Six Flags Back in the Red

[FParker185]

http://www.zacks.com/research/get_news.php?id=187l4657

You know damn well there is someone in corporate as we speak saying "It's time to raise the prices some more"

[Necropolis]

Kinda surprised but kinda not. I mean yeah I think the company was heading in a good direction but public attendance has surely been lacking lately especially this season. I can see prices being raised again next year. Kinda makes sense why they introduced that summer thrill pass this year, for those who couldn't afford a season pass or those who only go during the summer season. Plus you have the coke cans that give you admission for $20 off and more people go outside the park to eat or bring their own lunches from home. The company is in the red but it can easily get out of that. I wouldn't necessarily worry at all about this.

[monsterfan99]

How this could be a shock to anyone is beyond me. The death march of Six Flags is right back on track after a brief detour.

[Ilovthevu']

^^I think the problem is, is that they can't get out of the red. They have been in the red for so long, and than all of a sudden they actually made a profit. It's easy to be in the red when one park gets 3 coasters in one year, and sure 1 is used, 1 is cheap, and 1 was refurbished, but that's a lot of money especially for those combined, and especially for that Superman ride. They should have just tore that ride down.

And than for SFGAm, they have one of the worst summer cold weather in recent years I can think of to build yet another water addition. I do like waterparks, but if you look at attendances for any waterpark, you will see the attendance is just not there. You can even look at Disney's waterpark, and it's nowhere even close to the 4 major Disney parks. A DISNEY waterpark of Typhoon Lagoon which is the highest attended waterpark got about 2 million people last year. Now, again this is DISNEY in which the Magic Kingdom is almost getting 17 million people! People in general like dry parks over water parks. Water parks tend to SEEM more crowded because of capacity issues. On a bunch of rides (excluding the 2 rides at SFGAm), you are going single or double down a slide. It's not a 32 person train that comes back every 2-3 minutes.

I like waterparks, I like amusement parks, and I even like carnivals, but my point is that IF SFGAm gets a new addition, it should be on the dryside! And I can't believe we didn't get a watercoaster instead of what we got for Riptide Bay.

And I as I said somewhere else, the too cheap admission prices / season pass prices have to be really hurting them in the long run. I even think that partnering with Key Lime Cove is a really dumb idea as I said before. Key Lime Cove is SFGAm's competition. They have a ride and slide pass with Key Lime Cove, and by doing something like that, it's almost like they want you to go on the slides at Key Lime Cove, and just go on the other rides at SFGAm. They are competing for the same market, and to me it just makes zippo sense for SFGAm to team up! It makes sense for Key Lime Cove to team up because they are a hotel, but not for SF. Sure, one is indoors, and one is bigger outside, but if you paying bigger money for the hotel, you probably would want to go into the swimming area in your hotel which is less packed than Hurricane Harbor, and than just go on the regular rides at the park.

For Superman, and Texas Giant, they are refurbished to be different type of rides. Do the people understand that they are enhanced at all? Maybe, people might think hey I hated that Texas Giant before, and look on the map it's still Texas Giant. And for Superman, they could potentially think well whoopee do, they painted that thing. That thing is still slow. I think on those 2 rides alone, they wasted way too much money. They should have just dumped those rides, and built other rides, or for Superman, did that ride really matter to the park?

What really amazes me though is that some certain season pass holders want more stuff than what they get, and remember as it stands, they can visit almost any other Six Flags for FREE! Cedar Fair has 2 separate prices for something like that, but Six Flags, hey you can go any Six Flags with that pass.

[monsterfan99]

^The Key Lime Cove one always confused me on what they were trying to do. The park is not a tourist destination as shown by the lack of hotels in the area. Then when they get the bright idea to partner with a hotel, the choice is a competitor? Unless KLC is kicking in a decent amount of money, the deal is insane.

I've said it before and I will say it again, something has to be done with ticket pricing and parking cost. My 2010 SP from the STL park, with parking added on, was around $50 bucks. Finding someone else's parking receipt and ticket stub on the ground saved me $65. Even at $110 it was way too low, but $50 is unreal. You can't stay in business allowing things like that to happen.

The solution to the ticket problem is easy too: Free Parking. Jack the ticket price up $25-30 and set the SP at $150 and eliminate parking cost. While only a $5-10 net gain on a single person, people are suckers for the "free" line. Plus you earn the full current parking cost on each person as well as opposed to $20 for the entire car. As a bonus you can cut some of the parking staff at each park.

[Ilovthevu']

^I think the $20-$25 per person would be too much money. I agree that the parking prices are way too high. Really, they should stay at about $7, or something low like that, but really $80 or $85 for one trip for one person to Great America is kind of outrageous. If you have 4 people in a car to Great America, and the parking is $20, the park thinks of that as $5 a person extra, but that's not what people think. They think, holy cow it's $20 to park. It's ridiculous. They want your business, and they charge so much to put your car there, and the backlot looks terrible with weeds growing out of cracks. Why not give less of a discount for admission, and knock those parking prices down a lot.

I do agree that people like the free tagline. Think of Holiday World, and they really charge a lot per admission for what they have, but they are giving free parking, free drinks, what free tubes I think, etc. The regular admission over there is $43 which again to me is quite HIGH for what they have, but anyway right now they are only giving people $4 or $5 off compared to Great America giving the gate away! Essentially, Great America is giving $20 off, and $30 off ($30 off = Buy One Get One) in July! It's kind of amazing how much publicity Holiday World gets for the free drinks, but when Kiddieland had it, it was nothing. I never heard anyone brag about it that they had free soda all day! The news definitely didn't really say much about it.

Last time I went to Great America, I heard two complaints about how high the prices are for the food at Great America. The higher they get, the more people might say the prices are ridiculous, let's just do something else instead. One was about the $3.50 drink, and another person was mad about 3 donuts for a certain price - Was it $7? What bugs me is that if SF thinks hey let's get people in these parks for cheap, and than they will spend, they shouldn't be thinking like that. If people want to spend, they will spend. They shouldn't expect people to give every dime to SF. If food prices are too high, they will figure a way around it. If the merchandise is cruddy, they need to figure a way to get better merchandise that pleases the people coming to the park. You can't just say we have this, and that, so you buy stuff from us. For games, I wonder if the stuffed animal craze is done with? I know that was an old thing, but maybe kids don't really care for them anymore. I don't know? Maybe, they should come up with some other prizes besides stuffed animals. And I know they have capes, guitars, and basketballs, but what about some other stuff? And Six Flags could have burnt their bridges with the locker policy last year by people saying hey forget the games.

I think of the season pass pricing this way. It's like if I go to see one movie at $5. There are still theaters that have $5 admission, but anyway the point is that comparing it to Great America (in which a movie is totally different), let's say they have $7 season pass for the movies. I would see so many movies at the theater for only $7. That's ridiculous really, and that's what Six Flags is doing, and that's why they are in the heap of trouble plus they spend a lot even on some dud attractions.

[Luxornv]

One way they could increase profits is by reducing the food costs. I'm sure most of you and others not on this forum are like me in the fact that you have a season pass with parking. It's no news flash that it costs me nothing to go to SFGAm after that first visit. The park makes no money off of me when I go. If I'm there for a whole day, or even a partial day after work, I eat outside of the park because it's way cheaper. Sure it's more of a hassle, but I save money. If the park lowered their prices to be competitive with the restaurants outside of the park, then they probably would start getting money from me. If it's only going to cost me $1-3 more for a meal in the park, then I'll buy in the park. When it's $10 or more for a comparable amount of food though, then I'm going outside of the park. I'm sure they know this, but still the food prices are outrageous.

-Captain Obvious

[BP317]

The fact that even after SF completely restructured their balance sheet and the parks should be operating at a profit now and still aren't just shows the company is still hurting from low attendance and a bad reputation.

I agree with Jforce about food service being a problem, but I think it has more to do with quality than price. People want to buy food in the park, people don't want to leave the park in order to eat lunch, assuming the price for lunch is somewhere between $8-15 or so may be expensive but it's no different than going to a normal resturaunt. Other parks have realized this and are much more sucessful with their food service operations when they increased the quality of the food. Amusement park food done right is an attraction itself, nobody wants to grossly overpay for a Sysco hamburger that may or may not be properly prepared. People will, however, gladly open up their wallets for something they know is going to be good.

The food service gripes is actually a great analogy to Six Flags itself and why it is constantly struggling to make a profit. Ive always seen Six Flags' biggest competitior as it's own reputation, take a park like SFGAm that used to be ran impeccably well and look at what it became under the ownership of Premier. From my experiences at SFGAm, while it is a very nice park that is normally ran very well, there have been plenty of times where there are an excessive amount of closed rides, understaffed food service with long lines, trashed queue lines, lack of upkeep, etc.

In order to be truly sucessful a business needs consistency, the parks can't be fun some days and ran poorly on others in order to truly be sucessful. SFGAm made a statement the past decade by adding family ride after family ride trying to convince people they are a family park and to come back because we care about the family. Things like lack of a 3rd shift staff to support the parks operation, constantly struggling to keep all the rides open, mandatory lockers (now not a policy at SFGAm anymore thankfully), basically say to people "we only care about your money not your experience with our product" and it hurts the business long term. Ive been to all the SF parks except for the ones in Texas, and the most recent being SFOG this summer. The park was clean and ran well when I went there and I had a great time. Mike went to SFOG last week and told me it was ran like garbage, 5 minute stacks on all of the coasters, mean employees, reminded me of how awful GADV was in 2005 and how I just wanted to leave after going on all the coasters once. Across the country at SFMM theres no reason for a very popular coaster like Terminator to be running 1 train all spring and summer other than extremely bad planning and lack of money being put into the right places. I don't want to go to a park during it's busiest season and have to worry about one of it's most popular coasters running 1 train. Cannot under estimate the importance of consistency.

This also reflects Six Flags' pricing strategy, it cost just as much for a parking pass as it does an season pass for admission into the park, which means Six Flags is the perfect place to drop off your troubled kids to get them out of your hair since it's super cheap for a full year with no parking pass needed. Also they are constantly going out there devaluing admission with kids free promotions, BOGO, Big Six ticket, etc, which is not what investors want to see. Another poster brought up a great point about Holiday World, which includes parking and soda with your admission ticket (it's not free, it's Will Koch being a brilliant marketer). But people refer to them as a great value for a day with your family even though it's pretty expensive for a small park.

Theres really no big secret as to why SF has not been succesful the past decade. In every interview Shapiro did he said the previous management constantly devalued the product with cheap season passes, but then he started running things and realized it's not as easy as it sounds getting people out to the parks that have damaged reputations and the pricing strategy continues today. Kirean Burke realized he ran the company into the ground with over expansion in small markets and poor quality, hence why his last year as CEO was the "100% committed to your playtime" campaign and added more detail-oriented quality attractions like SFGAm's Hurricane Harbor and The Golden Kingdom.

I can't believe we didn't get a watercoaster instead of what we got for Riptide Bay.

I wouldn't worry about that too much, considering how popular HH is it's only a matter of time before it gets a water coaster. SFGAm's waterpark addition is pretty much all of the stuff SFKK was supposed to get but didn't when they decided not to renew the lease.

[FParker185]

Last 2 posts have hit the nail square on the head.