Lost Island by the Numbers
If you're aware of this amazing little unicorn you're also aware their attendance has been disappointing. Or more accurately, catastrophic. The first new ground-up outdoor theme park in the US since Hard Rock Park, Lost Island sadly seems to have made the same mistake of massively overestimating their potential market.
https://wcfcourier.com/news...9aec3.html
Last year they only had 26,425 visitors, but they were plagued by an uncertain opening date and supply issues. This article says that as of last week they have only had 46,013 visitors this season. The park was built to handle 7,5000 guests a day and their single biggest day was 1,400 people. I saw elsewhere that the owner was "hoping" for a 10x increase on attendance this year but they're not even knocking at the door of double.
Everyone's first thought is that it was crazy to build such an attraction in the middle of nowhere, but they have a very successful water park next door. I don't know who they hired to do their market analysis but they sold the city on the idea that they would have 250,000-350,000 visitors IN THE FIRST YEAR.
"He said the developers’ most conservative estimate is that the economic impact in the first year will be $32 million, but it could potentially be twice that."
Those naive (or misleading) projections convinced the city to go on the hook for construction bonds in addition to paying $10mil to widen the road there.
I was curious about the population in that area and found this interesting tool
https://www.freemaptools.co...lation.htm
If you draw a circle with a 60km radius around the park, and if EVERY SINGLE PERSON living within that circle showed up this year, you would just barely hit their 'first year low end projection' of 250,000 visitors. The nearest major city is Cedar Rapids, which is a full hour away and even then only has a population of 136,000.
The good news is that they're discussing plans for next year so hopefully they make it to reopening. Their commitment to theming and storytelling looks really incredible and I love the optimistic spirit they brought to the whole enterprise. I hope they are able to find their magic key to make the numbers work before they have to call it all off.
I thought Lost Island was great – especially Volkanu, which is top notch. I'm rooting for them.
I develop Superior Solitaire when not riding coasters.
They will need a good season next year. If not it could be their last. It seems attendance is dropping at many parks this year?
Those numbers almost imply people are actively avoiding the place. Roughly 500 customers a day? I don’t care what it cost to build it; they can’t possibly be covering their operating costs with that kind of attendance.
There’s a casino nearby as well, which the same folks may have owned at one point, but it seems they sold it to Caesars. In any case, I don’t think there’s a lot of evidence that casinos and amusement parks are complementary businesses.
This park is well designed, the theming is pretty cool, and they have some really fun rides. Any time I look at photos of the park though I consistently have the same gut reaction….where is the foliage and trees?!?!?! In its current condition it “looks” like a giant concrete pad baking in the sun from every photo….not a “Lost Island.” Hopefully next season they can utilize landscaping to give it a lush Pacific Island tropical feel so photographs reflect the sense of adventure somewhere mysterious.
I visited Lost Island last month. One major flaw I noticed was online ticket buying.
I was going to buy tickets the day of on the way to the park, only to find out that their website said tickets weren't available that day. Most would probably give up and decide not to go right there.
I however was going past there on my way to Valleyfair anyway and decided to stop in and see if tickets were available. They were, and of course the park was empty. They weren't selling them online anymore because they charge $5 more the day of to buy tickets, and you can only buy them at the gate.
For a park struggling to get anybody to come, that seems like a terrible business plan.
The park itself is nice, but I think people are over rating the themeing of the park a lot. They probably should be running some sort of discounts and bundling with the waterpark just to get people through the gates at this point.
I just checked out ticketing on the website, definitely wonky. They also are doing the exact opposite of every other park for single day admission, the advertised price is the true cost. Most other parks utilize psychological manipulation just like retail, there’s the “full value price” and then the discounted “sale price” if you have a coupon, Coke can, etc. to make you feel good you saved money.
Pricing for season passes is crazy! Military and senior discounted admission prices are too high. It’s less expensive at CF/SIX/SEAS parks!
Holy carp! Holiday World, similarly in the middle of nowhere but not struggling to get people in the door, charges half that much. I’ve argued, regularly, that season passes are underpriced, but when your daily attendance is in the hundreds, surely the thing to do is to get people in the door as often as possible and sell them hot dogs and cheese fries.
There are 10.6 million people within 100 miles which I think is a reasonable "day trip" distance, assuming that there are highways to get there from the major cities.
Obviously they have failed at every level of marketing, but I think they were simply too ambitious as well. The park is at an awkward size at which it's too big to be supported by the local population but not big enough to entice people to drive two hours to visit.
Parks like Holiday World and numerous others have proven that you can have a successful theme park several hours away from a major population center. However, if you think of those examples, all of them developed organically -- they all started with a couple rides and attractions and then grew as they were able to pull in more people from outside their zip code.
I'd argue that Hard Rock Park could have been the rare example of a non-Orlando park that was built to be a destination park from day one, but they clearly were not financially prepared to give it a couple years for marketing and word of mouth to get attendance to profitable numbers.
Pictures of this park remind me of Roller Coaster Tycoon. I have a plot of shadeless land and I built some stuff on it and opened it. While I fully acknowledge it is way harder to start a new park organically compared with the well known parks of today that started out decades ago (and then some), this one just seems very artifical and weird.
I've been told that the owners privately funded this project. And therein lies the difference between this park and Hard Rock Park. These folks can go on losing their own money a lot longer than Hard Rock Park could lose someone else's. This park won't be profitable for decades at the rate they are going, but if they have the money to burn, they may be fine with that.
Perhaps there will be a lift in their core waterpark business as a result of this additional gate that we can't see, but it's probably not substantial.
PhantomTails:
There are 10.6 million people within 100 miles
Where are you getting that number? The only cities within 100 miles are Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, and Iowa city with a combined population of about 300,000
Holiday World has Evansville, Bloomington, Bowling Green, and Louisville with combined pop over 900,000, besides being in a more densely populated area in general and then having cincinnati, Nashville, and Indianapolis all within an easy weekend drive.
You're probably right. I was using the map tool that you originally linked to and I think it's extremely buggy. I tried to reproduce my results and now I can't get a value more than 92,000 even if I change the radius to 1000 miles and reset the map.
Having worked in park marketing briefly, next year I’d definitely do some of the old-school promotions to flood the market area with their brand. Examples: partner with the local Coca-cola distributors to “save $10 on admission” with a soda can then recycle the cans via local fire department Aluminum Cans for Burned Children program, McDonald’s drink cup branded promo, etc. Maybe they do these already? One of the crazier ones I’ve seen are the carload sales, Geauga Lake did this and people would show up with folks crammed into a car and the park would be insanely busy…which meant money spent on food, beverages, games, golf/go karts, etc.
I have to say to some extent, what does a park do to market itself like that. If we go back, say 30 years or so, a new park could easily market itself to everyone. They'd buy ads in a newspaper or TV station, and people would hear about it. If you really wanted targeted ads, it would go to people via mail in the weekly "junk mail" fliers we all get. But today, what do you do? Network TV viewership is way down. Newspaper readership. Yep, virtually gone. Does online advertising work? 5 years ago I might have said yes, but with the deluge of spam today, I'm not sure that will help get through. I'm not saying this is easy, but honestly, this is probably where their biggest problem is. I've not seen any advertising for this at all. For a new venue like this, AAA might be a starting point. That is my go to place for a lot of event / attraction tickets. In Lost Island's case, maybe I'd like to take a weekend trip in September or October - i.e. when theme parks tend to be doing a lot of business with "Halloween Events". Doesn't look like they are open.
Like everything else, I have a feeling there are lots of complex mistakes here. The tourism numbers really seem to me to be overly optimistic. But, it also seems like the park itself isn't advertising enough to be successful. This location is about the same distance from Chicago as the Dells is.
The GM sending out tweets like these likely won't help things either. He essentially tweets out all of the things we used to say in the breakroom when I worked at WDW, but wouldn't dare actually say out loud in the park. Let alone publish on the internet as the General Manager.
Find Us More Guests For That RMC
Wow, that guy is a special kind of awful. I wouldn't give them money or work for them.
Jeff - Editor - CoasterBuzz.com - My Blog
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