Attendance up 2.2% in top 50 parks for 2004

Hmmm...no mention of Six Flags or the weather...wonder why.... ;)

Here is a longer story with Six Flags and the weather.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/041213/theme_park_attendance_4.html

Universal's 13 and 14 percent increases are really impressive. In addition to the Mummy addition, they are high quality, well run parks.

Was that first article short or what!

So... why is Amusement Business parroting Six Flags' "weather" excuse? Do they not want to offend their subscribers or something?

You have to believe Tivoli is VERY pleased with their new B&M boosting attendance nearly 30%!

Does anyone have the full list of all 50 parks?

Contrary to popular belief in enthusiast circles, attendance did decline at some SF parks due to weather. It's just to bad the execs decided to use that excuse more than it should.

Here is a site showing the top 25 attended parks with their attendance and whether it increased, decreased , or was flat.

Click here.

CP came in with a decrease at 3.1, PKI increased to 3.5, and SFGAm remained flat at 2.3.

Be interesting to hear what CP's excuse is for the decrease. :)

That's still normal for CP, especially in a year with nothing new. Anything over 3 million is about where they should be.

I don't take a lot of stock in the numbers overall though. I know for a fact that their 2003 numbers for SFWoA weren't even in the neighborhood of being correct, as managers from other parks in the chain enjoyed having some of the heat deflected from their own parks for not hitting numbers.

I thought it was interesting that BGT was the only park in Florida to decline. Looks like their poor ride operations are finally affecting them.

Anybody know the story on Canada's Wonderland? That 30 percent increase is phenomenal.

"Twelve of Six Flags' 13 parks on the top 50 list had attendance that was either flat or declined by as much as 13 percent from last year. The stagnant figures were caused by weather problems and that Six Flags didn't roll out a lot of new rides this year, said James Zoltak, editor of Amusement Business. "

Any predictions which was the lucky SF park that actually went up?

My guess on the SF park that had improved attendance is SFMW due to the addition of Shouka.

I guess PKI is now the highest attended seasonal amusement park in the country. They have now surpassed CP in that regard. I don't know if this is the first time or not though. Boomerang Bay really must have done wonders.

I'm surprised about the 2.3 million attendance figure for SFGAM. Considering they added all those rides this year as well as the mouse coaster, that's quite disappointing. Maybe weather was a factor at this park.

2.7 million doesn't look too good either for SFMM. They were usually at least in the 3 million range in years past not too far behind Cedar Point's attendance. I guess those days are over.

The trouble with SFGAm and their new additions is that they really didn't market them.

The occasional "New Mardi Gras area" was briefly mentioned on TV ads and radio spots but they didn't go into detail of what it had to offer along with the new rides. Kind of ashame because they probably missed out on added attendance in that regard. Weather did play a part in the early part of the season as all of May and some of June were for the most parts washouts due to rain.

I don't think they will be making the same mistake with the new waterpark going in.*** This post was edited by Chitown 12/14/2004 2:09:23 AM ***

While SFGAm added 5 new rides this year. They didn't really market them at all. They had a few radio ads...but no TV Commercials for the new rides and area, just the standard Mr. Six ads.

The lack of advertising for the new rides I think is probably a major factor in the flat attendence at SFGAm.

Edit: Scott beat me to it :(*** This post was edited by CoasterDude316 12/14/2004 2:09:01 AM ***

Suprise suprise, Six Flags uses weather as an excuse.

I too wonder which SF park actually went up, maybe SFEG since they added the Half Pipe, that is the only "major" addition that I could think of to really boost attendance.

Universal Orlando really impressed me with the 13/14% increase, and with all of the hurricanes late in the summer, for the Orlando parks to increase so much is an even more amazing feat!
(sorry, just realized that one of the articles already brought that up)

On the local news I saw that US parks increased 4%.

Maybe we will start to see an increase due to the promising figures... oh, and maybe rain clouds won't hover over SF parks next year.

One last note, a quarter of a billion people visited amusement parks last year (that just impresses me, nothing special I guess.)

So you really think that a half-pipe coaster at SFEG would outdo a killer whale(Shouka) at SFMW for an attendance boost?

"Twelve of the Six Flags parks had attendance that was flat or declined" I would say for those that were flat, that is an improvement over last year when 99% of their parks had attendance decline.