2013: General Discussion

[josht]

They've reached 5,000,000 guests, with record gate figures for winter season - over 25,000 guests on some days which are usually only found in main season!

25,000 compared to towers 600
But it shows how good europa is

 

[AstroDan]

New Annual Pass design from this weekend:

Interesting graphic, showing visitor demographics from 2009 - 2013. Yellow shows German guests, blue shows French, red shows Swiss and green others. It also shows the total guests at the park, which has risen 25% in just 5 seasons!

Source: Europa-Park's Place on Facebook.

 

[Wilsy]

Why doesn't Europa Park target a wider European audience?

The park is high enough quality to compete alongside Disney and certainly Port Aventura which get lots of visitors from the UK, but there is barely any mention of the park in the UK outside of this forum.

 

[Jonathan]

Why doesn't Europa Park target a wider European audience?

The park is high enough quality to compete alongside Disney and certainly Port Aventura which get lots of visitors from the UK, but there is barely any mention of the park in the UK outside of this forum.

From what I remember, Wilsy, the park can't expand its marketing reach any further until there's more accommodation on resort. That may not be true, but it's what I think I recall someone saying once.

 

[AstroDan]

Why doesn't Europa Park target a wider European audience?

The park is high enough quality to compete alongside Disney and certainly Port Aventura which get lots of visitors from the UK, but there is barely any mention of the park in the UK outside of this forum.

Miro Gronau, Park Operations Manager, explained this to us last year.

He basically explained that the park don't even advertise to the whole of Germany. For example, Hamburg - where Heide-Park and Hansa-Park are located, don't get anything from EP. Equally, they only advertise in North East and Eastern parts of France.

He said that if Europa-Park started to advertise more widely, across the whole of Germany, France, Italy and more of Europe, that the resort simply couldn't cope with additional guests. They already get 50,000 guests on the busiest days, and the resort creaks at those times - even with immense throughputs and world beating operation. Luckily, because it's a family business, they don't have to maximise revenues. So it really is the guest experience first - where many parks would be like "as many as possible!", Europa-Park are taking it more steadily.

The hotels already run at 96% occupancy year round - I very much doubt any other theme park resort in Europe can claim this (even though obviously other resorts may have higher numbers of guests) - because EP are gradually trying to grow, rather than just oversaturating in one go. They will add major rides every 2 years, pretty much. This is quite a high frequency compared to most European resorts - in fact next year they will hit 12 coasters. A lot!

The way they build hotels is simple. Rather than the PortAventura and/or DLP approach where they build huge, 500 to 1000 bedroom hotels with no guarantee the guests will come (and this is the case, hotels at these resorts are regularly less than half full in quieter times) - they will look at how many bookings have been turned down, and use that to inform the size of the next hotel.

With this in mind, upon building a new hotel (i.e. Bell Rock), the park can then add a geographical area to its marketing. For example, when Bell Rock opened in 2012, they began advertising to the French city of Metz, around a 2 1/2 hour drive away.

I am not 100% on every detail there, but it gives you an idea.

 

[Dave]

Interesting that Outside of the key three areas visitor numbers have dropped this year, though obviously this has been made up and exceeded by increased visits by Germans, French and Swiss..

Clearly we didn't do enough meets there this year

 

[AstroDan]

Interesting that Outside of the key three areas visitor numbers have dropped this year, though obviously this has been made up and exceeded by increased visits by Germans, French and Swiss..

Clearly we didn't do enough meets there this year

The breakdowns are only approximate.

Europa-Park do announce roughly how many of different groups attend the park, but I would say there's a margin of error in the diagram, possibly as much as 10% within each subsection. Although the total guests is pretty much spot on.

 

[AstroDan]

And with that, Europa-Park's best ever season will tomorrow come to a close.

Here's to the 2014 season, which begins on Saturday, 5th April - precisely three months from now.

 

[Andrew]

That picture looks beautiful but eerie at the same time. 2014 will certainly be an interesting year for the park!

 

[josht]

That's one might long season I really do love this park hopefully back there in summer

 

[AstroDan]

From EPRUST.com

I know this is the 2013 thread, but this is technically 2013 news...

Here is the leaflet the park released to celebrate the award of the THEA Classic last year. A lot of it is in English.