Doerges Attendance. Everything is based
on attendance. Once we realize this, we begin working on a methodology
that will help us better understand attendance patterns. Unfortunately,
it doesn’t happen the same way throughout the year, although
you wish it did. If you had the same number of people attending your
park every day of the year, that park would always run at maximum
efficiency. You’d always have just the right capacity on rides
and attractions, always the right capacity in restaurants and shops;
everything would correspond exactly to meet your projected service
levels. Your capital investment would be spent in the most efficient
way possible. But the facts are that it just doesn’t work like
that. It’s all
about patterns. Weather patterns, school attendance patterns, vacation
patterns – all these things affect how people attend a theme
park.
In some cases parks will close during the winter because they don’t
have enough attendance to support the operation. But then they become
overwhelmed in the summer time. This is particularly true with regional
parks. They build as much capacity as they reasonably can to accommodate
the influx of summer guests, but they really don’t make a good
return on investment because for half the year that investment is
just sitting there doing nothing.
So we decided that if we were going to build more parks, we’d
first need to take a look at attendance patterns and see where we could
get as level an attendance rate as possible. How do you level the attendance
rate? You start by looking at the geography, specifically places where
the weather is good year round. You want a location that is conducive
to outdoor entertainment, a location where the marketplace is already
visiting for the climate. You also want a place where people have year
round discretionary income. This combination is exactly what Walt and
his executive team found in Florida . Florida had a constant stream
of tourism almost all year round, even before we showed up. Before
Disney, approximately18 million tourists were coming into the state
every year for the sun. Disney recognized this, and knew that if they
put a park in the middle of this existing market and raised their hand,
people would be there. That’s all they did in the beginning.
Q In analyzing patterns and locations, is there such a thing
as perfect attendance?
Doerges Mathematically, .0027 would represent perfect attendance.
When the various patterns and influences are calculated for Florida
, Florida achieves about .0032, California around .0045. When you
start looking at other parts of the world, it gets much “peakier.” For
example, most of Europe goes on vacation in July and Aug – you
end up with dramatic peaks and valleys of attendance. Hawaii actually
turns out to be probably the best of any place in the world. Their
problem is that their two primary markets – Japan and North America – really
aren’t that big. Consequently Hawaii doesn’t draw the
large number of visitors that you see in California or Florida .
Japan , on the other hand, has less tourism, but they have so many
people in Tokyo and Osaka that parks operate almost totally on the
local markets.
Q All this discussion about attendance may seem to wander
from the idea of design programming, but in fact it plays an integral
part. Is that an accurate observation?
Doerges Absolutely. For a design program to be effective,
it’s essential that you have a thorough understanding of the
marketplace, as well as a high level of confidence that you’re
going to attract a specific level of attendance. Of course when we
run the program, we try to strike a range. A small parks program
might run at 1.8 million, 2 million, and 2.2 million. If it were
a large park we might run it at 8, 10, and 12 million. It all comes
out of the market research.
About Norm Doerges
A pioneer in the theme park industry and co-founder
of Apogee Attractions (www.apogeeattractions.com),
no one understands this better than Norm Doerges. In
the early 1970s, Norm and a handful of industrial engineers pioneered
the field of design programming for the Walt Disney Company. Over the
course of his 30-year career, Norm built an extraordinary resume that
encompassed operations management, design, engineering, construction,
and attraction development. Best
known for his instrumental role in the planning and development of
the enormously successful EPCOT, Norm led a work force of over 6,000
people, holding complete operating responsibility for the US $1.3 billion
exhibition in Florida.
(c) copyright 2008 Apogee Attractions
