Minisode - Universal, Joe Rohde and Dolly Parton

Went through a little bit of news that was happening right now.

You probably noticed that the Theme Park Association's attendance estimates from last year came out.

They were super interesting, not unsurprisingly.

Everybody took a bit of a bath.

The economy is in rough shape.

Fuel's been expensive.

Travel has been restricted to an extent because of the cost.

Everyone took a bit of an attendance hit last year, Universal, Disney.

But you know who didn't take an

attendance hit?

Dollywood.

Dollywood continues to surpass expectations.

It's starting to look like maybe Disney and Universal ought to think about learning some of the lessons that Dollywood learned from Disney and Universal.

Focus back in a little bit on your theming, put a whole bunch more performers and craftsmen and quiet spaces in.

Just a thought seems to be working real well for them.

Universal took a surprising hit for several reasons, one of which is they've had reliability issues with Epic Universe, and we all know about that, and they restricted attendance for some time because of the reliability issues and to kind of get things up to speed.

They also, and I think this is a little confusing and almost inexplicable, they didn't allow their annual pass holders to... use their passes to go to Epic.

So Epic was keeping a fairly low attendance rate most of the year.

That's okay.

It's a smaller park and it's to be expected.

But I think part of the problem that Universal ran into is that they'd hoped that their stalwart, their ever consistent, you know, since the late 60s park, Universal Studios Hollywood was going to make up for some of the gap.

Sadly, however, the Los Angeles area, like Altadena, Pasadena, around Universal City there and Hollywood, they had some pretty horrible fires last year.

And that knocked attendance for Universal down.

down pretty badly for months on end.

And of course, that's not the big thing that we want to be concerned about with these giant fires.