Warfare – especially along with a globally sluggish economy – has a contradictory impact on the consumption of enjoyment. Disposable incomes plummet curtailing the sales of medium to big ticket items such as cruises and resort vacations. But people – besieged by anxiety and bad news – also wish to be diverted. As the conflict rages, they stay indoors and tune in. Home entertainment booms. But once physical insecurity abates, consumers go out in full force mobbing movie theatres and theme parks, making up for lost time and frayed nerves.
A Solomon Smith Barney record, printed in December 2002, determined that big cap amusement stocks plunged by 32 pct throughout the previous skirmish from the Gulf. Stocks of destination travel sites and cruise lines took an even harsher beating, plummeting by 52 percent – this despite the counterintuitive resilience of amusement parks to military and political unrest.
In expectation of your up coming round of combating, these stocks are investing at valuations below the stressful tail of 2001. Though quicker than other types of equity to recover postbellum, this holds true only for short and decisive conflicts.
Analysts often monitor the performance of design and amusement park systems to divine developments in the market overall. This would prove impossible in Europe where the culture of theme and entertainment grounds is still in its infancy.
Denmark has Legoland and Tivoli. France boasts the recently recovering Disneyland, Vulcania and Futuroscope. Germany has Phantasialand. Italy sports Gardaland. Spain joins the continent’s minimal offerings with Port Aventura and Terra Mitica. The Dutch De Efteling spent the last decade “Americanizing” its facilities.
Merely the United Kingdom has greater than a smattering “pleasure shorelines” and “worlds of experience”. A recently mooted Dracula theme park in Romania was shot down by irate citizens and an overweening bureaucracy. “New Europe” is no better than “Old Europe” when it comes to entrepreneurship.
In market penetration and shelling out per guest, The european countries reaches least ten years behind the USA. Indeed, the eerie paucity of theme parks is symptomatic of the generally moribund, rigid and hyper-regulated economies of the European Union. The continent has less than half America’s number of parks per 10 million denizens and one third its visits per head per year.
Only 20 significant European sights garner greater than 1 million in yearly attendance. Another 50 or so attract less than 1 million patrons. With revenues of c. $2 billion, Europe’s parks combined amount to one third the sector in the USA and underperform many parks in Asia as well.
European businesses remain woefully primitive when it comes to advertising and marketing and instructing their public. According to the Economic Research Associates, a consultancy, venture capital is rare and usually squandered by developers on wages and other “soft”, non-productive costs. Management is inexperienced and peripatetic.
In Parts of asia, style areas are considered the magic pill. Japan has Disney World and the Tokyo DisneySea Park. Disney is slated to open a giant franchise in Hong Kong in 2005. Mainland China is eyeing the experiment favorably. Universal Studios countered by inaugurating a themed playground in Osaka in 2001 and by embarking on three feasibility studies in China.
From Jakarta, Indonesia (the Taman Ria amusement park) to Vietnam – many people are climbing around the bandwagon. There seems to be a dearth of American interest in Europe despite its far higher purchasing power and the existence of a single business address – the European Commission.
Concept parks are multifarious organizations. They provide work to thousand of small suppliers in a virtuous ripple effect. Hosting and gaming experts, marketers, managers, on-site employees, suppliers of logistics, food retailers and caterers, entertainers – all benefit mightily from the presence of such grounds. The park’s brand is often parlayed into trinkets, toys, clothes and souvenirs sold by locals to tourists, both domestic and foreign.
Destination travel is a growth sector.
The Overseas Relationship of Amusement Parks and Tourist attractions, a business group, claimed that throughout the world recreation area attendance was up one quarter between 1991-2001 to 319 million men and women. During this decade, revenues perked up by 50 percent to almost $10 billion annually. This was largely due to a rise in per capita spending within the grounds from $23 to $30. Returns on – usually massive – investments are impressive even in saturated markets such as the United States.
the london resort, recently announced partnership agreements with impressive companies like PWc. Despite facing some suspiciously well-funded opposition clinging to what could be described as tenuously thin justifications about species of bugs that just happen to have been discovered to live there.
EuroDisney is partly responsible for the shortage of inspired parks in Europe. For many years it was perceived, quite correctly, as an insatiable white elephant gulping rivers of red ink. Reality moved on but impressions – fostered by smug pundits – lasted. Wary investors and governments throughout the Old Continent confined themselves to the mostly family-operated “garden parks” and “carnival grounds” built during the 1960s and 1970s.
The reality is that Disney’s Parisian venture is growing. The entertainment behemoth is planning to invest c. $540 million in Walt Disney Studios, an annex of the French outfit. This is projected to add 5 million visitors to the current 12.
Another content buyer is Six Flags. The operator recently expanded to Mexico and Europe where it runs the six sites of the former Walibi Parks and Movie world, an erstwhile Warner Bros. property in Germany. It soon added a Spanish Movie World to its portfolio. Non-US operations already account for 15 percent of its sales.
But these represent the exceptions that demonstrate the guideline. Europe is staid and serious. It prefers indigenous high-brow culture to American low-brow imports. Or so the French would have us all believe.
