Martin
TS Member
This has had me thinking again of something related that's been on my mind off and on for years, about the demographic shift in guests at Towers.
When I first started visiting in the mid 00s, there were a lot of guests who were groups of working class British-Asian teenagers/young adults, mostly male but not exclusively, from northern and midlands towns and cities. Liverpool had and still does have a relatively lower proportion of British Asian residents than other Northern cities so maybe it was just me, but I don't think it was - it was even a reccuring joke in Four Lions. There was a couple years where I wasn't visiting often before I finally got a MAP and started being regular, so I'm not sure when this happened, but at one point I realised that there was a lot less of this type of guest and a lot more posh sounding white families. Now I'm not British Asian but from my own experience growing up half way between Towers and BPB, amusement parks seem to take up a lot less 'space' in working class culture. I was the only one in my friendship circles who ended up 'Like This' but we all loved visiting parks and would talk about them fairly often, we'd look forward to getting to go with each other or family, etc and then at one point it stopped and nobody really cares. It isn't something that people in my workplace pretty much ever seem to mention doing with their families - and we get a discount as one of our benefits. We could do an entire thread on why this is but I digress.
Obviously, Towers are free to attract whichever guests they want either deliberately or as a natural outcome of their decisions, and unless they're all sat around the board room twiddling their moustaches and laughing about how they've successfully socially cleansed the park (for the record, I do not think this), there's nothing wrong with deciding to chase a wealthier audience - it makes business sense. But to a point, and that's really where I'm going with this.
If your new target audience is people who - in general - have more money, more time off, potentially higher standards (or at least more well versed at the 'can I speak to your manager' game) and potentially greater cultural capital, your new target audience is people who have a lot more choice. It's far easier for these people to vote with their feet and go to Disney or Port Aventura, or increasingly Europa and Phantasia, and that's only Europe. If your main audience is people like myself, my friends, lads from Bolton, whatever, it's easier to take the proverbial because our only real alternative is Thorpe - which you also own - or Blackpool which is lucky to get one new major attraction a decade.
Towers' big advantage over Europe or Florida is, even with how expensive it is these days and how silly it is to get to, it's still a lot easier and usually cheaper when factoring in travel time and costs. But at some point the gap will become small enough that the extra expense and time becomes worth it. If Towers want a captive audience there's two easy options, neither of which they'll particularly like and both of which have risks - either massive capital expenditure to make sure mummy and daddy don't start googling Eurostar; or drop the prices, work something out with the public transport operators, and let the urban youth come back.
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Came back across the old Midterm Development Plan from 2012 the other day, and Jesus Christ the sense of loss I felt over something we never had. It wasn't even particularly ambitious!
When I first started visiting in the mid 00s, there were a lot of guests who were groups of working class British-Asian teenagers/young adults, mostly male but not exclusively, from northern and midlands towns and cities. Liverpool had and still does have a relatively lower proportion of British Asian residents than other Northern cities so maybe it was just me, but I don't think it was - it was even a reccuring joke in Four Lions. There was a couple years where I wasn't visiting often before I finally got a MAP and started being regular, so I'm not sure when this happened, but at one point I realised that there was a lot less of this type of guest and a lot more posh sounding white families. Now I'm not British Asian but from my own experience growing up half way between Towers and BPB, amusement parks seem to take up a lot less 'space' in working class culture. I was the only one in my friendship circles who ended up 'Like This' but we all loved visiting parks and would talk about them fairly often, we'd look forward to getting to go with each other or family, etc and then at one point it stopped and nobody really cares. It isn't something that people in my workplace pretty much ever seem to mention doing with their families - and we get a discount as one of our benefits. We could do an entire thread on why this is but I digress.
Obviously, Towers are free to attract whichever guests they want either deliberately or as a natural outcome of their decisions, and unless they're all sat around the board room twiddling their moustaches and laughing about how they've successfully socially cleansed the park (for the record, I do not think this), there's nothing wrong with deciding to chase a wealthier audience - it makes business sense. But to a point, and that's really where I'm going with this.
If your new target audience is people who - in general - have more money, more time off, potentially higher standards (or at least more well versed at the 'can I speak to your manager' game) and potentially greater cultural capital, your new target audience is people who have a lot more choice. It's far easier for these people to vote with their feet and go to Disney or Port Aventura, or increasingly Europa and Phantasia, and that's only Europe. If your main audience is people like myself, my friends, lads from Bolton, whatever, it's easier to take the proverbial because our only real alternative is Thorpe - which you also own - or Blackpool which is lucky to get one new major attraction a decade.
Towers' big advantage over Europe or Florida is, even with how expensive it is these days and how silly it is to get to, it's still a lot easier and usually cheaper when factoring in travel time and costs. But at some point the gap will become small enough that the extra expense and time becomes worth it. If Towers want a captive audience there's two easy options, neither of which they'll particularly like and both of which have risks - either massive capital expenditure to make sure mummy and daddy don't start googling Eurostar; or drop the prices, work something out with the public transport operators, and let the urban youth come back.
__
Came back across the old Midterm Development Plan from 2012 the other day, and Jesus Christ the sense of loss I felt over something we never had. It wasn't even particularly ambitious!