Chapek shares why Disney isn’t selling new annual passes

Chapek explains his reasoning on why new Disney World annual pass sales have halted. Take a look and see if you agree with him.

Third Quarter Earnings

Disney Parks shares that the parks, experiences, and products reports a revenue of $7.39 BILLION in the third quarter. However, they projected $6.65 BILLION in revenue. This beat expectations by almost 1 billion dollars.

Disney shared the following: Operating income growth at our domestic parks and experiences was due to higher volumes and increased guest spending, partially offset by higher costs. Higher volumes were due to increases in attendance, occupied room nights and cruise ship sailings. Cruise ships were operating during the entire current quarter while sailings were suspended in the prior-year quarter.

Second Quarter Increase

Bob Chapek, Chief Executive Officer, The Walt Disney Company, shares the following reasons for success: “Our strong results in the second quarter, including fantastic performance at our domestic parks and continued growth of our streaming services once again prove that we are in a league of our own.” 

Chapek’s Statement on Annual Passes

In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter at the D23 Expo, Chapek shared the following statement. “We love all our fans equally. We love the superfans, obviously. But we also like the fans that don’t have the same expression of their fandom. We want to make sure that our superfans who love to come with annual passes and use [the parks] as their personal playground — we love that.

We celebrate that. But at the same time, we’ve got to make sure that there’s room in the park for the family from Denver that comes once every five years. We didn’t have a reservation system and we didn’t control the number of annual passes we distributed and frankly, the annual pass as a value was so great that people were literally coming all the time and the accessibility of the park was unlimited to them and that family from Denver would get to the park and not be let in.

That doesn’t seem like a real balanced proposition. I guess it’s possible that the superfans look at that as a disadvantaging of the way they consume the park, but we’ve got to make sure that not only are we heeding the needs of our superfans, but we’re heeding the needs of everyone who travels from across the country one time every five years. We have a real high-class problem: We have much more demand than there is supply. What we will not bend on is giving somebody a less than stellar experience in the parks because we jammed too many people in there.”

We will not bend on giving somebody a less than stellar experience in the parks because we jammed too many people in there.

Bob Chapek, Chief Executive Officer, The Walt Disney Company

Do you agree with Chapek that they limit attendance or does it seem as crowded as it was in parks before reopening? Chapek previously stated that annual passholders are “unfavorable guests.” Do you think it’s fair to limit annual passes? Please let us know your thoughts on the KtP Facebook Page and follow us on Twitter.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter