Cedar Fair reports "strong performance" so far for 2021

Richard Zimmerman said:

We are also very encouraged by the early trends in the sale of 2022 season passes and related all-season products, which through yesterday are pacing well ahead of the early sales numbers of the then record 2020 season pass program.

I still think this is not the point of pride they are trying to make it out to be. The passes are so underpriced for the product offered, and to me it's nothing more than undervaluing their own product. If they were priced appropriately (higher than Six Flags but still lower than an Orlando park pass) and you were having higher than usual sales with pent up demand, then great! But if you are setting all these pass sale records for a product that has evolved, but not necessarily changed in recent history, I feel like that's a huge red flag that the pricing is too low.

Totally agree. You can sell a lot of anything if you price it low enough. It doesn't mean that you hit the sweet spot against what the market will tolerate.

And that some people think a given price is too low doesn't mean it isn't hitting the sweet spot against what the market will tolerate.

Weren't season pass sales increasing before the Gold Pass, when pricing was significantly higher? That seems to indicate they hadn't reached the sweet spot.

Do they release season ticket sales by park?

Not to my knowledge, but if the chain's season pass base was growing absent any major Gold Pass-esque promotions, and Cedar Point, at least anecdotally, was pretty damn busy pretty consistently, it stands to reason that CP could have charged the same if not more for the product, rather than basically give it away.

Yeah, that's exactly where I am. Decreasing the price when you were in a period of growth seems like an odd choice.

And especially coming out of a year where staffing was such a challenge and not knowing if that trend will continue in 2022, I would think the Disney "less is more" strategy with expensive admission combined with slightly decreased attendance for a better experience would be the no-brainer decision.

For all the sound and fury about the cost of Disney parks, it isn't reflected in the lines for F&W, that's for sure.

Not to my knowledge, but if the chain's season pass base was growing absent any major Gold Pass-esque promotions, and Cedar Point, at least anecdotally, was pretty damn busy pretty consistently, it stands to reason that CP could have charged the same if not more for the product, rather than basically give it away.

So we don't have the data. But people who made the pricing decisions have the data. Not relying on extrapolating data from the entire chain to individual parks. They have the data for each park. And looking at data not anecdotes.

So either management doesn't understand a basic principle of economics (which pretty much anyone who took a high school economics class and definitely a college economics class knows) or the data is otherwise than the extrapolation/anecdotes.

One thing I learned over the years on this site is enthusiasts tend to view parks through enthusiasts' eyes. They know what they would do with given price point, given a certain perk, etc. Assumption is that everyone will do the same. But the vast majority of people aren't enthusiasts.

Disney and Cedar Fair have a very different revenue mix (gate, food, lodging, merchandise, etc). As a result, taking the same approach is one won't necessarily work for the other.

Why does it matter if we have park data? We can see the gold passes range from $79 to $119 across the chain. You could make all of those assertions about Six Flags in the Burke era when they did the same thing Cedar Fair is doing now. You know how that turned out.

And come on, "enthusiast eyes?" This is the site where the community that calls out enthusiast eyes. We get more right than we get wrong, and Gonch has every post cataloged to prove it.

So you determine sweet spot in terms of pricing by touch? Smell? Weather forecast in Seattle? Of course you need data.

As a journalist major you presumably know the meaning of the word "tend" right?

And all from the guy who views the world through Disney eyes. Too funny.

If I remember things correctly, the failure mode of the Six Flags Story years wasn't (just) giving away the gate. It was also combined with an inadequate focus on customer service and an over-extension of cap-ex. I bet they could have survived one of those at a time. Maybe even two. All three together is pretty tough.

Cedar Fair seems guilty of (at most) one of those---and the debate here is whether or not they are even guilty of the one. If I understand this point correctly:

> So we don't have the data. But people who made the pricing decisions have the data.

that leads to a set of questions that we can guess at, but leadership (probably) knows the answers to:

1: How many visits does a gold pass holder make on average to the park in a season?
2: How many times does a gold pass holder park on average in a season? (Almost certainly meaningfully smaller than #1)
3: How do the add-ons (season drink, food, fastlane, etc.) for a gold pass holder perform?
4: How do changes in the passholder mix influence demand for the resorts?

There are probably others, but the easiest (and maybe most important) one to think about is #1. If it's more than three, then the pricing seems like it might be a bad idea. If it's less than two, the park is #WINNING. If it is in between those two, then it is arguably working as an upsell mechanism.

And, I would not be surprised to find that the average is somewhere between two and three. I suspect everyone who buys one plans to visit at least three times. But, some (and maybe many) of those people won't quite make it as often as they'd planned, because plans change. The distribution is almost certainly heavy-tailed, so there will absolutely be some outliers, and so the average is not descriptive statistically.

But, it strikes me that the average is very meaningful economically. At the end of the day, if the per-caps are going in the right direction (they are, comparing '19 vs. '21) and attendance is not falling by more than a compensating amount (it isn't, on the same basis) then they are doing something right. Could they be doing something "more right"? Maybe, but at least it isn't wrong.

Yet.

GoBucks89 said:

So you determine sweet spot in terms of pricing by touch? Smell? Weather forecast in Seattle? Of course you need data.

As a journalist major you presumably know the meaning of the word "tend" right?

And all from the guy who views the world through Disney eyes. Too funny.

For ****'s sake, this is CoasterBuzz, this is what we do. If you want to make an argument for something, then do that instead of implying we're all a bunch of dumbasses. Then we can talk about what's "too funny."

What Brian said, and I would add that the pent-up demand effect on everything, which has pushed inflation higher, labor costs higher and is breaking supply chains, all makes a pretty good argument to be skeptical of anything being cheaper right now.

Brian Noble said:

If I remember things correctly, the failure mode of the Six Flags Story years wasn't (just) giving away the gate. It was also combined with an inadequate focus on customer service and an over-extension of cap-ex. I bet they could have survived one of those at a time. Maybe even two. All three together is pretty tough.

Cedar Fair seems guilty of (at most) one of those---and the debate here is whether or not they are even guilty of the one. If I understand this point correctly:

Lurking over on Pointbuzz it looks like at least Cedar Point was pretty guilty of number two as well for at least the first half of the season. Food lines longer that coaster lines, bad Six Flags and SeaWorld/Busch Tampa style dispatch times on major rides, major rides opening hours late, coaster lines being cut off 2 hours before park close, etc., seemed to be the norm for at least May and June.

that leads to a set of questions that we can guess at, but leadership (probably) knows the answers to

I agree that the park doesn't have perfect info as to all of those questions. But they certainly have more info than we do. And thats been my point in this thread and the 500 other times this conversation has happened here since Cedar Point first announced Gold Passes.

But even without the data, you can look at what people who have more data than you are doing and draw conclusions. They set the price at 99 cents from the get go. They have pass data from other parks plus a lot of data from CP over the decades. And then when they had the chance to adjust the price for the 2022 season (with the ability to increase it like many other things right now, say the 99 cent offer was a 150th anniversary thing, etc), they kept it at 99 cents.

One, could be that management doesn't understand Econ 101 in terms of impact that price increases or decreases can have on profits. Doesn't seem likely though.

Two, could be they are getting it wrong. Given there is some art involved because you are not keeping everything else constant to determine the profit impact on one price change. That is something in all the discussions on this I have never ruled out.

Three, could also be that the data shows the current price is the best economic choice for the company.

Many people here seem to totally discount #3 as even being possible with more apparently supporting #1. On what basis?

"People here" have not been leaning on either condition. They've been leaning on the idea that management thinks that they can get people in cheap and have them spend more once they're inside, a movie that we've all seen before. That's a reasonable conclusion given the emphasis on dining plans and Fastlane and generally higher per capita spending. They reported July per caps at "120% of 2019 levels." And when they start talking in the next breath about "challenging business optimization" and the reports from the front line guests is uncharacteristically negative, it's pretty reasonable to conclude that the formula is not winning.

GoBucks89 said:

And all from the guy who views the world through Disney eyes. Too funny.

How man-bites-dog is it that someone on here is being chastised for viewing Cedar Fair's results through Disney eyes? 20 years ago it was all about this site having a Cedar Fair bias.

That all ended when Dick Kinzel bought Pop Forums to... wait a minute... wrong timeline.