Extract 10 LECTURER: This is all very interesting, isn’t it?
EVIE: Yes, but if we could just go back to the market map, the EcoKids programme is for families with children so it goes on the left, and it’s in the cheap to middle price range, so it goes around the middle on the vertical axis.
LEILA: Correct!
Unit 7, Lesson 2, Exercise B 1.30 Part 1
Good morning, everyone. Do the names Disney World, SeaWorld, Movie World and Six Flags mean anything to you? I’m Craig Horton and I run a theme park. I was asked to talk about theme parks and tourism, and to show you how these businesses work. I’m sure many of you will have visited a theme park at some stage in your lives. People often consider amusement parks, also called theme parks, American inventions. However, amusement parks were first created in the ‘old world’. Did you know that it was in 1853 that the first amusement park was opened in Copenhagen, Denmark? We’ve come a long way since then.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that theme parks need to appeal to families, often have a themed environment, almost always offer some form of free entertainment, such as musicians and performers, and provide a high standard of service. Plus there’s the fact that they must offer enough activities to make the average visitor stay for, typically, five to seven hours.
What I’m going to talk about today is one of the core features of tourism: that is, attracting people and entertaining them. I would like to trace the process with you of developing a park from beginning to end. What I mean is, we’ll be looking at how a tourism business, in this case a theme park, does what it does. Bearing in mind that, in a way, a theme park is like any other company, big or small, it will become clear that it has a production process that it needs to manage, and that this depends on many other parts of the operation. I mean, it’s everything from doing the research, designing the park, financing, building the park, and running it. It’s a continuous process. Getting the name of your park to the public is one of the most important steps to take, and we’ll be taking a close look at that. Near the end, I’ll be making some predictions about the future.
Theme parks are a service industry, and yet they are very much like any other manufacturing
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company. I agree, a theme park hasn’t actually got an assembly line, but it does have to produce the same experience over and over again. Would you call that mass production?
Anyway, we’ll look at that later on.
Unit 7, Lesson 2, Exercise C 1.31 Part 2
It was Walt Disney who came up with the idea of starting a theme park in the 1950s. As is commonly acknowledged, Disneyland in Anaheim, California, which opened in 1955, was the first real modern theme park. Since then, the theme park industry in the United States, Europe and Asia has grown dramatically. The industry is now a multi-billion dollar business. Dozens of new parks are built every year. We have a few large corporate owners, and you’ve probably heard of most of them: Disney, Six Flags, Universal Studios, SeaWorld and Paramount.
I’ve been told that, in previous lectures, you’ve become familiar with the life cycle of tourism activities. The process of setting up a theme park can be thought of as a similar process. As you have seen before, there are many steps to this process. The first stage of the development cycle is coming up with an original idea and understanding the economic feasibility of the project. Like a regular business, a theme park has a cash flow, and needs capital investment. Another term for this is drawing up the master plan. Many ideas fail and never get off the drawing board.
What follows are the other ingredients, and even though these stages often overlap, they do happen in a more or less fixed sequence: design, financing, construction, buying the rides and other equipment for the park, installing those rides and the equipment, and organizing the show facilities. And then, finally, there is the actual opening of the park and operating and expanding the park over time. Typically, it can take three to four years to get from the idea to opening the gates.
Unit 7, Lesson 2, Exercise E 1.32 Part 3
An important phase in theme park development is marketing. What do I mean by ‘important phase’? Well, let’s take a look at the brochure I’ve given you for the new Goldorama Theme Park in Bristol, UK. This will open in six months’ time from now. Marketing is a key area which must begin well before you open a park. You need to develop
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