Weather, Memorial Day weekend attendance, and $$
Now that park officials have finished counting the cash from the holiday weekend, they can only be thinking of the Revenue That Might Have Been. Park attendance on Saturday and Sunday had to have been a huge disappointment, all due to weather.
Comparing attendance levels on the weekdays before Memorial Day to that of Saturday & Sunday was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I expected the weather to scare some folks off, but I didn't expect a holiday weekend to be dead. It was. The park, even on a holiday when one might expect that people plan and make reservations weeks and months in advance for, still depends on locals making day trips for a huge percentage of its' attendance.
If you assume that 40,000 additional people would have come over the weekend had the weather been decent, and further assume that each one would have spent their average $38, that comes to a cool $1.52 million in lost revenue. Ouch.
Ironically, had people watched the weather carefully and make a mad dash out to the park after it cleared (which happened in the afternoon on both Sat. & Sun.), they would have been able to get in many more rides in just a couple hours than I did during the week.
The moral of the story: don't be afraid to go to the park on a bad weather day if there's ANY chance it will clear up at some point. You might just have the place to yourself.
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Dave McWilliams
Comparing attendance levels on the weekdays before Memorial Day to that of Saturday & Sunday was a bit of an eye-opener for me. I expected the weather to scare some folks off, but I didn't expect a holiday weekend to be dead. It was. The park, even on a holiday when one might expect that people plan and make reservations weeks and months in advance for, still depends on locals making day trips for a huge percentage of its' attendance.
If you assume that 40,000 additional people would have come over the weekend had the weather been decent, and further assume that each one would have spent their average $38, that comes to a cool $1.52 million in lost revenue. Ouch.
Ironically, had people watched the weather carefully and make a mad dash out to the park after it cleared (which happened in the afternoon on both Sat. & Sun.), they would have been able to get in many more rides in just a couple hours than I did during the week.
The moral of the story: don't be afraid to go to the park on a bad weather day if there's ANY chance it will clear up at some point. You might just have the place to yourself.
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Dave McWilliams
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