Leaderboard

Get ready for the motherload, folks. For more boring captions under photos, as always, you can hit the link.

The thing is, after a huge retail bricks & mortar downturn at the start of the decade, major shopping centres have been punching back (and have been hugely successful) with new fit-outs that are very high-end, introducing new food & entertainment precincts and shifting brands like Westfield & Pac Fair away from shopping brands and turning them into lifestyle brands. The parks already have the keys to the castle, figuratively speaking. They have a captive audience who are super passionate (certainly way more passionate about parks than people are about shopping centres) about these psuedo-lifestyle brands that have been around for decades. They just need to spend the money to create a comparable product that's seen outside of the theme park industry, and people will rock up in droves. Disney certainly get this more then anyone, hence why they've got a bajillion food options at their parks (they even posted a video on Facebook today about cool foods at Disneyland for under $5 and there's tons of options) & position themselves as much as a lifestyle brand as much as possible (don't forget, lifestyle brands say way more merch, too.) This is the secret sauce for Top Golf. It taps into the booming Gen-X/Y leisure scene and has all the trimmings of a quality experience that could stand on its own two feet. So that being said, take the new areas of Pac Fair & Westfield Chermside and rip the best parts of them to get passholders spending more. That area outside of Dreamworld Parkway / Lego Store could be so brilliant with a classy retro fit-out, heaps of licensed drink & unique food, plenty of shade and places to relax and of course extended trade. Money spent on getting you through the gates might just get you to break even. The real money is in hotels & resorts (hence why Wanda Group is bailing from parks and focussing on hotels), unique premium experiences, pre & post dining and entertainment areas (Universal Citywalk) and of course, in-park food & merch. This is why Disney spends so much time getting Merch right and goes as far as to literally pump the scent of Churros down their Main Streets.

I like theme parks. I like activites which involve drinking. I am delighted to finally be part of the target audience for a thing.

Not particularly. The sooner our Parks become activity/precinct hubs outside their regular operating hours and start generating additional revenue streams, the sooner we'll see increased capital expenditure in response to the increased visitor numbers and avg. spend. I think Top Golf is going to be a massive success for VTP.

Really? Because I kind of got the opposite impression. While I'm pleased that there might bot be a design flaw, here's the thing I think you're not getting: There's no way to tell who the dodgey operators are. What also appears to be true, is that ride safety on the traveling circuit appears to be a voluntary thing, if you want to go above and beyond and make your rides safe, you can, if you want to take chances with safety, apparently you can do that too. So long as the conditions that allow dodgey operators to exist are present, stuff like this will keep happening, and people will continue to not trust traveling rides.

And don't forget the hair! 😜

The Dutch manufacturer of a thrill ride that broke apart and killed an 18-year-old man at the Ohio State Fair says excessive corrosion on a support beam led to the "catastrophic failure" http://abc.net.au/news/2017-08-07/ohio-state-fair-ride-malfuncion-caused-by-excessive-corrosion/8780044

So this has appeared. Looks like corrosion may be the reason for the failure: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-08-07/ohio-state-fair-ride-malfuncion-caused-by-excessive-corrosion/8780044

Least neither are as big a failure as Wonderland right @AlexB?

I'm getting relatively sick of the "DISNEY IS COMING TO AUSTRALIA" people popping up on the forum over the 3 years I've been here. Disney building a park on the Gold Coast, let alone Australia, would make little economic or business sense. One of the things that puts off big theme park companies setting up on the Gold Coast is the small population of the area itself. Even if you add Brisbane and the rest of South East Queensland to the number, it still adds up to less than 4 million. The two theme parks that Disney consider as their smallest parks, Hong Kong and Paris, both have population counts close to 7 million in their city metro areas. For those that don't know, Paris, despite it being open for 25 years, has never made a profit. Hong Kong, while it had a slow start, is picking up steam in recent years, with aggressive expansion (and a gigantic expansion plan in the years to come, including replacing half of Tomorrowland with Marvel attractions, a Frozen land, and a Moana area.) While the Gold Coast's tourism revenue is high for Australia, in comparison to other cities that Disney parks are built in, it is miniscule. Take a look at Paris and Hong Kong, for example. Paris, while tourism is declining greatly, is still among the world's most visited cities. The tourism revenue from Paris alone consists 7% of France's GDP, which in 2016 was 2.465 trillion USD, which equals about 3.1 trillion AUD, meaning the tourism revenue of Paris that year was $21.7 billion. Hong Kong's tourism is also quite strong, accounting for 5% of its GDP, which was 320.9 billion USD, or 405 billion AUD, meaning that the tourism revenue of Hong Kong was around $20 billion. By comparison, the Gold Coast's tourism revenue is tipped to reach just $7 billion by 2020. While impressive, it is tiny in comparison to the cities where Disney want to set up in. That's why Disney won't be coming to Australia - for a while. Just my 2c.

So long as the theme park remains their core priority in the area - you don't want some 'add-on' attraction becoming the main event and draining all the money AWAY from the theme parks...

Incredible photos and video! Im excited to see it later this week (thankyou GC work trip!) Is it just me, or does anyone else wish the TOP GOLF site was kept for more rides/coaster at MW?

The photo of the detached seat certainly would support that finding. The steel did not exactly look healthy.

Yeah, jumping the gun, I know. Probably because I'm firmly in the "carnival rides are not as safe or thoroughly regulated" camp. I know that's not a popular opinion on here, but that's where I stand...

News Article: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-40742586 Official Website: http://www.morganswonderland.com/park-info/about-morgans-wonderland ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's really good to see something like this existing in the world. Stumbling across this article this morning was the first time I've heard of a place like this so I don't know if something similar already exists somewhere. So have a read, have a heart and enjoy the feels trip.

I'd say we'll have a Joker face shortly, crane is up and running, multiple people at top of lift hill

Some amazing videos of late: And a brilliant Portal 2 ride, bit iffy on the Heroes crossover though.

They're doing fine now. Bankruptcy is almost a completely different thing in the states. Filing for chapter 11 over there gives businesses an opportunity to restructure various facets of the business to maintain operation, where-as here going bankrupt basically means closing the doors ala Wow Sight & Sound. With all that said, most people who have been here longer than six months knows that the "OMGZ DISNEY IZ COMINGS" thing comes and goes all too often, and I think all the mods, myself included, have banged our collective heads against the wall in trying to explain why again and again, that a "Magic Kingdom" style Disney park is not coming here for a long, long time. It's not the most profitable industry unless you're Disney or Universal and have crazy-good vertical integration of your core product. However, in the next few years with upturn in tourism, exposure from the games and the dollar settling in to a routine, I think we'll definitely continue to see more investment in the area. I don't think it's unreasonable to see someone like Merlin build a Legoland here in the next decade. Ultimately there's a reason why we really only have two major theme parks on the Gold Coast. Anyone, like that mob who wanted to build in Nerang, who say they'll throw around hundreds of millions of dollars to build a theme park here, are either misinformed or lying to get the land. To put it real simply, even the smallest Disney park (Hong Kong) peaks at about 35,000 guests per day, meaning we'd have to basically triple our current theme park tourism throughput on the Gold Coast to support what Disney would describe as their biggest failure in the chain. Looking at the most successful Disney parks (Magic Kingdom / DisneySea), we're talking somewhere around a tenfold increase in tourism to support a park that big, and that's without considering the neighbouring parks, resorts etc. etc. etc.

Shots from early this morning on way home from work. last of top supports also saw the lift hill chain on the ground on old road under track no sign of the joker face that will need to be added before the big Crain goes

*sigh*

I hear it is going to be this new Chinese-Euro-American consortium: Disneyversal Flagpark

If that isn't a click bait story I have no idea what is!