SeaWorld Entertainment promotes executives, with new "chief transformation officer"

But will she get them to run two trains on Montu and Mako on weekdays again?

No doubt. And why is there a chief accounting officer separate of the CFO? And it doesn't matter how many chiefs there are as long as there's Scott Ross.

She won’t be there long enough to tell them.

"But will she get them to run two trains on Montu and Mako on weekdays again?"

Montu isn't running two trains on the weekends either, so.

Most large organizations, including SIX and FUN, have a CAO and CFO.

CAO typically responsible for day-to-day accounting operations such as transactions, general ledger, cash like AP and AR, financial reporting, P&L, sometimes tax, handling audits, etc.

CFO has overarching responsibility for finance and financial reporting but also more broadly with strategy, financial planning and analysis, budgeting, treasury, investor relations and usually other non-financial areas such as IT, real estate, HR, etc. For example, both real estate and security fall under the CFO at Disney and IT falls under the CFO at Cedar Fair.

I've worked for many "large organizations," including SeaWorld, and none of them had a CAO.

The Chief Transformation Officer will oversee the company’s effort to transform into pre-bankruptcy Six Flags.

I don’t know what to tell ya. Your experience is an outlier. Perhaps it was called a Controller. I’m a CPA, almost all large organizations I’ve worked with have a Chief Accounting Officer or Controller - including SEAS two peers both have CAO’s, FUN and SIX.

With most CFOs having responsibility for areas outside of “finance” like IT, HR, legal, real estate, security, strategy, etc, they aren’t involved in the day to day of general ledger transactions, accounting standards, cash, financial reporting, etc.

I’m shocked that SEAS - a $1.5B public company - hadn’t had a CAO or Controller until now. May have been part of the reason for all the turnover.

Don't get me wrong, they all probably had vice presidents or whatever, but they weren't C-suite positions.

Well that lasted 5 months.

https://www.mynews13.com/fl...next-month

Chelle Adams, joined the company in June 2022 as CFO, moved to Chief Transformation Officer in January 2023 and out in July 2023.

Since Scott Ross joined the SEAS board in November 2017, just over 5.5 years ago, SEAS has had 5 CEOs, 4 CFOs, 5 COOs or Chief Parks Operations Officers, 4 CHROs, 2 Chief Accounting Officers... and several Chief Strategy, Creative, Transformation, Marketing or Commercial officers.

What senior leader in their right mind would jump into that revolving door of executive leadership under Ross?

If Cedar Fair wasn’t billions in debt they could buy SEAS and get this craziness over with. Tampa would become Cedar Point of the south for cold winter months, Sandusky for warm summer months. Ideal for coaster enthusiasts!

Sounds like the only thing Michelle was able to transform was her LinkedIn profile.

Unreal. I haven't been to any of the parks in awhile, but I'm not encouraged by the ops accounts lately. At least the food is still good!

It's gone downhill at BGW over the past few years. I was talking with some people at CoasterCon and they echoed the same sentiment.

Most of the food choices from the past remain, but they don't taste nearly as good as they used to. For example, the German potato salad at Festhaus was swapped out with a dry variety that tastes super processed. This has been a theme for several years.

Perhaps this was just an aberration, but on this year's visit in March most of the homemade desserts had been replaced with prepackaged cake slices and cupcakes. I hope that was just a one-off thing.

I was at SWO Saturday 7/1. That park had the largest crowd I have ever seen there, the shark encounter had a wait, pinguins had an hour wait. There was long lines everywhere, however, I have to give it up for ops and F&B because they were hustling the whole day and doing their best to shorten those waits. Side note, as good as Ignite is, the Fourth of July tag they did after Ignite blew it out of the water, the finale had so much shells exploding all at once it drowned out the music and turned night into day. Major props to Sea World for not only having a great 4th show but for also doing it for 4 straight nights.

Touchdown:

pinguins had an hour wait.

Jeff:

At least the food is still good!

Boy it really has been a while since you've been to a SEAS park

Just my perspective... My handful of visits to SWO have been great... Rides were running two trains (if needed and it wasn't completely dead), the parks were clean and overall, just good experiences. I never once left SWO thinking "sucks". Caveat, I never eat at SWO so I don't have that input at least.

Likewise, visits to BGW, BGT, SW San Antonio, SW San Diego... In the past two years, I've genuinely enjoyed my time at all the parks greatly without any annoyances or issues with operations or anything. I never "get" the bashing of the parks, as my experiences have all been so good. Most notably, in San Antonio and BGW... I mean, we spent basically 2.5 days at BGW and still could have done more (compare to Dominion, which we went for about 2.5 hours and left to go back to BGW).

Perhaps I'm just lucky with my visits, but given the various parks/visits/etc... I'd like to think I am not an outlier.

In December I visited both BGT and SWO for the first time. I had a much more enjoyable experience at both parks then I did at Disney having to deal with Genie Plus.