Disney Wins the Attendance War for 2019
Every year, the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA) releases data regarding theme park admission.
Every year, everyone else in the industry gazes at The Walt Disney Company with a combination of admiration and envy.
Since the TEA requires a few months to tabulate the data, it ordinarily posts these numbers in May or early June.
Obviously, 2020 has proven different in many ways. However, in an example of better late than never, we now have the information.
Here’s everything we just learned about 2019 theme park attendance. Spoiler: Disney wins!
The Pink Elephant in the Living Room
I’ve written about the TEA statistics for many years now. Unfortunately, the 2019 results are unlike any other.
Even as I mention broken records and attendance spikes, we all know the reality here.
In 10-12 months, the same publication will post the 2020 results, and they’ll be the worst of the century.
So, everything that I say here comes with an asterisk.
Disney officials have confirmed that their American theme parks were on a record pace through the first 10 weeks of 2020.
Then, Coronavirus forced an extended park shutdown at Disneyland and Walt Disney World alike.
For two months, every Disney theme park in the world remained closed.
In other words, the industry has changed, and much of what we’re about to discuss comes from The Before Time.
Disney and the other theme park companies may not match their 2019 results for the next three years or more.
Then again, they may make a full recovery by 2021. Everybody’s just guessing right now.
While what I’m discussing here is informational, its representation of the current state of the industry is innately misleading.
You can read last year’s article to appreciate how much Coronavirus has altered our previous reality.
The Basics of Disney’s Domination
In 2017, Disney became the first theme park company to reach 150 million in total attendance. Nobody else has managed more than 67 million so far.
Yes, Disney dominates the business so much that it does more than twice as much business as the next closest competitor.
In fact, Disney has topped 150 million three straight years, although that streak will end in 2020.
For 2019, the company suffered a slight setback from the previous year. Attendance fell from 157.3 million to 156 million.
One theme park is responsible for almost all the drop in business. Everywhere else, attendance remained relatively static.
Until March of 2020, park officials were balancing customer satisfaction with park traffic.
As strange as this statement might sound, the company didn’t necessarily want more attendance. Instead, they wanted the same number of guests.
Disney planned to earn more money by enticing these visitors to spend more at the parks and resorts.
Recent earnings reports suggested that the strategy was working…right up until the pandemic occurred.
However, I’d like you to keep these facts in mind as we evaluate 2019 park attendance.
Theme Park Attendance Top Tens
Here’s the list of the top ten theme parks in the world based on ticket sales:
- 1) Magic Kingdom
- 2) Disneyland
- 3) Tokyo Disneyland
- 4) Tokyo DisneySea
- 5) Universal Studios Japan
- 6) Disney’s Animal Kingdom
- 7) EPCOT
- 8) Chimelong Ocean Kingdom
- 9) Disney’s Hollywood Studios
- 10) Shanghai Disneyland
Yes, Disney owns or licenses 80 percent of the most popular theme parks in the world.
In North America, the company’s superiority is even more pronounced.
The top ten is:
- 1) Magic Kingdom
- 2) Disneyland
- 3) Disney’s Animal Kingdom
- 4) EPCOT
- 5) Disney’s Hollywood Studios
- 6) Universal Studios Florida
- 7) Universal’s Islands of Adventure
- 8) Disney California Adventure
- 9) Universal Studios Hollywood
- 10) SeaWorld Orlando
Yes, the top five theme parks in North America are at Walt Disney World and Disneyland. And every single American Disney theme park qualifies in the top eight.
You may wonder about the other Disney parks. Disneyland Paris finished 14th in the world in attendance, just behind Disney California Adventure.
Hong Kong Disneyland comes in 21st place, while Walt Disney Studios Park ranks lowest of all Disney properties in 23rd place.
All Disney Parks by the Numbers
Once again, Magic Kingdom wins the theme park attendance war. The Most Magical Place on Earth gained 104,000 visitors year-over-year.
For 2019, Magic Kingdom claimed attendance of 20.96 million, up from 20.86 million the previous year.
The song remains the same at Disneyland.
In an unlikely event, the TEA calculates the Happiest Place on Earth as having the exact same attendance numbers in 2019 as 2018.
I’m skeptical, but their data states 18.67 million guests each year.
At Tokyo Disney Resort, attendance is similarly static. The two parks only showed a combined change in visits of 2,000 guests!
Tokyo Disneyland increased by 3,000 while Tokyo DisneySea dropped by 1,000.
I don’t want to give park officials too much credit here for improbable results. However, it’s hard to ignore such eerily steady attendance numbers.
If Disney wanted to entice more guests into the parks, the company could. This data suggests that the company is happy with the current attendance levels.
I’ll add more information to prove the point.
EPCOT also claimed identical attendance in 2019 as 2018, 12.44 million.
Disney’s Animal Kingdom added 113,000 guests to reach 13.88 million.
Meanwhile, Disney’s Hollywood Studios leveraged the opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge to boost attendance by 225,000.
That amount represents the most substantial attendance increase of any Disney park. Overall, Hollywood Studios sold tickets to 11.48 million guests.
So, all these parks stayed the same or sold slightly more tickets, but none of them improved more than 225,000, which is about 620 more people per day!
About the Lesser Disney Parks
Disney California Adventure also matched its 2018 performance in 2019, with attendance of 9.86 million.
As I mentioned, Disneyland Paris finished closed behind its American sibling.
In France, the featured Paris park registered 98,000 fewer guests with total attendance of 9.75 million.
Hong Kong Disneyland was the Disney park that felt the sting in 2019. Due to civil unrest, the Chinese locale fell from 6.7 million guests to 5.7 million.
Yes, that one million in lost visits is almost all the 1.3 million in attendance that Disney parks lost overall.
The other Chinese park didn’t do much better. Demand at Shanghai Disneyland declined from 11.8 million to 11.21 million.
Finally, Walt Disney Studios Park lost 53,000 guests, giving it 2019 attendance of 5.25 million. Yes, that’s the worst of any Disney park.
So, Europe and Asia are where Disney suffered modest setbacks in 2019. Overall, the parks did remarkably well, though.
Disney’s 156 million in tickets sold represents the second-best year ever in the industry’s history, trailing only 2018’s 157.3 million. And that’s amazing.
Unfortunately, we all know that history won’t repeat itself in 2020.
Next year, when I write this article, I hope that we will all remember Coronavirus’s horrors as a problem the medical community solved.
In that scenario, we’ll all be in a happy place as we consider how much Coronavirus devastated theme park attendance in 2020.
A reasonable guess is that Disney parks will struggle to reach 90 million visits for the year.
Feature Image Rights: Disney