SeaWorld’s attendance may be plummeting, but it has a little secret on its side: people are intrinsically drawn to it… but will never make it the success that Disney or Universal is. Here’s why.
The name of SeaWorld’s pain
The Themed Entertainment Association recently released its 2013 attendance numbers, and the picture they paint for SeaWorld is, to be blunt, rather bleak.
Despite owning 12 parks in the United States, ranging from its SeaWorld and Busch Gardens locations to each of their corresponding water parks to a Sesame Street-based children’s play land, only two of SeaWorld Entertainment’s properties managed to crack the top 25 most-visited parks worldwide: SeaWorld Orlando and SeaWorld San Diego, coming in at 19th and 22nd place, respectively.
And just to add insult to injury, both of these locations have seen a not-unsubstantial decrease in their traffic from the previous year, with San Diego down 3% and Orlando, a whopping 5%. The only park to lose more of its guests was Disneyland Paris, which saw an unbelievable 6.9% slip – but which also still saw twice as many visitors as SeaWorld Orlando.
Image © SeaWorld
(Just for the record, both Disney and Universal managed to expand – and expand quite dramatically – their audiences during the same time period, topped by Universal Studios Florida’s 14% increase and Tokyo Disneyland’s 15.9% gain.)
What’s behind the under-performance? Two back-to-back occurrences that started early in 2013 and plagued the company for the entire rest of the year.
First and foremost, it raised the price of its tickets repeatedly over the course of an 11-month period, starting in July ’12; although it was attempting to keep pace with Disney’s and Universal’s current price tags (which now range from $94 to $99 for a single-day, single-park admission), it still resulted in a 12% increase by the time the price stabilized at $92 in June ’13.
By that August, SeaWorld was offering some of the most aggressive discounts and packages it has ever done in its history, including free kids’ tickets with the purchase of an adult ticket weekdays at San Diego.
The second – and far more well-known – happening was, of course, the release of the now-infamous Blackfish documentary, which provided a relentless, scathing condemnation of how SeaWorld handles its animals, particularly the troubled killer whale named Tilikum.
Image © SeaWorld
Although several sources have challenged the film’s credibility – chief among them, of course, SeaWorld Entertainment itself – the word-of-mouth it generated after its January debut at Sundance and its national release in July was enough to make fans boycott and musical acts to ditch their performances at such events as Bands, Brews, and BBQ.
It’s not all doom and gloom for Shamu and friends, however. After a fairly dismal performance for most of the year, the fourth quarter picked substantially up for the company, helping to offset the severity of its losses. And, even better for SeaWorld, in-park, per-guest spending is considerably up, making ’13 the most profitable ever in the parks’ 50-year history – approximately $1.46 billion was raked in, substantially more than ‘12’s $1.42 billion.
This, more than anything, speaks to a simple, quiet truth: no matter how slowly or painfully SeaWorld may appear to be dying, it will never fully die.
Read on to find out why…
Why SeaWorld will never die
There is a long- and deeply-held fascination in American society for spectacle (one of the many reasons why the Marvel Cinematic Universe is performing so admirably right now). Since rollercoasters and other types of thrill rides ably provide this slice of spectacle, typically with a heaping helping of visceralness thrown in, their permanent presence in the routines of our lives is perpetually guaranteed – despite the fact that amusement parks may eventually have to become more themed to better compete with Disney and Universal’s unbelievable economic performances and guest experience offerings.
Image © SeaWorld
Zoos and live entertainment venues also, of course, have topped human fascination since time immemorial, which explains why both have dotted the urban landscape for at least the past three millennia. That SeaWorld is able to provide all three experiences under one collective roof is the fundamental reason why it has managed to weather the ups and downs of the past half-century, and speaks to its ability to do so for many more to come; much like Hollywood or the music industry, the company stands to persevere through all sorts of cultural redirections or technological upheavals (music alone has had its very foundations gouged out twice, with the introduction of the phonograph in the 1870s and online file sharing in the 1990s).
In this way, SeaWorld has become just as much of a cultural touchstone as has Disneyland.
Why SeaWorld will never fully live
That indefinite baseline, however, is far from being a perpetually-increasing bar graph.
It turns out that, for all the timelessness of its constituent pieces, SeaWorld’s various parks will never be able to thrive or otherwise escape the shadow of its themed competitors.
Why? Because as exciting as it may be to ride Manta or as fun as it is to watch Shamu flip and dive, there is nothing for guests to get emotionally invested in as they count down the days to their vacations or, especially, as they cross through the front gate. There is no magical transportation to a different time or place, no exclusive culinary offering to play up one’s sense of exoticness, no overarching narrative to be totally absorbed in.
Image © SeaWorld
To say that neither SeaWorld nor Busch Gardens is a theme park only scratches the surface of the situation. For all the (deserved) flack that Disney and Universal get for their merciless licensing of outside material or their endless mining of their own internal IPs, there nonetheless is still the fact that guests have a connection to these properties which oftentimes borders on a sense of personal ownership – there is a reason why so many have flocked to Universal Orlando since the Wizarding Worlds of Harry Potter have opened, and, even more, why so many literally cry the first time they set eyes on Hogwarts Castle or Gringotts Wizarding Bank. There is an emotional resonance there that SeaWorld can never hope to replicate.
It is a matter only compounded by the chain’s lack of additional experiences. Once a family’s day at the park is done, there is no on-site hotel to go back to, no golf course to play at, no Cirque du Soleil or Blue Man Group to be entertained by – and since there’s no library of material to work off of, there never will be, either.
Trapped in purgatory
Does SeaWorld have to be a carbon copy of its themed rivals? The answer, obviously (and thankfully), is no – there needs to be an entire gamut of vacation possibilities for individuals and families of all walks of life, and, just as in a theme park, there also needs to be lesser as well as E-ticket attractions to provide for a well-rounded experience.
This is why SeaWorld will always remain precisely what it is, with nary a total defeat or major success in sight.
