Theme park attendance might be down at Disney's theme parks in the United States and in Hong Kong, but one of Disney's resorts is bringing in visitors at record levels this year.
The Oriental Land Company's Tokyo Disney Resort today announced record attendance levels for the first six months of its fiscal year. For the period from April 1 through September 30, Tokyo Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea welcomed a combined 15.735 million visitors, the resort reported today.
That's up 218,000 people, or 1.4 percent, over the same period last year. And it's the highest first-half attendance level in Tokyo Disney history.
The resort credited the opening of its installation of Soarin' — which is called Soaring: Fantastic Flight and includes a period Society of Explorers and Adventurers theme at Tokyo DisneySea — for helping to drive attendance in advance of the opening of a major expansion at Tokyo Disneyland next year. Tokyo Disney also aggressively programs seasonal festivals, including a months-long Disney Easter festival that OLC credited with helping boost attendance.
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It would be great if Disney would hire the Oriental Land Company to run all their parks.
The increase can be explained by a total increase in international visitors to Japan in 2019.
In fact, Japan saw a 4.6% increase in foreign visitors in the first half of 2019. I bet the great majority of them did not skip Tokyo.
https://www.nippon.com/en/japan-data/h00509/international-visitors-to-japan-increase-again-in-first-half-of-2019.html
The OLC "guest profile" shows that 9.6% of guests in 2018 are from "overseas", but doesn't break out by country.
National statistics from JNTO show that >80% of visitors are from Asia (~25/25/15/10% from South Korea, China, Taiwan and Hong Kong, respectively).
Stats through July show that growth in inbound visitors from Asia (tourist >> business), year-over-year, was typically >=20% for 2014-2017, but has slowed to single digits since mid-2018. That *might* just mean saturation of the market.
NHK World reported yesterday a recent sharp drop in tourism from Korea, attributed to trade frictions (quite separate from U.S. trade policy). That's not *obvious* in the JNTO monthly stats, but the fraction of Asian visitors from Korea has declined slightly from a high of 27% in 2018.
http://www.olc.co.jp/en/tdr/guest/profile.html
https://www.tourism.jp/en/tourism-database/stats/inbound/
(There's a spreadsheet, but I had to do my own analytics on it.)
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If a 1.4% increase is worth such adulation, it further solidifies the fears that theme park attendance around the rest of the world is not doing very well. This has nothing to do with additions, festivals, or other capital improvements, and has far more to do with a slumping travel/tourism industry and potential signs of a sagging world economy. The Tokyo Disney parks grew @8% from 2017-2018, so this would signify a significant slowing of that growth. The additions OLC made to their resort propped up their attendance more than boosted it.