Attendance dipped at the SeaWorld and Busch Gardens theme parks this summer, due in part to hurricanes in the U.S. southeast.
United Parks & Resorts this morning reported total attendance of seven million guests at its theme parks during the three months ending September 30, 2024. That is a decrease of 1.4%, or about 100,000 guests, from the same period in 2023. Total revenue also was down, 0.4% to $545.9 million, with net income down 3.1% to $119.7 million for the quarter.
CEO Marc Swanson blamed the weather in part for the declines.
"Third quarter results were impacted by both a negative calendar shift and meaningfully worse weather, including Hurricane Debby in August and Hurricane Helene in September," Swanson said. "The combined impact of the calendar shift and the meaningfully worse weather was approximately 320,000 guests, adjusting for these impacts, attendance would have increased approximately 3% compared to the prior year quarter, as we continue to see strong demand for our parks during normalized operating conditions and we are growing total revenue per capita."
On that note, total revenue per capita increased 1.0% to $77.66 during the quarter, with admission revenue accounting for $42.24 of that - up 0.5% from the year prior - with in-park spending jumping 1.6% to a record $35.42 per guest.
So where is United Parks spending the money it's making from that? Share buybacks.
"We also continued to take advantage of our significant free cash flow generation and follow through on our commitment to return excess capital to shareholders by opportunistically and aggressively buying back our shares at extremely depressed and highly attractive prices – we repurchased approximately 4.9 million shares, or more than 8% of our total outstanding shares, since the end of June through November 6th," Swanson said. "Year to date, we have repurchased approximately 9.4 million shares or approximately 15% of our total outstanding shares."
Those 4.9 million shares cost the company $211.7 million, with the company spending an additional $37.7 million to buy about 800,000 additional shares after the end of the quarter in September.
United Parks & Resorts owns the SeaWorld, Busch Gardens, and Sesame Place theme parks in the United States, as well as several water parks, including Aquatica, Adventure Island, and Water Country USA. It licenses the SeaWorld brand to Miral for its SeaWorld Abu Dhabi on Yas Island.
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In addition to the weather, there's also the predictable "calendar shift" excuse. And these soft numbers include the endless bribes to passholders of free tickets, free Quick Queues, free food samples and free in-park credit. You've trashed the guest experience, United Parks. We all know the reason your attendance continues to drop.
And the creative accounting takes that free in-park credit that passholders are receiving (sometimes multiple times a month) and counts it as part of their increased revenue.
Our parks are falling apart, but hey let’s buy back shares instead of investing in our parks.
I will not be renewing with United Parks next year. Absolute trash chain, bottom of the barrel for theme parks worldwide. Sickening what they've done to some truly great properties.
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Again with the freaking weather. At what point do you stop blaming that for soft attendance and start doing something to combat it?