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Well - they could really do with getting into bed with Mack - the whole place could do with a refurb... But why not? Disney is the first 'true' theme park - they set the standard that everyone tried to emulate... albeit on lower budgets. The contrast in those quotes is stark... put simply - our parks are reducing their costs to improve their bottom line by cutting hours, cutting facilities to find 'efficiencies'... they're not efficiencies - they're reductions to the previously offered guest experience... sure - certain rides, or shops don't get much patronage at certain times of the day... but thats not what is important - what's important is that one guest who might want to shop there, or ride that at that time now can't, because the company wants to save $20ish a day. In contrast, the final quote shows that they're increasing their costs, reducing their margins in order to increase guest offerings, which in turn increases volume of sales. The old adage 'you've got to spend money to make money' rings as true today as it ever did. Having just returned from a USA trip, seeing the little things that Disney does in park, without expectation of return is in fact what encourages you to spend more money. Two examples from my own experience: 1) when in a store, the cast members will engage with you - talk to you about your day and the reason for your visit etc. They try to find any opportunity to give you a badge ("button") for you to wear showing the reason for your visit (ie: anniversary, birthday, just married etc) and freely hand these out in almost every outlet and store in the park. They've already got your admission fee, and giving you a button isn't a pre-cursor to you making a purchase, or anything else for that matter... so why do they do it? For no other reason than to improve your guest experience. On top, most cast are eagle eyed enough to spot the buttons, and to give you their best wishes for your special day also... (ie "congratulations" or "happy birthday"). I challenge anyone to show me how these buttons (which are a cost, albeit a minor one) are associated in any way with making money... after our three days in the park, we had about 8 buttons between us (including two of the 'cars-land' buttons they were handing out in the area). now even if the button costs 25 cents in manufacture etc, thats $2 for us - or $1 per guest. Judging by the people in the park wearing a similar number of buttons - thats hundreds of dollars a day in buttons... and for what? Nothing but guest experience. 2) our other experience is a little more personal. After discovering on our first day that my favourite ride - Space Mountain had been shut down for unplanned issues, and that it wasn't expected to be open before we left LA, we discovered, at around 7pm on our last day that it was in fact open. Since we still had the fireworks and fantasmic to do, this altered our plans greatly as we most definitely had to ride this one as my Wife had never seen it before. After having spent more than 6 days straight at other parks, my wife had hurt her ankle, and spent our final day in disney in a wheelchair. Between 7pm and 11:30pm we managed to get 2 rides in. After visiting the photo booth and finding both photos were 'not the best' for various reasons, we were cut, but decided to buy the cheapest version of both photos - a digital download, which cost around $30 for the two. We got chatting with the cast member at the photo booth and explained that this was our honeymoon, that SM was our favourite ride, and that the closure had been the worst news of the trip, with the late reopening being the best news we'd received... but that the ankle injury had impacted on our enjoyment of the park. After also trading a pin or two with the cast member, she asked us if we'd like to ride it again to try for a better photo. We said we'd have liked to but the queue was too long for us to get through again before closure. She called one of the leads for SM, back-doored us into the Wheelchair car (i'll talk about this later but i have to say an amazingly efficient way of assisting disabled guests without disrupting the main queue), we were on in less than 5 minutes, and coming back out at 11:40, just in time to see the third of our photos spit out of the photo printer (with the first two behind it), which she promptly placed into separate photo wallets, took my digital download card to upload the third one onto it, and then refused to take my credit card, telling me that the photos, a space mountain t-shirt, and a Disneyland keyring that she'd placed into a carry bag were a belated wedding present, and their way of trying to make our day. So in short - our $29.90 digital photo download purchase turned into a free-front-row ride, $60 worth of photos, another $15 digital download, a $45 t-shirt and a $9 keyring. $130 RRP just to make our day finish on a good note... and at that time of the day, there was no chance the park would recoup that from us (we'd spent way more than that in the past 3 days but they weren't to know that)... but that experience left my wife with a great impression of Disney, and guaranteed that we would immediately begin planning our next visit... again - i challenge anyone to show me how this interaction was in any way about making money, instead of just improving the guest experience...

-13

Of course they did - as one of the top two buyers for the AALARA market - they'd be sure to be well represented. doesn't mean they're buying anything decent... more likely they were digging through the discount bins for last season's seconds.

I do like the way that Ardent put it in their latest ASX release: To be fair, Village Roadshow aren't very different: Meawhile, here's what the annual report of another international operator who obviously don't know how to run a theme park business have to say about the topic: