Opinion: The Cedar Fair and Six Flags merger implications

I have to wonder, given this merger, what will become of the various membership / season pass, etc. programs. Given that we are near SFGA, we have had the membership for a few years and it has been handy to be able to travel a bit with it. But, I also see that CF hasn't been as accommodating with their season passes and travel overall. I know there is not a huge amount of overlap, aside from the Midwest with SFStL and World s of Fun, Knotts and Magic Mountain, and Dorney and Great Adventure.

Curious what you mean by “CF hasn't been as accommodating with their season passes and travel overall.”

Both chains charge about $100 to upgrade to a pass that’s good at all parks.

PhantomTails:
Both chains charge about $100 to upgrade to a pass that’s good at all parks.

Actually, that's not entirely true. The membership plan which Six Flags had / still continues to support for those in it is good at every park and includes free parking at every park. Looking at (at least the Great America website), you can either buy a season pass that is just valid at Great America / Hurricane Harbor for $99.99, or buy "Six Flags Plus" for $9.99 per month ($119.88 per year) which includes all parks and water parks... For Cedar Fair, if my home pass is from Cedar Point, the pass that is just good for Cedar Point is $130, while if I want to be able to go to any park, it goes up to $325.

Now, I will also say, between the Membership plan existing, going away, coming back, going away again, it's kind of unclear what Six Flags has been doing long term with season passes and memberships...

Walt S:

Cedar Fair, if my home pass is from Cedar Point, the pass that is just good for Cedar Point is $130, while if I want to be able to go to any park, it goes up to $325.

I think that second number is not quite right. They changed the pass offerings for 2024 to discontinue the Platinum and instead make all-parks an add-on to the Gold pass. The price was $100 last I checked, but it is dynamic.

https://www.cedarpoint.com/...k-passport

For Cedar Fair, if my home pass is from Cedar Point, the pass that is just good for Cedar Point is $130, while if I want to be able to go to any park, it goes up to $325.

I think you're confusing the prestige pass (lounge access and a dedicated entrance lane, wowie zowie) with the platinum pass (standard pass but good at all CF parks). I looked at my receipts from past years and paid $240 last year and $192 the prior year for them. That would put them about $110 more than a one-park pass. As Brian noted above, the upgrade this year with the new (and confusing) system is $100.

OK, Yeah, I have to say I thought the Six Flags Membership levels were confusing a few years ago, but this, yeah, is just as confusing. And I should also add I think there is a history of passes not being handled smoothly when ownership situations change (i.e. Geauga Lake in the 2000's...)

On their joint call, the parks said they expect to continue running their pass programs separately (as currently in place for each park) through next fall at which time they will begin to sell 2025 passes when they expect to have combined pass offerings.

Jeff:

• The soft "experiential" parts to operating amusement parks are the things that make you love them. This means adequate staffing operations to get people on and off attractions quickly. It's the random street performers, resort experiences and entertainment that you're not expecting, but enjoy. It's the random employee that makes your visit better when you don't expect it. The cost cutting of existing Cedar Fair execs kills all of that, and the press release suggests that there's an absurd billion and a half to realize by combining the companies. Mark my words, because I will say "I told you so," that savings does not exist.
• My contacts in the company suggest that Cedar Fair has reverted to a world of micromanagement. The empowerment that Ouimet enabled is gone. GM's are order takers. It might be a billion-dollar corporation, but the markets that each park operate in are different in terms of culture, demographics, income, etc. You can't simply apply one paradigm from a park to others. Former CEO Dick Kinzel did this to disastrous effect after the Paramount acquistion. Furthermore, you don't want to chase out the people who "get it" and can make day to day decisions on the fly, in context to their market. The Zimmerman tenure appears to have done just that.

Spot-on to both points. Tim Fisher, Cedar Fair's COO, has been gutting the guest experience at Cedar Fair parks since COVID, particularly entertainment and the "streetmosphere" that Ouimet so regularly talked about. CF's CFO even highlighted in during the Q3 earnings call - "The decrease in operating expenses was driven by our new cost saving initiatives highlighted by a meaningful reduction in seasonal labor hours and in-park entertainment costs."

Lastly, the culture of micromanagement is alive and well at Cedar Fair under Fisher and Zimmerman. As Jeff noted, Ouimet brought a culture of empowerment, inspire and trust. The GMs ran the parks. Now, the GMs are simply figureheads taking orders from Charlotte - with their only objective to cut costs - at the expense of both the guest and employee experience. Fisher is actually worse than Kinzel. Kinzel spent the vast majority of his time at Cedar Point - when he was out of site, out of mind (and granted, 15 years ago CF didn't have the digital capabilities and analytics to micromanage the parks from Sandusky like they do now.... so Kinzel was neutered to a degree for every park other than CP). Fisher definitely runs a "command and control" culture vs a "trust and inspire" culture ... and it's been really sad to see park-level leadership and headcount getting slashed in favor of an extraordinarily bloated corporate team in Charlotte.

RCMAC:

I don’t know what the New Englanders prefer to say but when I was there I didn’t hear a lot of “Riverside” but heard more “Six Flags”.

Riverside Park is the only park for which I have *never* seen a positive review. When Premier Parks bought the place, a friend of mine lamented that I would never be able to experience the tragedy of Riverside Park. I suspect that when that became Six Flags New England, Premier was quite happy to put the Riverside brand out of their misery, as were the local customers. By all accounts, after the Premier purchase, the park improved drastically *immediately* and proceeded to get better with the Six Flags branding.

ObDisclaimer: I have personally never visited either Riverside or Six Flags New England, and the reviews I have seen of "both" parks are necessarily limited, and largely confined to rec.roller-coaster.

Another thing...

Jeff and Jetsetter agree:

the press release about the merger refers to guests as "consumers." If you don't see them as "guests" in the context of their business, you probably don't understand the hospitality industry or the experience economy.*

I'll agree with you to a point. But I also believe that anyone in the hospitality business who forgets that their "guests" are, in fact, "consumers"...or I actually prefer the term, "customers"...does so at his own peril. Guests are consumers, and they exhibit the usual consumer behaviors, including the classics of voting with their wallets and feet.

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* Neither of them actually said that; I figured I'd combine their matching statements so it doesn't matter who I am quoting.
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Finally, on the whole US Economy thing...

The pessimism about the state of the US economy is rooted in reality. I have it better than a lot of people, because of my employment situation, and most critically, because I bought my house in 1997 and haven't seen a "rent increase" in 26 years. But if I were renting, I'd be in serious trouble right now. Rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in my relatively cheap neighborhood is about double my mortgage on my 3-bedroom house, and more important amounts to almost an entire two-week paycheck. Add to that the fact that nearly everything else I buy has increased significantly (most notably fuel and groceries) while my income has not come close to keeping up. I'm doing okay, but I'm pretty much out of "disposable" income at this point and I'm having a tough time meeting expenses without taking on additional debt. That's a far cry from a couple of years ago, when I was aggressively paying down debt and still had money to play with. My income has barely changed since then, but even though I'm now buying less, my expenses have grown dramatically. Sure, my house is worth a lot more than it was, but what good does that do me? Okay, I can perhaps take on more debt if I really need cash, but the more obvious impact is that it just increases my taxes!

Just one data point. Obviously just in this small group you're going to see very different observations.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Fisher and Zimmerman

I do find it funny the worst parts of Kinzel rubbed off on them, and he seems to be pushing a Paramount Parks beef towards Sandusky when Jeff is right the Ouimet approach took the best of Disney/CF/PP and melded them.

At the same time, I don't think long-term they are going to last as long as Dick, the shareholders and Wall St. won't stand for it, both are also in their late 60's.

I think the biggest benefit is the combined company has a lot more leverage to handle both their debit, especially in the present rate climate.

Zimmerman is like 59 or 60 I beieve and the same for Fisher. They have plenty of time to run things into the ground, unfortunately. Hopefully they'll focus on bringing food and beverage at Six Flag parks up to the standards of more recent Cedar Fair additions and not on cutting staff.

They were both 62 when Cedar Fair filed its annual report in February 2023. Still relatively young.

You hope that with mergers, companies combine the best of their respective entities. But too often, I have seen them doing the exact opposite. Hope that doesn't happen here.

Still relatively young.

The other problem with CEOs is that much like Congress they like to hang around past the sell by date (see Murdoch and Kinzel, although Dicks house was literally in the Parking lot). But I would hope both would want to enjoy their post-65 years, and let a sane Park GM take over, but just daydreaming.

I get that everyone is different but I cannot understand why some people want to keep working long after they can retire. I am hoping to get out at 60, but at the very same company there are people who are still working into their 70s. I get liking your job, but it seems like some people like their job more than their life.

The sort of person who becomes an executive might do so in part because of the relationship between work and their sense of self.

Earlier in my career, I defined my worth by professional accomplishment and success. At the time, I thought I'd leave my career feet first. After a few personal crises (mostly self-inflicted) and a whole lot of therapy, I'm separating my sense of self from what I do for money. Perhaps coincidentally, I'm also now more serious about planning my retirement.

In other words, I think you are on to something with that last sentence.

Their work is the the whole of their lives. There is a unspoken belief that when they quit working they will be forgotten, and their life will end. Unless they die of a stroke or a coronary first.

I was thinking the same thing. My wife and I both dump a ton of money in to our retirement so we can go as soon as possible. These people are set for life (and maybe a couple more generations of lives) and they want to work until they're geriatric. I really don't get it. I can't imagine being that age and that well off and choosing to spend my time worrying about the ROI on a funnel cake stand refurbishment.

I retired with 33 years at 57 and I couldn’t think of anything better that I should do. I also had a job where plenty of replacements would be immediately available should I die in my sleep. While I took pride in a job well done I didn’t suffer from that need to stay “necessary”. I liked what I did, but not that much. I also remembered my dad getting 20 good years of retirement and I wanted to do the same. More than once I noticed the same name in both the retirement and memoriam columns in the company paper. No thanks.
I was born with a pension but that’s a thing of the past for most workers entering the force. My biggest adjustment was not having the same money coming in on a consistent basis, but I got over it. I’ve been gone 12 years now and I’m able to take trips to amusement parks during the optimal times of the year and on weekdays without worrying about vacation time. And that’s the important thing to me as I head into the final chapters.

One problem that many companies have is leaders who stayed past the normal retirement age which meant that the next generation of leaders didn't have a chance to development leadership skills. And at some point, its too late for them to do that and that generation tends to be skipped. But the generation below them isn't necessarily ready for prime time. That is definitely true in politics as well. Generation who should be in leadership roles at this point are struggling to gain footing because older generation is still around.

Some people are definitely too tied up in their jobs in terms of it defining their self worth/identity. They often stay too long because they cannot let go without losing who they are.

But there are some people who go beyond liking their work. They don't view it as work. It energizes them. Its enjoyable to them. Its not a matter of worrying about aspects of it. Its a challenge like climbing a mountain, building a puzzle or playing an complex board game. Though they do have a life outside of it. Its not for everyone. And from what I have seen, those types of people are far outweighed by the people who are defined by what they do for a living.

Dutchman:

Their work is the the whole of their lives. There is a unspoken belief that when they quit working they will be forgotten, and their life will end.

But enough about my 70 year old father that still works 60 hours a week and has no outside interests, hobbies or general ability to recreate.