China’s accelerating enthusiasm
Mel Taylor, CEO of Omnico Group explains how the
theme park market in China can adapt to the ever- growing demand
enthusiasm. It is expected that 59 new parks will open by 2020 with
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ticket sales expected to rise to $12 billion (from $4.6 billion in 2015). The list of new venues includes Six Flags’ $4.6 billion Hangzhou Bay development, Universal’s park scheduled to open in 2020 in Beijing and Dalian Wanda’s $9.5 billion park in Jinan, part of the latter’s determination to out-distance Disney as the supreme operator in China. In fact, across the Asia-Pacific region, resorts and theme
Mel Taylor, CEO of Omnico Group
parks are set to spring up, even in the Philippines where it is a case of building down into the sea at the Coral World undersea park in Palawan. Attendances in the region are expected to rise more than six per cent annually, with China generating 42 per cent of expenditure on theme parks. Some of these parks, such as Shanghai Disneyland, appear to have been runaway successes, crossing any cultural divide very effectively while taking great pains to ensure they offer the experiences that China’s expanding middle class clearly craves. Yet only in December, China Daily reported that a mere 10 per cent of China’s many theme parks actually make any money. Admittedly, some of these parks are said to have been set up to attract property investors, but the president of the China Tourism Academy was quoted as warning that many indigenous parks fail to meet demand in design, operation or maintenance and lack cultural creativity.
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vast amount of land in China is about to disappear under rides and rollercoasters as the country embraces theme parks with accelerating
The hassle-free experience Whatever the strengths or inadequacies of the rides and attractions, all these parks will have to accommodate the fast-changing expectations of consumers who now want a fully-integrated experience that uses digital technology to remove all the snag-points, the hassles and the queues. Clearly, an operator such as Disney does not need to be
told how to run a theme park. When it moved into China, Disney did not bring its famous MagicBand to Shanghai as a means of providing visitors with a cashless method of payment or gaining access to rides. Instead it relied on smartphone-related technology – a transition that seems to have worked.
AUGUST 2017
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