking for a payout.

I think it's possible that they didn't announce it earlier in the year with everything because of Valravn. When Cedar Fair made all their announcements there were still a lot of people who hadn't ridden Valravn and were likely to go before the end of the season, however if they announce a major new coaster this subset of people will hold off their trip until next year. It seems silly but I know of parks that have done this before. If they decided to hold off on all of the announcements in the chain until after the season the parks couldn't do their end of the year "buy a season pass for next year" deal. Its a business and every dollar counts. Sounds like a conspiracy but I know someone who works in Revenue Management at WDW and his whole job is to figure stuff like this out and run each scenario through a bunch of models to see which one yields the highest return...so I promise i'm not crazy

No Superman was made to run 3 trains and they got 3 trains when they built the ride, but like several other big coasters in the SF family (X, Kingda Ka) they chose not to run full capacity anymore probably due to budgetary reasons. The maintenance team probably had that train in the shed because they were putting it back together.

There has been lots of research done on this and studies show that engaging a "hater" is generally a waste of time and is what they want you to do in the first place. You're pretty much being sucked into a hole where no one is a winner and both parties end up looking bad. However I also don't think it's smart to flat out ignore all criticism, if there are potential high value customers that are giving feedback there might be something to it (though you know your business better than anyone else and is up to you to decide). However it's definitely not worth engaging with people who are just criticizing and flat out don't know what they are talking about. Either way you need to be careful how you spend your time, anyone whose seen the movie Jerry Macguire knows that

I wonder if this is the same ride at Motiongate Dubai.

Remember this was originally announced to be at Raging Bull. Major props are due to whoever it was that had the stones to stand up to the boss and tell him he had a very bad idea.

So many things wrong in that statement, especially with the Ragin Cajun notion of 'saved it to when they were going to get something like the Joker". My statement may not be exactly right but it is mostly right, there has definitely been an agenda for things they want to get rid of and has been for awhile. There is constant focus on ROI when it comes to rides that are at the park because no matter what they build they won't push past that 2.5-3 million mark. They have a hard enough time maintaining and operating everything and I think SF's current management has realized that hiring more full time maintenance staff and taking on even more projects isn't worth the added cost, hence all of the removals the past decade.

I am pretty sure it has more to do with what they want to take out. SFGAm didn't need to take out anything to build some of their new rides, but they made it obvious they wanted to, as adding more without taking anything out would add to the cost of operating the park. A lot of things have been removed over the past decade. Corporate probably told them they were going to get the justice league ride and the parks management decided where they want to put it...they had been wanting to get rid of the Southwest Theater for awhile so put it there. I would imagine it was similar with Ragin Cajun when corporate said SFA needs a new coaster SFGAm gladly gave up Cajun and saved it for when they were going to get something like the Joker...then decided to extend the layout to the general area of JWR and ERC in order to remove a few rides to not increase the cost of operations.

Your'e assuming that they HAD to use the ride. They could have easily put a portal for a Marvel Land next to the ride and it wouldn't have changed a thing (except the land would have one less marvel themed ride). I don't think there will be a Hollywood area, there is no space for it. This would put TOT awkwardly in between Marvel and Bugs Land?

What a lot of Disneyland "fans" don't think about is that Disney's management didn't have much of a choice, basically either had to retheme it or remove it. What were they going to do, have a big Twilight Zone themed ride in Marvel Land? I view this move positively. For people like me who go to both regularly this will differentiate WDW from DLR, the addition of a super heroes area will also bring something cool and different to the DLR repertoire, and this ride sucked compared to WDW's to begin with.

Assuming you're asking a serious question: look at the license plates. At Disneyland you see California, Nevada, Utah, Oregon, etc plates. At WDW you see Florida, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, Carolina's, Alabama, Quibec, Ontario, etc. Two different markets, 99% of people are not going to visit both.

Disney used to consistently put out quality attractions, but in recent years they have been very lackluster. The imagineers used to create iconic attractions like Splash Mountain, The Great Movie Ride, and Dinosaur. All creative, original, and entertaining. But look at recent additions like Frozen Ever After, Test Track 2, and Soarin Over The World. All cheap overlays instead of new original attractions. They even took out the original Captain Eo and replaced it with Pixar short films at Epcot. Disney is churning out uninspired, unimaginative, and cheap attractions to us just like Six Flags. The magic is dead, people! Well since this is the Disneyland thread, I will only point out that they are building a Star Wars Land and are not even 10 years removed from Carsland at DCA. Not every attraction can be an E-ticket, nor can you always just expand into new space. Taking perfectly fine ride systems and updating the show material is just smart business sense. Absolutely right. As well, this version of the ride was nowhere near as good as the original. Hell, it is not even as good as the clone in Tokyo! The new theme to this attraction will bring it more in line with the other, higher caliber versions of this ride. I think it's obvious the Pixar short films attraction is a stop-gap because Captain EO was so bad they had to get rid of it - but are spending so much $ on Springs/DAK/DHS they haven't approved the budget to start making big changes to Epcot yet. Once those projects come to a close you will start seeing more money being poured into Epcot.

That is how Sea World is for most any time of year actually other than Christmas and some of spring break. Although yes you are correct, most parks (other than Disney) will be walk on city this time of year.

I guess the good news is that the population of the Central Florida super region has exploded over the past decade, so even if tourism is down they can count on making some serious $$$ on weekends during F&W regardless (although I do wonder how many of those people came in for free with the extra tickets they gave all the cast members to try and pad the numbers for this summer ). In addition to all the bad news in the worlds economy I think Disney and Universal are OK with thinning the herd a bit as they have really been pushing prices closer to elasticity the past few years, so some of it may be by design. In semi related news I went to Sea World yesterday with someones AP bring a friend for free ticket and walked right onto Mako in the front row, which was running mostly empty trains in the middle of the day, so for some parks even big discounts and free tickets doesn't cut it .

As much as I dislike Stitch's Great Escape this is not a good sign for Disney or Florida tourism in general. I've been in Florida long enough to know when attractions start going seasonal that means business has slown.

I've always found it funny when people say sports tickets are over priced and instead of going they watch it on their big screen at home, like somehow they are sticking it to the man (not realizing how much $$ is being made off them from watching it on TV). Every time I see an article online about the NFL there are a lot of comments "overpriced, management sucks, I watch at home" etc. The games are selling out and there are still always lines for concessions, TV ratings are through the roof, do you really think the NFL gives a **** about your opinion?

It's a damn shame if Terminator has gotten rough. It always makes me nervous when parks add these really fast relentless wooden coasters, because if they're not committed to baby it and constantly spend money, they are going to become unbearable. And lets be serious SFMM is a huge park with probably little maintenance staff, it isn't a park that is going to spend much more than it needs to keep things running.

The Florida Busch parks, BGT and SWO, have always had really slow operations. Oddly enough i've been going to these parks for 15+ years and it's always been that way. Maybe Disney and Universal get all the good people and Busch is stuck with the rejects. The park in Virginia never seemed to have this problem. Some of these parks I haven't been to in a long time but here are my thoughts from when I was there. Mt Olympus and La Ronde were in the "so bad it's funny" category. Mt Olympus all the coasters only have 1 train (which isn't that big of a deal for a small park) but the attitude of the employees is poor as well. They send the train, sit on the track and wait for it to come back, yell at people, only have 1 ride op on all the rides except for Hades (which has 2). I also found it odd how none of the rides had fences around them so a little kid could easily just walk onto the track and get decked by a train. La Ronde everything was just slow and the ride ops on all the rides were on their phones not paying any attention at all to try and dispatch trains in a timely manner. The park was also filthy with no one making any attempt to clean (seems to be a French culture thing). Ocean Park had slow operations due to the phones as well. We sat in the station on Hair Raiser for at least 3-5 minutes watching them play with the phones, waiting for them to dispatch a train. When I went on a tour of the SF parks a little over a decade ago (Kirean Burke era) they ALL had really bad operations except for Great America where the operations oddly were really good. A couple years later we toured all the SF parks again and they shaped up, and now are usually "normal" to hit or miss. Oddly enough Great America has some of the worst operations now.

The Golden Tickets always have been a joke run by a select group of ACErs. I've been on Boulder Dash and Fury and while Boulder Dash is probably in my top 10 wood (though definitely not number 1), Fury isn't even in the top 10 steel. Holiday World wins cleanest park every year I don't understand how that is, it's cleanliness is not any different than any other park. I've been to pretty much all the Christmas events from all the parks in the country and while Dollywood's is nice it's not as good as Herschend's other major park Silver Dollar City's. Also Cedar Point finally didn't win Best Park, but then wins a "publishers pick" for best park anyway

See parks have a lose lose.. they charge to much people complain..they offer good cheap sale prices and people complain.. I commend six flags for keeping their prices cheap and not increasing them over 30% like Disney.. I'm not complaining, if I lived near there I would definitely buy that season pass obviously its a great value. I'm just stating that kind of price for unlimited visits to a major theme park and includes parking just comes off as extreme desperation to me. The food deal is smart though, if all the food is high margin (burgers, fries, cokes) and the price of a regular meal is $15 a person they probably sell a lot of those food deals and make a killing. I'm willing to bet a lot of people don't visit enough to redeem the full value of it as well.

Can you believe this sale they are having now. -Rest of 2016 + all of 2017 -Parking included -2017 Whitewater season pass included -Bonus free ticket for Holiday in the Park For $52. That's unbelievable, talk about desperation. If I were a park exec I would be scared that huge amounts of lower income people are going to buy season passes then eat at Wendy's right next to the park gates (that's what I do )

Herschend is a Christian company and prides itself on family appeal, as Joel Manby said "we would never do anything to violate a mothers trust." A haunt event wouldn't be a good cultural fit. A trick or treating thing with cutesy decorations and whatnot I would think is possible though.

Its funny in Hong Kong how you can clearly tell the difference between people from Hong Kong and a mainland tourist. I had a similar experience there on a weekend, but then on a weekday didn't see any of that. Though I will say I enjoyed the cultural experience in a "this is fun but glad I don't live here and have to deal with it every day" way. The line for the tram was literally a stampede every time it moved, everyone running (and running each other over) just to move like 10 feet.