SeaWorld Entertainment this morning announced that it is changing its corporate name to United Parks & Resorts.
"Our new company name, United Parks & Resorts Inc., better reflects that we have been, and will continue to be, a diverse collection of park brands and experiences. Each of our iconic parks, including the four SeaWorld parks in Orlando, San Antonio, San Diego and Abu Dhabi, will continue to operate under the same names our guests know and love. What also remains unchanged is our deep commitment to creating experiences that matter for our guests and inspiring them to help protect animals and the wild wonders of the world," CEO Marc Swanson said.
The name change, which takes effect February 12, gives the company the initialism UPR, which coincidentally had been the initials of Universal’s theme park segment, before it changed its name from Universal Parks and Resorts to Universal Destinations and Experiences (UDX).
The new United Parks includes the SeaWorld parks in San Diego, San Antonio and Orlando, Busch Gardens in Tampa and Williamsburg, Va., Sesame Place in Langhorne, Pa. and San Diego, Discovery Cove in Orlando, plus the Aquatica water parks in Orlando and San Antonio, Adventure Island in Tampa and Water Country USA in Williamsburg. The company also licenses SeaWorld Yas Island to Miral in Abu Dhabi.
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Discovery Parks would have been better - Discovery Sea, Discovery Land, etc, but what do I know lol
/\ From what I was told by someone in the know their first choice was already trademarked.
I agree with Russell that rebranding the company like this, especially with that awful name, is a puzzling decision. I could understand if they renamed the Sea World and Busch Gardens parks because of the negative traits associated with SW and the fact that Busch doesn't have anything to do with BG anymore so its basically free advertising, but rebranding the company in this way without even a logo reveal seems haphazard.
Absolutely hilarious they are changing their ticker symbol to PRKS. I remember after Premier Parks bought Six Flags and went public they traded under the ticker symbol PKS for years before Mark Shapiro became CEO and changed it to SIX.
Doesn’t mean anything and it won’t move the needle. Renaming the individual parks would have been major. Nobody searches for SeaWorld Entertainment when researching the parks, Autofill takes over. I’m sure the corporation has plenty of reason to do this and they don’t care about a couple of replies on a nobody theme park website. Stop being armchair quarterbacks
Agree with Russell that the brand recognition is a good reason not to make this change.
Crediting my friend and colleague Joe Kleiman here, but if you translate "United Parks" into Spanish, you can get... "Parques Reunidos."
They should have called it "Acme Parks & Resorts".
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This is about as brilliant as Twitter rebranding as X. Sea World had wide-reaching brand recognition, and while less than half the chain's parks were actually named Sea World, there is enough value in the brand's identity within the other parks. I could see doing slight tweaks to the name for various reasons, but to abandon the Sea World brand as the corporate identifier is pretty foolish.