Cedar Fair, Six Flags announce merger deal

In one way I hate everything about this. Now with practically no competition they have no incentive to invest more into better new attractions, no incentive to improve their operations and maintenance, and they are already making decisions that I don't like (like having the company HQ and corporate office in Charlotte, unquestionably a CF management move as they basically moved their HQ to Charlotte years ago and lied to Sandusky that its actually there so they can get tax breaks. It's ridiculous to me that a company called SIX FLAGS is not going to be HQ'd in Texas).

On the other hand there is a sense of "well it can't get any worse than it is now so maybe this will be a good thing." At the end of the day I don't think much will change operations and maintenance wise, the company will likely continue to struggle in that department.

In regards to rebranding and stuff it wouldn't surprise me if over the next couple years all the parks are rebranded as Six Flags with Knotts becoming "Knotts Berry Farm...a Six Flags property" in small print.

Mr. Six is coming to Knott’s Berry Farm! Woohoo!!

This is incredibly depressing stuff. Capital investments are likely to dry up completely outside of the largest markets, while the smaller and older parks are all on the chopping block. I'm going to make it a priority to get to some of the smaller parks in the chain over the next few years before they're gone. Very glad I went up to ride Shivering Timbers this summer, I can't see Michigan's Adventure surviving more than a few years.

Chances my Six Flags Membership will start applying to KBF and other Cedar Fair parks? I’ll be on the next flight to Ohio if so.

Agree with the_man3 that the lack of competition will result in a lack of incentive to invest in new attractions and improve operations. Up until now I have regarded Cedar Fair as the equivalent of Bergdorf Goodman and Six Flags as the equivalent of Macy's but that may change. I wonder how this will affect pricing. Historically, the cost of a Cedar Fair Platinum Pass has exceeded the cost of a Six Flags Platinum Pass although I see that Cedar Fair recently did away with the Platinum Pass and substituted an All Park Passport.

Six Flags Over Muskegon.

This is kind of what I expected when the rumors started swirling last night with Cedar Fair management/shareholders essentially getting a slight majority over their Six Flags counterparts. I do find the stock spit pretty interesting, indicating that SF was overdiluted and perhaps even overleveraged (i.e. more shares outstanding meaning fewer shares in the new combined company), but the ultimate result is a pretty even merger of two companies that compete in the same industry but not necessarily against each other in the same markets.

Like evanweston, I worry about the smaller, less financially lucrative parks that are close enough to be considered in the same market but not necessarily overlapping (like Dorney Park/SFGAdv, KD/SFA, WoF/SFStL/Schlitterbahn KC, Schlitterbahn TX (2)/SFoT and SFFT, and the aforementioned Great America/SFDK). The writing is obviously on the wall for that last market (Bay Area), but those other groups have coexisted without necessarily competing directly against each other yet may represent efficiencies the combined company may seek to exploit (meaning park closures/sales).

Like Bobbie, I am also interested in the pricing impacts. Given that Cedar Fair is in the dominant position, I would expect their pricing to dominate the combined company. That probably means single park passes/admissions will probably be in that $60-75 range during pre-season sales periods and eventually rising to $100-150 (market dependent) at the beginning and during the current season. Multipark passes will probably stay in the $200-250 range, which would be a bit of a shock to long time SF passholders. However, for those with CF Platinum/multi-park passes (or with passes to both chains), the passes for the combined company would represent a discount given the additional parks (or a savings for only having to get a single pass versus 2). I do think SF's strategy of gouging guests for parking will be curtailed as well as many of the additional upcharges the chain initiated (complex dining plans, memberships tiers, and others). However, all of these pricing changes will probably take a year or more to sort out, meaning fans might still need to have passes for both chains in 2024 to visit all the parks in the combined company. We'll see how that works, but current (and 2024) pass holders probably won't get any information on this until February or March at the earliest, meaning you might be better off taking advantage of sales NOW instead of playing the waiting game to see if a combined pass is offered in the spring. I also wouldn't be surprised to see the combined company offering regional passes since SF somewhat dabbled in that last year, and Cedar Fair has done that before in Ohio when they owned 3 parks in the state.

As far as investment, I don't see the combined company curtailing capital investment too significantly. I would expect investments in smaller parks that are teetering on the edge of being liabilities to the combined company might be halted, but that probably won't impact 2024, since most contracts for new attractions have likely already been signed and new rides/attractions either under construction or too far in process to stop without taking a significant loss. In 2025, it will probably become clear which properties are on the chopping block, which should reduce overall waste in the combined company and should increase funds for capital improvements across the chain. However, while SF was very focused on adding new attractions every year for every park, I expect with CF taking the reigns in management that they will me more targeted with their investments. The result will probably be fewer overall additions across the combined chain, but those that are added will be of higher quality. In other words. if a SF park typically got a new flat ride every 1-2 years and a big ride/coaster every 3-5 years, I think you could expect one big attraction or land every 2-4 years. I still think smaller parks that survive the fat trimming will be treated like red-headed stepchildren, but perhaps they'll get thrown a bone more frequently than they do now if the local operational team can maintain standards and show growth.

It will definitely be an interesting winter for these companies as they combine operations and management.

The six flags surviving branding immediately deteriorated my perception of any park in the group.

Alone they are worth less than the proposed American heartland. Together they are worth less than two thirds of epic universe. Something had to give. It did

I'm very very interested in how all this turns out. Overall, I do agree that consolidation is normally a bad thing (and I'm still not sold on this deal), but most regional parks don't compete as much as we enthusiasts think they do. There are parks that are directly competing for the same markets, like Knott's and Magic Mountain, or Six Flags America and Kings Dominion, but most of the time regional parks are competing with go-kart tracks, arcades, local waterparks, and other smaller (and cheaper) family venues on Summertime weekends. Plus most Six Flags/Cedar Fair parks are competing with other companies like SEAS in Virginia and Texas, Hershey in PA, or Herschend in Missouri. There are some parks I'm worried about, like Dorney Park or Six Flags America, but I don't think the "reduced competition" argument here is very valid when most Cedar Fair/Six Flags parks weren't even competing in the first place. Honestly, I think some parks could stand to benefit from this deal, for example Magic Mountain and Knott's have been fighting for the Disney/Universal scraps for years, but if they sell a combined season pass and market the parks together as a bundle, they now both get to fill that market and work with each other rather than against. I'm more worried about people losing their jobs, smaller parks closing, and little things like dips in food quality. On the more positive side, I think Six Flags adopting Cedar Fair's model of "a substantial addition every few years" rather than "a new flat ride or water slide every single year" would be a smart move, and would greatly improve a lot of their lower- to mid-tier parks. Also, FWIW, I've seen that there aren't any plans to slap the Six Flags name on any of the Cedar Fair parks.

This is going to be a notable shakeup for the theme park landscape, still early to tell how it falls out but given how bad Six Flags has been the last few years, not exactly encouraged.

This is awful, it will lead to many park closures and layoffs. Mergers are bad.

@AgustinMacias - Why are you so certain of that? While there are a couple of redundancies within the chains (Great America/SFDK and Kings Dominion/SFA being the most obvious), most of the properties exist in different markets with minimal overlap of guests. Mergers are all about finding efficiencies, and I'm sure there will be some casualties, but I don't think there will be "many park closures and layoffs". The combined company is still a theme park company, so unless analysts discover that selling proximal properties would net critical profits or parks would start undercutting each other, the combined company would still need to operate theme parks in order to generate revenue.

Cedar Flags? Six Fairs?

This is great for Great Adventure. Not only will we be getting the Glamping resort but it will probably be adding a full hotel in 2025 and finally get some live shows during the summer. Great Adventure should have been been Six Flags number 1 park being in both the NY and Philadelphia market but they failed. Now with the combined company and a desire to grow Great Adventure can finally reach its appropriate level and become the park it should be.

And even better the combined company will be the number 2 themepark company in the US based on attendance.

I have some questions, because I dispute the statement about it being a "merger of equals". This is not a merger of equals in my mind. Cedar Fair and its shareholders are the ones taking the risk and the temporary (hopefully) hit. They've had an overall good reputation, they've been a dividend paying company for 30 years, and they've missed very few payments during that time. Six Flags has almost died twice and continues to have a less than stellar in park reputation. While Six Flags does have some good locations and potential upside with improvements, they are not equals in terms of operational quality, reputation, or financials. They still have some of those same old problems within the parks they've had for years that helped to set them up for the near death experience they had during the great recession. Meanwhile, Cedar Fair decided to tone down the coaster war a little bit and spend on some of the little things, and it's made their product better and it shows.

In my mind, there's a particular path that needs to happen to make this a good thing. First and foremost, Cedar Fair management has to be in the driver seat. Their policies, their operations, their financial approach. I'm sure that Six Flags will bring some good people to get involved and bring value, but I trust Cedar Fair management much more with actual control of the product.

Second, and I hate to say this, might have to see some of the smaller parks either spun off into another company or sold...hopefully not closed. We already know that California's Great America will be gone soon thanks to the 49ers, but between bringing up standards at Six Flags parks, maintaining an improvement schedule for all the parks, financially crawling out from the 2020 economic rubble and an spiked interest rate which if maintained makes this whole proposition much more expensive, there may be a time when some of the smaller operations or lower performers would be on the block...be it the chopping block or the sales block.

Third, perhaps they should think a little more about the use of the Six Flags brand for everything, because the brand isn't exactly the shining beacon they make it to be, not exactly associated with quality if you know what I mean. Perhaps adopting the Six Flags name for the company was what Six Flags wanted to get the deal done, but if you ask me, Kings Island, Cedar Point, Knotts, and others don't need the Six Flags brand to have continued success because it doesn't add anything for them, in fact it diminishes things. For that matter, many of the Six Flags parks, save the "Over" Gang and a couple of others where SF is baked in, might actually benefit from dropping the Six Flags brand and transitioning to the old name. Magic Mountain and Great Adventure and Fiesta Texas and others existed without the brand at one time. I actually say debrand most of the Six Flags parks and return it to what it was, more of a local/regional flavor over a corporate stamp.

Part of me thinks this might be a pre-emptive move to adapt to a new financial world Thanks to the 'rona and the shutdowns, the economic mess and response to those events, the economic mess that the first economic response to those events eventually brought, and now the new mess that the response to the response of those events among a few other things has brought us (farce fully intended to match the ridiculousness of the situation), the days of cheap capital to keep mediocre products alive in the market are over, and companies are going to have to actually get better to separate people from their dwindling piles of money. Six Flags crashed hard the last time there were bad economic times and almost died, and the economic numbers currently out there aren't exactly forecasting sunny days ahead.

In short, not really a fan of this and skepticism is high at the moment. There's a part of me that knows Cedar Fair can come in raise the standards of the Six Flags parks with the right strategy plus time and people and money, and another part of me that knows that none of those three things may be abundant supply soon, which may make the Six Flags part of this an albatross around the neck of an otherwise stable company.

With the Six Flags name sticking around post merger, I could see some slight rebranding of parks in the Cedar Fair chain with “A Six Flags Theme Park” added to the end of the park name. For consistency purposes it might make sense for Magic Mountain, Great Adventure, Fiesta Texas, Discovery Kingdom, Great America and perhaps one or two other parks to reposition the Six Flags from the front to the back as well.

mergers suck. this sucks.

I don’t see how this is anything but a net loss for CF and its parks.

CF has generally had a reputation as a solid theme park company with well run parks that are all pretty unique in design.

SF has almost gone out of business at least twice, continues to have all kinds of financials issues on a regular basis and has parks with horrible quality and customer service issues that are becoming more and more cookie cutter in design.

I’m sure somebody on the CF board profits handsomely from this or it wouldn’t have happened. But I fail to see how it benefits its parks or customers.

It was impossible to Cedar Fair to add to its roster of super regional amusement parks without adding to the chain’s already substantial debt load. A merger of equals was likely the only way to grow the chain, though a purge of lower performing parks across both companies may be the cost of this growth.

I’m curious what happens to Gilroy Garden which I think the city owners but run by Cedar Fair? Can anybody here confirm that? I believe they have some land to maybe add some of those Great America rides or expand.

>> and others don't need the Six Flags brand to have continued success because it doesn't add anything for them

IIRC the Montreal park doesn’t use Six Flags name in its title (but uses the branding and name in a secondary way) so there is precedent for this.

I would honestly like to see Six Flags America close combined with moving Superman and Wild One to King's Dominion. That would make King's Dominion more competitive with HersheyPark. As is, I have no desire to visit Six Flags America, and King's Dominion is not worth the traffic.