Amusement Park Attendance numbers question.

LaMarcus said:
I didn't see anything from AB, but the 12/14/04 Knoxville News Sentinel has Pete Owens, PR director for Dollywood, saying that 2004 attendance was in the "2.2 million range" and up 2-3% from last year.

It seems like it would actually be higher than that. In 2001 the park itself claimed that it had 2.4 million guests, so apparently during 2002 and 2003 attendance dropped somewhat.

RamblinWreck: These aren't Lemon Chill people I'm talking to. They're people I trust, and they give me the real poop because they trust I won't repeat it (aside from the vague generalities, of course). I said last year many of their guesses were blatantly wrong, and I'll stick by that this year.

I didn't think that you were talking to some vendors, but I was just being general too, because wouldn't SF and other companies want to deny drops...?

Not wanting to let one's competitors know attendance (for example) may outweigh any benefits to the stock price of announcing attendance.

In any event, as an investor, I could care less how many widgets you sold last year. I care a lot more if your revenues and, even more importantly, your profits on widget sales are increasing.

For example, many folks believe that DLRs attendance summer '04 was below that of summer '03. But, there were many fewer discounts offered in '04, and employees could not comp their friends into the parks during summer '04 (but could in '03). Fewer people in the parks (requiring lower staff and operating hours) at a higher per-capita price? Increased profits and happy investors.

Very true.. and to avoid being called a "fanboy" of a certain company I won't name names, but a park/chain may want to let another park/chain think they've surpassed them so that they don't gun for them as much.

I mean, think about it psychologically. In high school, I was in track and my main race was the 400m. There were a couple of times where I'd do "well" place wise, but my time would suck (my very first race I placed 2nd with a time of 1:03!). Why? because I wasn't fast, I was just faster than most of my competition and there wasn't motivation for me to dig deeper. On the flipside, my fastest time ever (51.0 for those who care) I finished 5/6 in my heat. I have no doubt that the reason I ran my fastest was because my competition was in front of me, and I gave everything I had to pass the other kid so I wasn't 6th ;)