TEA / AECOM 2012 Attendance Estimates Released

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Hoopla said:
Just wondering, what are KD's and BGT's numbers like.
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Kings Dominion's attendance does not rank it in the top 20 in this report. There is/was a site that estimates the attendance at individual parks. Especially for companies that do not disclose park by park attendance figures such as Cedar Fair.

I just cannot remember where I saw this and I don't know what formula(s) and/or other statistics used to back their attendance estimates. This estimate for Kings Dominion was for the 2012 season: between 2.15 to 2.25 million visitors.

So, BGW's attendance is about 650,000 to 750,000 more visitors in 2012 than KD. Not too bad considering BGW has about 20-25 more operating days {assuming this attendance figure includes "Christmas Town" days of operations).
 
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Kings Dominion barely beat out Cedar Point last year if I remember the numbers right. Surprisingly even though Cedar Point is CF's 'Flagship' park in their chain, they've lost every year in attendance to Canada's Wonderland since 2008. Kings Dominion has been competing with Cedar Point in attendance since 2010.

Look at the coasters built during those years and you'll find out why. Maverick built 2007, Behemoth 2008, i305 2010.
 
b.mac said:
Kings Dominion barely beat out Cedar Point last year if I remember the numbers right. Surprisingly even though Cedar Point is CF's 'Flagship' park in their chain, they've lost every year in attendance to Canada's Wonderland since 2008. Kings Dominion has been competing with Cedar Point in attendance since 2010.

Look at the coasters built during those years and you'll find out why. Maverick built 2007, Behemoth 2008, i305 2010.
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Canada's Wonderland has phenomenal attendance figures for a seasonal theme park. Their attendance numbers are greater than Knott's which is Cedar Fair's only year round park and greater than Cedar Point which is the chain's only resort property.

I assume that Canada's Wonderland's closest competition is the Six Flags park in the Quebec province. Followed by whatever parks there are in up-state New York and finally Cedar Point.

Kings Island seems to hold its own without much close competition. (Holiday World and Dollywood pull from the southern and western edges of Kings Island's market area). Course, with Kentucky Kingdom coming back online in 2014, there might be a small dip in attendance. But, Kentucky Kingdom is going to be in a period of continuous growth for at least another 5-6 years, so I think it gives Cedar Fair time to figure out what attractions to add to maintain and maybe increase future attendance at Kings Island.

Kings Dominion is a solid 2nd tier park for the Cedar Fair chain. Course, its annual attendance averages 800,000 to 1.2 million less folks that the 1st tier parks in the chain (Knotts, Canada's Wonderland, Kings Island, and Cedar Point).

Based on the Cedar Fair webcast highlights, (shown on the News-Plus-Notes web site), the park chain stated that adding something every year to a park does not always translate to increased long-term attendance. The focus seems to be shifting from just finding ways of increasing attendance by adding a new attraction. Cedar Fair stated that they want to focus on those existing guests, with more disposable income, and find ways to promote more spending from them.

Course, in my opinion, spending money on food is at the top of my list. Cedar Fair has some work cut out for them to increase the food quality, variety, and service without sending the prices into low earth orbit.

Merchandise can be improved as well. Too much cheap "trinket" stuff in the shops; that I have no interest in cluttering my house with. I could not tell you the last time I bought a souvenir from the park.

The one current program that brings in some money is the Ride Fast Pass and the Haunt Fast Pass in the fall. I am not sure if Cedar Fair is going to have KD do any type of back-stage tours like the ones at BGW.

As I have stated before, Cedar Fair is not currently in a financial position to take any major risks that could result in taking a financial loss. It appears their debt load is 3-4 times that of other comparable park chains (Six Flags, SeaWorld Entertainment, and the Herchend park chain). Cedar Fair does not have the luxury of being able to handle financial losses due to taking a risk like putting on a Christmas event at Kings Dominion.

That was pretty much stated in the webcast highlights. Outside of Knotts, they don't see any type of Christmas event happening at any other parks in the chain for the foreseeable future. (Cedar Fair is looking at doing some type of spring event at some of their parks in the future).

I think Cedar Fair could bump up their attendance at most of their major parks, by a couple percentage points, if they would continue to improve the entertainment variety and show production values.

Back in the "Golden Years" at Kings Dominion, you had probably 16%-18% of park guests who came to the park just for the shows (might also ride the gentle attractions). When Paramount eliminated the majority of entertainment options, those folks drifted away and never returned. I think if Kings Dominion continues to increase the entertainment options a little more and gave more financial focus to increasing the show production values (sets & costumes) and adding a couple more show facilities, I could see them pull in at least 4%-6% more park guests over a 5-6 year period. Course, doing that would take a chunk money; therefore, the costs would need to be spread out over that 5-6 year time period.
 
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Shouldn't it be #7 on that list, at least for 2010. They have Cedar Fair listed at #7, but the 2010 attendance is 22,800,000.
 
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I'd agree from those numbers. Perhaps they averaged years? Maybe just a poor journalism mistake? Also, I don't see that they site their source for this data. I don't like the way they rate this list with numbers so old, either. It just feels like a sloppy online "news" report.
 
b.mac said:
Kings Dominion barely beat out Cedar Point last year if I remember the numbers right. Surprisingly even though Cedar Point is CF's 'Flagship' park in their chain, they've lost every year in attendance to Canada's Wonderland since 2008. Kings Dominion has been competing with Cedar Point in attendance since 2010.
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Kings Dominion has never beaten Cedar Point in attendance. It's not even close. Cedar Point's attendance is well over 3 million visitors every year and is third in the Cedar Fair chain only to Canada's Wonderland and Knott's Berry Farm. Cedar Point even had an increase in attendance from 2011 to 2012. The park has the luxury of being located near several major markets like Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit/Canada and Columbus. Thats where the bulk of their attendance comes from. Kings Dominion doesn't even come close to Kings Island which also brings in more than 3 million visitors each year.

And Canada's Wonderland has been beating Cedar Point in attendance for over a decade. It's the only amusement park in Canada's largest city.
 
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I took another look at the numbers and we can not be sure what the trend is until after seeing the estimates for 2013; however, it seems after 2008 the park took a hit and since then they have steadily increased their attendance each year. I really am interested to see how 2013 estimates are going to come out.

Personally, I think the park may still see an increase in attendance. Maybe not a large one, but I'd wager to say at least a 1% increase for 2013. It is a growing trend.

I also want to point out I find it extremely odd how while forum members keep persisting the park is getting worse, yet attendance is a t a steady incline for now. I think the park has done very well and more people will continue to come.
 
There is no way attendance increased, especially not after a year with a brand new roller coaster. There's absolutely no way the park's attendance increased in 2013 compared to 2012. I would be the most shocked person on the planet if it did.
 
Okay, If you're assuming that we had an increase in attendance last year(even though there's no way in the world we did), then why did SWP&E have a decrease in attendance, with record attendance at the SeaWorld parks? Are you assuming BGT was the dragging anchor, SP? Because, while that may be the case, BGT has a frequent draw in attendance.(tourists) While BGW relies on locals, which from my experience inside, and outside of the park, locals didn't nearly go as much as they had in the past.



MOD Edit: Removed unnecessary comments.
 
I really can't see where the park got an attendance boost anywhere in 2013 outside of maybe Howl O Scream. Special events-wise, my educated guess is that the park did OK. A good number of people came to see Food & Wine and Christmas Town, while it didn't do so well at first, really came to life after the park was open daily. Spring weekends were pretty packed with competitions and nice weather in play. Summer had very random weather, but an abnormally short hot season. The park still cut hours despite that, so my guess is the park wasn't doing as well as it hoped.

I also can't see where this whole "dragging anchor" theory is coming into play. Sesame Place had to cut down its Halloween event and Tampa had a significant amount of rides/attractions down for budget reasons. I'm sure both parks took a hit on attendance as a result.

- Hopefully we get numbers soon enough. This whole "flailing attendance" argument is getting old.
 
JuniorBGWFan,

While I do consider your opinion to try and be helpful it comes off as insulting. I hate people getting into the thought that I only believe they do everything fine. Clearly they did not have a record year. I have personally admitted some faults with the park and just because I do not feel the same way about certain topics as you do, doesn't mean I am wrong or that the park is doing anything wrong or right. We both have varying opinions as to what certain choices made are bad or better for the park, as many people do. I only ask of you not to stereotype me as solely supporting the park because I am wearing some type of psychological eyewear device. They have made mistakes, in my opinion. I do not feel like their mistakes are as large as some may point them out to be though.

With that said, while there may not have been nothing extraordinary this year, I can see a slight or small increase as the park has shown significant estimated evidence that for the past five years, something new or not they have increased their attendance into a trend. I feel like that trend may very well continue if not only fairly slightly.

Furthermore, netdvn brings up a very valid point in regards to the "anchor" terminology. Why does it always have to be just one park? It can be multiple. In fact, strength is greater in packs. So really the obviously less famous and not as well recognized parks such as Water Country USA, Adventure Island, Busch Gardens, and yes even Sesame Place may have all as a whole brought down the company attendance. I point out those brand specifically because while they may bee known to many people, before 2000 I do not recall hearing of Busch Gardens or their water parks. I never knew Sesame Place was a park. I did know about SeaWorld. It is clearly the stronger more well known and established brand out the the entire company. I expect that brand to be the shining stars of the company.

While you may be judging on your personal experience at the park and eyeballing a guess of what you think, I based my opinion and prediction solely on the attendance estimates. These are actual numbers that if they are not exact to the tee, are fairly right near close to it. If you look at those numbers, there is a clear and significant trend of increased attendance since 2009. Yes there was a drop that year; however, since then the park has clearly increased it's attendance each year. I do believe they can continue that trend even if ever so slightly.

While I can not point out what I would expect the increase of attendance to come from specifically by what has gone on this year, I can say that because Verbolten is still a relatively new ride and people are still trying to visit to ride it or because people have ridden it and planned on visiting more this year, these are probably the main reasons why I feel they may have a slight increase in attendance if anything.

But as netdvn has said, this idea that attendance is dropping quicker than anything else is just getting fairly old. Clearly the numbers how a trend, that I believe may very well continue, if ever so slightly.
 
Blaze Star said:
I took another look at the numbers and we can not be sure what the trend is until after seeing the estimates for 2013; however, it seems after 2008 the park took a hit and since then they have steadily increased their attendance each year. I really am interested to see how 2013 estimates are going to come out.
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I want to know iff we're looking at the same numbers here. You're saying attendance has increased since 2008 but 2012 was the first year in attendance gains since 2007, its been downhill between then.
 
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I am sorry, let me make myself slightly more clear, the impact on attendance, while it has dropped it has shown a smaller drop each year leading up to a large increase. What I basically mean is while yes attendance has dropped, it isn't going from 3 million to 2.5 million to 1 million. The drops have been quite slight and not very large and the percentage of dropping has gotten smaller and smaller each year until it finally pops up to an increase.

EX:
Instead of attendance dropping:
Year 1 - 6%
Year 2 - 10%
Year 3 - 15%
Year 4 - 25%

Attendance is dropping in such a manner like so:
Year 1 - 6%
Year 2 - 4%
Year 3 - 3%
Year 4 - 2%

As you can see, if you look at it on a chart in a sense of the first drop on a coaster, the first year attendance dropped was the initial top of the fall and the park took a plunge. As we see with each year, that fall is coming closer and closer to it's end and it appears we are about to climb back up a hill. So yes we may have still been falling, it just seems the falling is going to come to an end soon.

I do apologize if any of my posts imply something else, this is the original idea behind them.
 
While it does seem like a good thing that the attendance drops hit a valley, it doesn't really mean that attendance is miraculously going to jump one year. Any year that there's an advertised coaster a park is going to have some sort of attendance increase, even if they lost 25% or 2% of their gate clicks the previous year.

Also using the 3 million to 1 million argument, any noticeable decrease in attendance over the span of a short period of time like that should be raising major red flags on all fronts. We would've known about that midway through the season that attendance isn't anywhere near benchmarks and SEAS would've had nightmares presenting these numbers to their stock holders.

It's natural for an amusement park to have gradual decreases in attendance when nothing notable is being added (a new show will never bring inthe same numbers as a flat ride or a roller coaster unless there's a big failure in marketing). There was a lot of hope placed in Verbolten saving BGW's attendance #'s, and considering that it only increased gate clicks to the point in the middle of a recession 2009-2010 shows that the park lost more than 250,000 people between 2007 and 2012. No matter how you look at that it's still a gigantic loss. The fact that they were also practically giving away tickets last year shows that there's some amount of desperation to try and bring numbers back to 3 million, and it definitely is not working with with a coaster that did not meet expectations the previous year amd had even less marketing than the previous year.

Whether or not 2013 is seen as an up year or a down year for BGW, their attendance numbers will definitely not have a noticeable improvement compared to their numbers in 2009, let alone 2007 or 2008 for that matter.
 
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I will only change my opinion slightly as you do provide a convincing point. I don't think attendance will drop below 2011's numbers. I imagine a fairly similar year number wise. You still are pulling people in with a new event, plus people still want to ride Verbolten that may not have gotten to yet. While numbers may not increase from 2012 to 2013, 2013 should not drop below 2011, 2010 at the absolute worst.
 
A statement that seems to pop up when attendance and roller coasters or other new rides are discussed: "Griffon drastically increased attendance in 2007".

I just wanted to point out that in 2007 was the 400th celebration of the founding of Jamestown settlement. There was a HUGE amount of people that visited the area for that. I will concede that a brand new coaster in the mid-atlantic gave BGW a bump in attendance, but I think the 400 year celebration had more to do with the 12.5% jump than just the coaster. Is it plausible?
 
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