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2012 Attendance report

P

peep

CF Legend
It's that time of year where we find out how the parks (and now museums) of the World are doing in terms of attendance.

LINK TO THE REPORT

Please note that it's a hefty pdf document which may take a while to load.


So, what's interesting in the report? Well, Merlin are growing but not because of their non-Lego parks. An overall growth of 16.4% is ridiculous. However with both Thorpe Park and Gardaland dropping by 10% and Alton dropping by 9.4% it's a surprise to hear they're doing so well overall.

Elsewhere in Europe, Parc Asterix has gained 8% due to the addition of OzIris. Hopefully management will see this and continue large investments.

Generally in Europe it was an average or not so good due to poor weather and the London Olympics.


I have other stuffs to get on with so I'll let you guys pick apart the rest of the report.
 
Hmmm, I was going to say that maybe that was in part due to the epic summer of sport we had, but Legoland saw no changes :s Odd. Can see why bigwigs at Thorpe were fretting though.
 
Interesting report was surprised Busch Gardens was so highly visited and that Thorpe Parks visited numbers went down by 10%.
 
Bit more analysis and guff in the CF News Article

I still can't get over how DCA managed to pull off a 22.6% increase! Just goes to show a) how big a success Cars Land and the other improvements have been, and b) how crap it must've been before! haha
 
I am very surprised that phantasialand had a higher attendance than parc asterix. I admit it is a much better park, but the days i had at each of the parks last summer could not have been more different. Parc asterix was heaving with 2-3 hour queues for oziris and TDZ and very long queues for everything else, whereas as phantasialand was quite quiet with the longest queue being 15 mins for the winjas and black mamba and colorado adventure being walk on.
 
There was a paragraph in the analysis that has just caught my eye

TEA Report said:
Certainly cold weather is less of an issue at Christmas time. The same goes for Halloween. More parks might look at what they can do with certain kinds of investments, and making the most of holidays, to offset bad summer numbers and even overcome negative trends. Europe, especially Northern Europe, hasn’t seen a good summer in a long time. With the uncertainty of the weather over the past few years, it might be time to explore more options.
Click to expand...

I find that quite interesting. It's something that has been evolving in the UK over the last few years, but I never looked at it as an alternative to Summer crowds. I always assumed that, Halloween in particular, was just down to a general increase in interest/Americanisation of the celebrations. They might have a point though. With parks such as Paulton's and Drayton opening their kiddie areas pretty much year round and laying on special Christmas events to suck a few extra quid out of the off-season, could we see some of the larger parks start to follow suit in some way?
 
Three things: Blackpool isn't even top 20 in Europe? Wow, how sad.

I'm sure the fiscal crisis didn't help the European attendance numbers, either.

Cedar Point is third for CF again, despite Knott's 4% drop?
 
Animal Kingdom is above Hollywood Studios for the second year running.

Wonder what sparked the change?

I was assuming to see it fall back this year. Hollywood Studios has had the most reent investments, too. Weird.
 
rollermonkey said:
Three things: Blackpool isn't even top 20 in Europe? Wow, how sad.
Click to expand...
I think they are still up there but have stopped submitting the figures. A strange decision as it does end up looking like they're doing poorly.
 
rollermonkey said:
Three things: Blackpool isn't even top 20 in Europe? Wow, how sad.
Click to expand...

Blackpool don't release their attendance figures for this and haven't done for as long as I can remember
 
That seems really odd, I wonder why they don't release them? I guess, historically, it makes sense as it would've been nearly impossible to get gate figures when it was free entry. However, now entrance is ticketed, it can't be that hard to do.
 
Better to be "the park that used to boast 7.5 million visitors" than the 23rd most visited park in Europe...

Quite shocked by Alton's poor performance, wasn't a good year at all for them.
 
furie said:
rollermonkey said:
Three things: Blackpool isn't even top 20 in Europe? Wow, how sad.
Click to expand...

Blackpool don't release their attendance figures for this and haven't done for as long as I can remember
Click to expand...

Shouldn't matter. Lots of the parks on this report don't report attendance figures.
 
I can't speak for all of the parks, but I can tell you that for the SEA parks those # are estimates. They are close (in the infield), but they are not 100% accurate. A few years ago SEA came out publicy and stated this company is just estimating.

Now that I think about a conversation I had with a Director in the Six Flags company, he told me a similar story. He was surprised at how close they were, but again it was not 100%. I guess the moral of my story is take it for what its worth. If they underestimate one park and overestimate another, well, there you go "rankings" change.
 
Merlin must be scratching their heads. They open The Swarm and the result is Legoland overtaking Thorpe in gate figures.
 
I think Merlin will be looking at the figures and still kidding themselves that they're competition for Disney.
 
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