I couldn’t find a thread that’s a “catch all” that touches on this. If there is sorry Admins!!
But with BGT losing the park president and SPP being up for sale, SF having leased/sold parks, and Hershend’s recent expansion I have a long winding thought/feeling that I thought could be a good jumping point for conversation:
(And I apologize for the sort of free form thought flow here. This isn’t a topic in my brain that has a natural starting/ending point)
I’m going to start with - I despise the current state of the industry. Private Equity has killed it (like it’s trying with other industries) because they’re after the most valuable asset: the land. Now without getting too political, something needs to be done about PE and these practices that are destroying much more than most realize (because PE has done great marketing to keep the companies they bought the villain). And especially in the case of parks, the local boards need to do better zoning to keep land use EXTREMELY REGULATED so there would be very little value in the land if it weren’t a park.
Ok. Off that soap box and onto the one that matters:
IMO there’s been some bad moves for the industry lately.
I’ll start with the big one - the SF/CF merger. What a doozy of a blow to the industry. The two largest footprint brands merging and basically owning coast to coast park operations. (I know SWSD exists but it’s minimal compared to SF/CF scale)
It took the idea of competing regional parks and basically killed it. Sure United Parks/Hershey/Hershend still exist, but how much harder did it make it to break into that space? Because the new SF isn’t going to sell a bigger park to a competitor unless they absolutely are forced too. They would more likely do what they did with Enchanted. Move some smaller parks over.
Then in response other brands made their moves. Hershend, Enchanted. It basically made them tie up funds to lack the ability to expand. United has their own money issues to boot.
Now - I know and will acknowledge here that United has a fair number of self inflicted issues. There’s no defending that.
But that said.
United is in a place where the likely path to getting capital to fix the issues are to either sell (so saddle Someone else with the debt that maybe has deeper pockets) or offload single gates (which might be more valuable not as parks). It’s kinda a sucky place because the third route out for them is to basically lose money for a few years.
Here’s where I’m frustrated with the state: if SF kind of could have taken care of themselves or sold smaller parks on their own without merging with CF we would have had enough players with flexibility to ensure parks with financial issues could have survived.
Because when SPP gets sold, it sounds like the options are super limited and the options are companies who haven’t operated in this space. So what is United decides it’s time to sell SWSD or the Busch parks. Who’s to step up?
There’s a time where (as annoying as this will sound) I felt the Saudi PIF could have been a potential player. They operate parks with leased names. Maybe they could have decided to jump into owning a chain. But the decision for them to pull back takes them out IMO.
I dont see Disney or Universal doing anything. Maybe Universal could get involved in SPP since they are starting to get into the kid space. But how would they use the IP other than the one park. Maybe the owners of Legoland dive in.
But back to the United problem. If it comes to it, what’s going to happen? I fear we’re going to lose some parks out of a continued slide and issues with United. I dunno. I just hate a state of the industry where very high on the list results for a bad financial decision is park closures.
But with BGT losing the park president and SPP being up for sale, SF having leased/sold parks, and Hershend’s recent expansion I have a long winding thought/feeling that I thought could be a good jumping point for conversation:
(And I apologize for the sort of free form thought flow here. This isn’t a topic in my brain that has a natural starting/ending point)
I’m going to start with - I despise the current state of the industry. Private Equity has killed it (like it’s trying with other industries) because they’re after the most valuable asset: the land. Now without getting too political, something needs to be done about PE and these practices that are destroying much more than most realize (because PE has done great marketing to keep the companies they bought the villain). And especially in the case of parks, the local boards need to do better zoning to keep land use EXTREMELY REGULATED so there would be very little value in the land if it weren’t a park.
Ok. Off that soap box and onto the one that matters:
IMO there’s been some bad moves for the industry lately.
I’ll start with the big one - the SF/CF merger. What a doozy of a blow to the industry. The two largest footprint brands merging and basically owning coast to coast park operations. (I know SWSD exists but it’s minimal compared to SF/CF scale)
It took the idea of competing regional parks and basically killed it. Sure United Parks/Hershey/Hershend still exist, but how much harder did it make it to break into that space? Because the new SF isn’t going to sell a bigger park to a competitor unless they absolutely are forced too. They would more likely do what they did with Enchanted. Move some smaller parks over.
Then in response other brands made their moves. Hershend, Enchanted. It basically made them tie up funds to lack the ability to expand. United has their own money issues to boot.
Now - I know and will acknowledge here that United has a fair number of self inflicted issues. There’s no defending that.
But that said.
United is in a place where the likely path to getting capital to fix the issues are to either sell (so saddle Someone else with the debt that maybe has deeper pockets) or offload single gates (which might be more valuable not as parks). It’s kinda a sucky place because the third route out for them is to basically lose money for a few years.
Here’s where I’m frustrated with the state: if SF kind of could have taken care of themselves or sold smaller parks on their own without merging with CF we would have had enough players with flexibility to ensure parks with financial issues could have survived.
Because when SPP gets sold, it sounds like the options are super limited and the options are companies who haven’t operated in this space. So what is United decides it’s time to sell SWSD or the Busch parks. Who’s to step up?
There’s a time where (as annoying as this will sound) I felt the Saudi PIF could have been a potential player. They operate parks with leased names. Maybe they could have decided to jump into owning a chain. But the decision for them to pull back takes them out IMO.
I dont see Disney or Universal doing anything. Maybe Universal could get involved in SPP since they are starting to get into the kid space. But how would they use the IP other than the one park. Maybe the owners of Legoland dive in.
But back to the United problem. If it comes to it, what’s going to happen? I fear we’re going to lose some parks out of a continued slide and issues with United. I dunno. I just hate a state of the industry where very high on the list results for a bad financial decision is park closures.
