The Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) and the Economics practice at AECOM have released their annual 2009 Theme Park Attendance Report, which shows attendance at theme parks worldwide and in North America dropping slightly from 2008 levels.
Highlights of the 2009 attendance statistics from the report:-
Top 25 theme parks worldwide - 185.4 million (down 0.3% from 2008)
Top 20 North American theme parks – 121.1 million (down 1.3% from 2008)
Top 20 European theme parks - 57.3 million (no change from 2008)
Top 10 Asian theme parks - 65.5 million (down 3.5% from 2008)
Top 20 worldwide water parks - 20.7 million (up 2.1% from 2008)
Dig deeper into the North American statistics, and you get some neat trends.
While attendance for all the Orlando theme parks put together dropped 9% in 2009, the drop had nothing to do with attendance at Disney’s parks. In fact, attendance at Walt Disney World in Florida actually grew 1% to 17.23 million.
Disneyland in Anaheim lead Disney’s growth with 15.9 million visitors in 2009 – a growth of 8% over 2008 attendance. Disney’s California Adventure grew 9.5% to 6.05 million visitors.
These statistics, coupled with the overall North American drop of 1.3%, suggest that while the theme park sector lost visitors, Disney not only managed to hold its own, but also reeled in visitors from its competitors.
Magic of the Disney brand or good management? Likely a little bit of both – as proved by the success of the ‘Give a Day, Get a Day’ promotion, under which 1 million people signed up to volunteer their time for their community, in return for free admission to one of Disney’s parks.
Apparently Universal’s magic isn’t so strong (2010 might be a better year after the Harry Potter park opens) - 2009 attendance at Universal Studios Orlando tanked 12% to 5.4 million visitors. Universal Studios Hollywood dropped 6% to 4.3 million visitors.
Seaworld too had a bad year, with Seaworld Orlando down 6.8% to 5.8 million visitors and Seaworld San Diego down 12.6% to 4.2 million visitors.
Match Seaworld’s sharp drops against the 2.1% growth of water parks worldwide, and taking into consideration the bad publicity over the death of a trainer at Seaworld Orlando earlier this year, things don’t look too good for North American water parks.
For more details and trends, download the full TEA report here (pdf file).
