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UK Merlin park guest figures through the years

Clearly there are a lot of factors that affect how many visitors a theme park gets, but that sounds quite poor to me. You’ve got a lot of Merlin employees in the area, between Thorpe, Chessington, Legoland and the London cluster, all using their Magic Passes to get friends and family in for free. You’ve got a lot of school groups with big discounts. You’ve got all the Merlin passholders who are potentially getting heavily discounted entry, depending on how many times they use their pass.

When you consider how much they must have spent on intellectual properties and big roller coasters, it doesn’t sound like a great return.
 
Funcone said:
Clearly there are a lot of factors that affect how many visitors a theme park gets, but that sounds quite poor to me. You’ve got a lot of Merlin employees in the area, between Thorpe, Chessington, Legoland and the London cluster, all using their Magic Passes to get friends and family in for free. You’ve got a lot of school groups with big discounts. You’ve got all the Merlin passholders who are potentially getting heavily discounted entry, depending on how many times they use their pass.

When you consider how much they must have spent on intellectual properties and big roller coasters, it doesn’t sound like a great return.
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Bear in mind, though, that Thorpe Park has not spent money on “big roller coasters” for 11 years. Even if you include Derren Brown’s Ghost Train, they haven’t spent “big” on anything for 7 years.

The more recent years at Thorpe (certainly the years post-2016) have been relatively stagnant. The only things they’ve done post-Derren are very minor IP-based additions that I’d class more as “filler” additions than anything that is much of a headliner in its own right. The last time they built anything that I’d have said could have laid claim to being a genuine headliner with strong appeal was Derren Brown’s Ghost Train in 2016, and some might even debate that.

With this in mind, I don’t think 1.5 million is overly bad at all given the lack of investment in recent years. It’s on par with the figure they were getting 4 years ago, so they’ve managed to maintain their guest figures over the last 4 years rather than decrease them.

Also bear in mind that the park hasn’t ever sustainably attained figures too much higher than this. Thorpe’s 2009-2011 peak saw attendances of 2.1-2.2 million, and this was widely seen as unsustainable. Many suggest that this was too many guests for the park to handle long term. Other than that, the highest Thorpe have ever gone is about 1.8-1.9 million, which 1.5 million isn’t exactly worlds away from.
 
Reinforces my questioning of people that would happily wait for the next major rollercoaster addition at Alton Towers to be 2026. It is long overdue, and the damage to visitor numbers without new major headline rides is all too clear to see.
 
Funcone said:
Clearly there are a lot of factors that affect how many visitors a theme park gets, but that sounds quite poor to me. You’ve got a lot of Merlin employees in the area, between Thorpe, Chessington, Legoland and the London cluster, all using their Magic Passes to get friends and family in for free. You’ve got a lot of school groups with big discounts. You’ve got all the Merlin passholders who are potentially getting heavily discounted entry, depending on how many times they use their pass.

When you consider how much they must have spent on intellectual properties and big roller coasters, it doesn’t sound like a great return.
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No one ever pays full price to get into a Merlin attraction, pretty much ever. There are always discounted routes in. Booking on line, newspaper vouchers, cereal and soap promotions, the list goes on.

You do have a cluster of Merlin employees in that area, but how many of them do you think want to hang out at work, or visit, on their days off? There may be a small amount, but not 1.5 million of them.

What you do have, however, is the third largest metropolitan area in Europe, with over 14 million inhabitants (2016 numbers) in London alone.

Visitors are visitors, whether they've paid that day the full sticker price or not. Where Thorpe does make it's money is on all of the extra spending in the park. The merch, the food, the drinks, the photos, the fast track, the games, the arcades, the parking, the list goes on.

Cinemas don't make profit on you buying a ticket to a film, nearly all of that goes to the distributors. The make a profit on everything else they upsell you on.

They do have quite incredible returns, just not in the obvious places.
 
To be fair, I didn’t ever suggest that the 1.5 million visitors were all Merlin employees and their friends. Clearly they’re not.

However, I suspect a lot of them do hang out at the parks on their days off. Most of these staff are young people and Merlin attractions tend to have a lot of churn in their staff, particularly at the seasonal parks. It’s not like these are mostly people who’ve worked for Merlin for years and grown tired of the parks. For a lot of the staff, the free tickets are a big perk of the job.

It is probably worth adding as well that the thing about nearly all the cinema ticket going to the distributor is a bit of an urban myth. It's not completely untrue. There may be certain films where for a short time it is largely true. Often films work on a ratcheting system where the fee goes down the longer the film's been out. Also, some films are more likely to sell more drink and food depending on the target demographic. But by and large, it isn't the case that most of the money goes to the distributor. If it were, then all cinemas would charge the same price, but you can get one cinema charging £3 to see a film and another cinema on the same day charging £20 to see the same film. If almost all the money from ticket sales went to the distributor, there wouldn't be any advantage in a cinema charging more than the minimum price.

It may be true that for certain big films that lends themselves to lots of food and drink sales, most of the ticket sale will go to the distributor, but that would still only be for the first few days after the film's released. There are big margins on cinema food, but often not enough on their own to sustain the costs of running a cinema.
 
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Funcone said:
It is probably worth adding as well that the thing about nearly all the cinema ticket going to the distributor is a bit of an urban myth.
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I said that cinemas didn't generally make a profit from ticket sales, the returns usually go to the distributor, not that they didn't take in revenue to break even on a showing. This explains the fluctuation in price depending on the screening.

Incidentally, companies don't make money, they make profit. Only banks make money.
 
Funcone said:
To be fair, I didn’t ever suggest that the 1.5 million visitors were all Merlin employees and their friends. Clearly they’re not.

However, I suspect a lot of them do hang out at the parks on their days off. Most of these staff are young people and Merlin attractions tend to have a lot of churn in their staff, particularly at the seasonal parks. It’s not like these are mostly people who’ve worked for Merlin for years and grown tired of the parks. For a lot of the staff, the free tickets are a big perk of the job.

It is probably worth adding as well that the thing about nearly all the cinema ticket going to the distributor is a bit of an urban myth. It's not completely untrue. There may be certain films where for a short time it is largely true. Often films work on a ratcheting system where the fee goes down the longer the film's been out. Also, some films are more likely to sell more drink and food depending on the target demographic. But by and large, it isn't the case that most of the money goes to the distributor. If it were, then all cinemas would charge the same price, but you can get one cinema charging £3 to see a film and another cinema on the same day charging £20 to see the same film. If almost all the money from ticket sales went to the distributor, there wouldn't be any advantage in a cinema charging more than the minimum price.

It may be true that for certain big films that lends themselves to lots of food and drink sales, most of the ticket sale will go to the distributor, but that would still only be for the first few days after the film's released. There are big margins on cinema food, but often not enough on their own to sustain the costs of running a cinema.
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Certainly, staff perks like free tickets can contribute to the overall number of visitors, but it's crucial to consider the diverse audience. Regarding cinema ticket revenue distribution, it varies, and the notion that almost all money goes to the distributor is a bit of a simplification. Different factors like film type, time since release, and demographic influence the revenue distribution. The pricing strategies of cinemas also play a role in the overall financial model.
 
GooseOnTheLoose said:
I said that cinemas didn't generally make a profit from ticket sales, the returns usually go to the distributor, not that they didn't take in revenue to break even on a showing. This explains the fluctuation in price depending on the screening.

Incidentally, companies don't make money, they make profit. Only banks make money.
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Mr pedantic here, getting a million miles off topic...
Banks shuffle money, only the Royal Mint makes money in the UK.
Back on topic, I haven't believed any of the footfall figures for years, they seem to be guestimates at best...sensitive numbers that may be massaged by owners, or best guesses by outsiders who have few figures to back them up.
 
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