If you have visited a theme park — such as Disneyland, Knott’s or SeaWorld — lately and said to yourself, “I don’t think that I am the target customer here,” you might be right.
It’s not that you are too old. Or too big. Or that you haven’t seen the right movies and don’t know who some of the park’s characters are anymore. It might just be because you are not a big-time Wall Street investor. Because that’s whom some theme park companies seem to be most concerned with pleasing these days.
Obviously, any company needs to deliver profits on a regular basis if it is to stay in business. But it’s probably not coincidence that many of the parks that have made me and other Theme Park Insider readers most happy in the past couple years have been ones not owned by publicly traded companies that have to answer to Wall Street — parks such as the family-owned Holiday World, the privately owned Hersheypark and the Herschend parks, including Silver Dollar City and Dollywood.
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Those theme parks are profitable and investing in new attractions and operations that make fans feel like guests of honor. But at other regional parks, many of us have been feeling lately like chum being served to Wall Street to boost a stock price. Who’s the real customer here?
New Six Flags management is talking a lot about corporate operational efficiencies after the merger, but I have heard complaints from many fans all summer about understaffed attractions and slow-moving queues at the legacy Six Flags and Cedar Fair parks. New attractions, such as the revamped Camp Snoopy at Knott’s, have underwhelmed or been delayed.
Over at SeaWorld and Busch Gardens, United Parks management has spent more than $200 million buying back the company’s stock. What used to be illegal stock manipulation is now standard practice to pump a stock price without having to actually do anything to win customers. Meanwhile, the company has delayed its new jellyfish attraction that was supposed to open this year at SeaWorld San Diego until next spring.
The Disney and Universal parks are part of huge entertainment companies, taking some of the pressure off the parks to drive their companies’ stock prices and allowing them access to capital to build huge new attractions that other companies cannot afford. But both Disney and Universal have raised their prices recently, with Disney adding a $400 daily line-skip pass upgrade to help boost income.
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Attendance has been sluggish this year at many of these parks, suggesting that fans have had enough of the poor service and are beginning to vote with their purses and wallets.
This should be a simple transaction — we trade money for fun. But complicated pass schemes, upcharges, inconsistent operating schedules and inexperienced workers are draining the joy from visiting a theme park.
Squeezing visitors might boost a stock price right now, but it’s not sustainable. Eventually, people will choose to spend their money only at businesses where they feel like customers and not the product.