See. I would argue that they do, they just don’t talk about it the same ways as we do. Like I would say those questions you posed show they care, they just don’t memorize everything with it.
I’ll use my wife and mother as my examples here:
While at Hershey, my wife looks at WCR and asked “didn’t that used to be something else, and why does it go upside down now?” I see that as caring, just not knowing why. Vrs my mother who looks at GB and says it can’t be safe because your feet are not secure. I feel like my mom is a far more minority than my wife.
While this is true, giving people a reason to come out and spend the discretionary money they do have with you is the battle.
Sure maybe it cuts the ability to make huge cap investments like massive coasters. But you can get people to come to you by elevating the experience of clean, safe, fun while making sure the F&B is worth having, there’s good entertainment, and people feel like there’s value of being able to do what they want without spending extra.
The golf industry is talking about it a lot right now. How do we keep people using their discretionary money with us. A lot of our surveys are showing that people want an experience they can’t get elsewhere. Sometimes it’s small things like free water, a dog at the turn, free range balls, free locker room access.
So back to the point here:
People don’t completely cut discretionary spending on everything, they become more selective on it. The struggle will be convincing people to spend it with you. And if parks think the answer is throw money at coasters over what people would actually want then they deserve to close of struggle.
I wasn't saying they don't care, I was saying what they care about isn't always the same. We have credit whores in the community that will ride anything at least once - sometimes going out of their way to do so - but we also have snobs who only care to ride if it fits within a specific set of parameters. In my observations of average guests, they may just want to go on it because it's new, if it's thrilling or not, or not want to ride if it has certain elements because they believe it will mess with their head/stomach too much or they perceive an unsafe condition. Then there's a convenience aspect - the park is close-by, or the ride is close-by and has a smaller wait than others; or it's indoors, or whatever. And then there's those that seek comfort in destination park visits such as Disney or Universal... or as an add-on to other trips such as Busch Gardens, SeaWorld, Cedar Point, or whatever... and will ride as much as they can to get their day-pass' money's worth.
In any business with consumers/users of the product, the most critical data to understand is not the immediate financials or even observable behavior - they are super important pieces, for sure - but experience. If you deeply understand who your consumers/users are, what they like, what they don't like, how they can be influenced, how you can leverage their influence, and also who are conquest groups of users/consumers (not currently yours, but could be), then you have a good understanding of what types of decisions you need to make for your desired output(s) be they financial or behavioral.
In the context of a website, there's a lot of control points that can be relatively quickly and easily and cheaply changed, behavior is able to be easily observed if analytics are implemented correctly and there's someone that can interpret the results, and rapid iteration is possible. Understanding the experience piece can be difficult, but there's a lot of tools available to relatively quickly and cheaply get a handle on it.
In the context of a park, there's a lot of control points that can't always easily or quickly or cheaply be changed; behavior is less observable - you may get some overall numbers, but may not see in terms of individual guests - and rapid iteration is usually not possible. Understanding the experience piece is possible, but could be harder to get right.
Bring this back to what we're seeing here - there's a good chance that there's been some base-layer experience research already done to make the attraction choice to achieve the goals based on the objective; what these surveys are likely for is to leverage a much larger audience to confirm the findings across all researched options. As we've seen before, there's a good chance that park management will look at survey results, weigh that against their research findings, financial impact analyses, and other analyses that they may have conducted, then decide a path forward if any have a positive outlook... they may also choose to not proceed based on feasibility, and then try again later.
