Wild Frontier Nights - June 3, 4, 10, & 11

If you can ride SV more than 15 or 20 times in a row you should probably apply to be an astronaut.

Jeff said:

There is definitely a certain customer for this....
....Similarly, I'm willing to spend freely in a fun environment on good food and drink with a limited number of people...

This is me. If anything I am about to drop money on has an option to upgrade or give me an option to be around less people, I will gladly fork over more money.

I attended Friday night's event using one of the aforementioned free tickets, and I thought it was phenomenally done. The shows were fantastic, the food and beverage options both looked awesome (I didn't partake), and the ERT was incredible. I rode the Cedar Creek Mine Ride by myself, with nobody else on the train, one of my rides on SV only had one other guest onboard, and I heard another guest say at the end of the night that they had ridden Steel Vengeance seventeen times (yes, se-ven-teen) that night.

Still, the attendance had to have been much lower than what the park expected. There was maybe, maybe, 300-400 guests in the whole of Frontier Town for the event, and that is a generous estimate. When the night started, I saw a few managers/higher-ups briefly looking around with a "This is all the people?" sort of look on their face, and at one point, I even heard an SV ride operator mention outright that they thought there were going to be way more people at the event. And I will admit, the lack of attendance was rather palpable, and it almost felt a little more like a ghost town in that regard, and not an exclusive event as much.

I really do think that the price of the event was a large contributor to the low attendance; I am so thankful to have attended the event for free (and I did return the favor by buying the WFN t-shirt they were selling), but $99 was a very steep asking price, if not too steep, in my opinion. For reference, WDW's After-Hours event at the Magic Kingdom (a somewhat similarly exclusive hard-ticketed event from 9p-12a--no theming or shows, but little to no ERT lines) was priced at $129pp when it was last offered pre-COVID, and that got you almost the entire park, and not just a single section. (Furthermore, an After-Hours ticket allowed you to enter MK at 7pm, giving you 2 extra hours of park time.)

Now, I know that CP is not WDW, and for a hard-ticket event, there is going to always be a constant balancing act for the market research/finance teams between exclusivity and profit margins. (I.e., if priced too low, crowds are huge and guests are disappointed, but if priced too high, nobody attends and the park loses money.) Not only that, but with such a novel event at CP, there was no previous experience to work with, barring the passholder Hoedown in 2018. Still, seeing CP offering an entire summer of visits for $105 at the same time as offering an exclusive 3-hour Frontier Town-only event for $99 gave me pause to consider the value of a potential guest's ticket dollars. $99 is a very, very large pill to swallow in light of the new $105 Summer Pass, but is it priced right for the exclusivity and entertainment? Possibly; I guess one could say that the ticket price is in the eye of the beholder. In any case, I thought the event was incredible, and I applaud CP for trying such an intriguing idea and for it paying off so well. I just wish that there were a few more people there to experience such a great event.

If I were running things, I'd keep the price the same or close to it for at least another year or so. If I recall correctly, the first Frontier Festival was not nearly as popular in its first year as it has been in subsequent years.

The first year of Brew & BBQ at Lakeside Pavilion (the event that evolved into Frontier Festival) was pretty quiet when we visited but the value for the price was pretty darn solid, particularly once they allowed the tickets to be used interchangeably between food and drinks. You could end up with a LOT of food for $15-20.

I would think that 300-400 people is a pretty good size. If it's 400 each night, that's $40k, for a total of $160k. I wonder what their hard costs are relative to that number. If it catches on, and to the other members' point, you probably need to give it a year or two to grow. Net a thousand people and it's $100k extra each night. That's not a bad take. More than that though, and I think the exclusivity, and therefore the value, is reduced.

That sounded like fun, at if the crowd was limited to 300-400 it is worth it to me. Seventeen times on SV, damn!!!!

Man, trying to be content that I was able to go to CP at all for the first time in 3 years is getting really tough after reading about all the people who got to go to WFN for free and marathon SV and Maverick whilst CoasterMania ERT was, well, what it was…

Imagine how I feel having gone for the first time in six years and not getting to ride much of anything.