Disney Park Attendance Up 15% for the Quarter
Something interesting from Disney’s earnings call yesterday:
At Parks and Resorts the investments we’ve made in our domestic Parks continue to drive higher guest visitation. Attendance at our domestic Parks was up 15% in the quarter and up 7% excluding the benefit of the fifty-third week. Disneyland in particular saw very strong attendance growth due to tremendous excitement for the 60th anniversary celebration. Per-capita spending was up 1% on higher admissions, merchandise and food and beverage spending. Per-room spending at our domestic hotels was up 7% and occupancy was up one percentage point to 84%.
Our Magic Kingdom analysis earlier this week showed 11.5% more people in line in September and October alone.
Disney’s didn’t break down attendance increases at the individual parks. Because it’s the most popular park by far, I suspect the Magic Kingdom got the largest bump. We’ll go back and check our models for the other parks, just to be sure.
Congrats to Disney – this is an historic level of growth.
Crowd calendar updates coming within days – Fred and Steve are working on them.
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I saw this somewhere else, and I’d be curious — this fall’s free dining promo required participants to purchase a park hopper. Maybe people are hopping more to MK?
Did Disney make changes to it’s fiscal schedule? 53 weeks?
Whenever a company has a fiscal year that ends on a constant day of the week rather than a constant date, then occasionally a year will have 53 weeks instead of 52. It’s generally referred to as having a 52/53 week fiscal year.
Thanks. I apparently needed more accounting in B school.
The lines, I don’t know. The never ending price increases, it explains it perfectly.
Mostly due to an extra week in their fiscal calendar. On an ongoing basis, 7% up which is still a big increase. But they indicated it was mostly driven by Disneyland. Suggesting WDW is something less than 7%. (Maybe 4-6%?)
So a healthy increase, more than on a typical yearly basis. Enough to explain the lines? I really don’t know.
On the other hand, this was the total for the quarter. I believe July/August saw pretty normal wait times vs predictions, so it’s possible that those months were a only few % points higher YoY, while September was much higher…possibly even double-digit higher.
Certainly possible… but that begs the question, what caused the sudden surge in attendance, and was it permanent or just a fluke?
Take a step back and go over that again it’s only really up 7% in true growth the 15% is bc 2015 had 53 weeks and 2014 had 52 weeks. Still a big jump!!!