It’s obvious to me that you have never been involved in any business that involves attendance. Those of us that have know how to estimate crowds through the parking lot. It also seems pretty obvious that you have no financial background.
It’s obvious that you have no financial background either, or you’d know that attendance is a horrible metric to judge success on. If you own stock in a theme park, you care about how much money the park makes. Attendance is a terrible figure for communicating that.
The park could make admission free, and attendance would skyrocket. But the park would be financially worse off. Or they could make admission cost 20 billion dollars, and if just one person bought a ticket the whole year, their attendance would be 1, but the park would be financially better off.
You’ll notice that in earnings calls across multiple theme park companies, the executives often brag that revenues and profits were up despite attendance being down. This isn’t corporate spin — there are plenty of legitimate reasons that higher revenues with lower attendance is an objectively good thing. That means they’re making more money per customer, which means lower customer acquisition costs, lower customer retention costs, lower operating costs, and more. And before you turn this into another rant about CF and SEAS being cheap, consider that pretty much any consumer-centric business would want this.
Attendance isn’t a totally useless metric, and it can help show trends in the park’s popularity. But it’s a completely BS metric to use as the sole evidence for a claim that a park is failing or succeeding. Financial performance is the key metric here, and to
@Nicole’s point, the only glimpse we have into that internal data is in the companies’ quarterly earnings reports.