Either of those would be good for the park to be honest, though I’d lean towards the GCI not just as an enthusiast but because SFFT has a log flume but no GCI.
It’s the only SeaWorld I’ve done and while the experience isn’t exactly offensive per se, it could certainly be improved. They’re clearly going into full rides mode with their image, all of the pamphlets, billboards, and hotel displays all featured Wave Breaker when I was in the area last month. A wooden coaster with a shipwreck graveyard theme like Mako would be an amazing way to fill out the long stretches of nothing around the property, it’s something Fiesta doesn’t have, and a little wooden coaster weaving around those scruffy tropical-looking forests would be amazing. However it needs to be done just right from a marketing perspective, as I was told Wave Breaker didn’t do anything to boost their attendance.
I think the main issues for this suffering park are lack of things to do for the price, competition with Fiesta, and public image with animals. Now the first two sort of go hand in hand. $69 gets you into sparse SeaWorld while $79 gets you into Six Flags with a ton of stuff, and you can tell considering how on a day when we did both, Fiesta Texas was rocking all day while SeaWorld literally had a band playing to an empty stadium. Now I personally didn’t drink the Blackfish Koolaid but I know a lot of people did and that really hurt their image with the animals, so they have to go the rides route. But the issue with this SeaWorld in particular is that if you want rides, there’s a much more stacked park just down the road that doesn’t cost that much more to get in, one that’ll be really hard for them to compete with in their current situation. So if they want to fix anything, they need to not only get more into the rides side of what they offer, but they also need to do it much differently than Fiesta. A GCI or theming/immersion focused flume like Infinity Falls sounds like an awesome way to do that in their current dismal financial state. They should probably also focus on making the park run more efficiently to cut down on that ghastly gate price.
It’s not a bad park for something you’d expect to find as a small city property. It looks nice, it’s wooded, and it was a nice relaxing afternoon for both of us. But for a big corporate brand like SeaWorld, they can’t go charging prices like that for that kind of product.
Tl;dr this seems like a good choice for the park with the direction they want to go in, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg for saving this sinking ship.
