I'm not sure that your argument is valid. Annual attendance for HS was 10.1M people with a nighttime show. Annual attendance for AK was 10.2M people without a nighttime show... HS has the fewest ATTRACTIONS of any park in the WDW portfolio. Again, this does nothing but further my argument that ATTRACTIONS bring people to the parks. Not restaurants, not shows. Attractions. Everything else is peripheral.
The issue here, and what has always been seen has false #s, is that "attendance" is determined by the park people go to first. Disney doesn't count attendance twice, so if you start in AK and finish in DHS, that doesn't count for DHS. It's generally known that people go to AK early, and as others have pointed out, then leave for other parks. How many people are drawn to DHS in the evenings for Fantasmic!, but don't get counted in the park attendance for that day? Certainly no-one on this board knows.
A nighttime show could possibly keep people in the park for the full day. OR, maybe it will lead to less people coming early and more people coming late.
Overall though - there is more chance that this expansion does more to self cannibalize than it does to bring new people through the gates. Slow growth is inevitable when you are the size of WDW. Even had they bought and built Harry Potter, they would not have seen the % growth that Universal did. Disney would've been lucky to see a 3-5 % bump, and the fact is, they probably got almost that large a bump when Universal built HP.
And that's Disney's greatest problem, and why it's more or less "built out". The question is will DAK draw people from MK, which is what they want, or will it be from Epcot and DHS. Because that's there biggest problem now, to boost the other parks or more specifically to pull some of the crowds from MK.
I guess I have to admit that I'm not being very clear in my point, or not articulating it well. I do not mean at all that these need to be ongoing upgrades, nor that they need enough to keep me busy for my 2-3 week vacation. I simply mean they need one big expansion (probably tiered in over a several years) at the three secondary parks so that they start to become a near equal draw to MK. In the process, they will create a resort that will take more than 7 days to "do it all" which will entice their average visitor to want to come back each year.
No, I think I got what you are saying. It's just not realistic, regardless of what I just said above.
1) They don't want all four parks to be equal to Magic Kingdom. They never did. However, they WOULD like to draw some people away from this park.
2) They don't NEED to convince people to come back. For every person that stops coming back, there's a new one to take his place.
The facts are the facts: they are continuing to increase the # of visitors every year, even with near-stupid year-over-year price increase.
Now, if they were forward thinking then I would agree that they would want improvements in the 3 lesser parks. Generally corporations aren't that forward thinking but again, in this case, they ARE looking at major expansions in TWO of their parks. You (and others) may choose to not call the DAK expansion a MAJOR expansion but it is. They are sinking $500 million into the park - which almost twice what they put into NFL (what I would consider a minor expansion). They are increasing the #of rides in the park by 25%, increasing dining options by about 40%, increasing shows by 25%.
There is also discussion/evidence of a major DHS expansion. Without full details, we can criticize rumors, but that is all prattle until an announcement is made. If the rumored $1 billion overhaul occurs, that is without doubt MAJOR.
