Amusement parks: few visitors worldwide – economy

A year ago, Roland Mack had hoped to be able to welcome visitors to his Europa-Park in winter too – but then the third wave came with full force, from the dream. After the amusement park in Rust was only allowed to open late at the end of May due to the pandemic, the extended season would have brought a certain amount of compensation into the cash register. Mack had recently spoken of a loss of around 300 million euros due to the pandemic. To mark the 45th anniversary of the park, he invited 50 artists to come and build 30 large ice sculptures out of 200 tons of ice – albeit without an audience. Because even the planned season opening at the end of March had to be canceled due to Corona, and the ice melted in the spring sun. Europa-Park was only allowed to let in visitors in mid-May, and only because the amusement park became part of a model project by the state government.

The world branch association TEA (Themed Entertainment Association) has now measured the effects of the pandemic on the amusement parks. Accordingly, the number of visitors fell by 50 to 90 percent worldwide over the past year due to the lockdown, travel restrictions and other officially prescribed hygiene measures after the record year 2019 “one of the strongest annual declines”. The big corporate parks of Disney and Universal in the USA got the worst with a drop in visitors of around 80 percent, in some cases other parks in South America and Asia had even higher losses, while others did not open at all.

A similar picture emerged in Europe: Disneyland Paris lost 73.1 percent of its visitors, Legoland Windsor as much as 81.5 percent. The German amusement parks got off relatively lightly: According to the ranking, Europa-Park still had 2.5 million visitors, which means a decrease of 56.5 percent. In the pre-Corona year 2019 there were at least 5.7 million visitors. In Europe, Disneyland Paris, which without Disney Studios had 2.6 million instead of 9.7 million visitors in the previous year, and Efteling in the Netherlands (2.9 instead of 5.2 million visitors) were more popular.

Of the 20 most popular European amusement parks, four are in Germany

However, since official orders had a significant impact on the opening of the parks, TEA has retained the ranking from 2019 this year. Phantasialand (-51.2 percent, one million visitors), Legoland Günzburg (-55.9, 750,000) and Heide-Park (-44.1, 950,000) also rank among the top 20 European countries. Incidentally, the Upper Bavarian Therme Erding (-59.5, 750,000) remains the front runner among European water parks.

The industry association expects the number of visitors to recover properly in 2022, “it could be a full year of operation for everyone, albeit with restrictions”. The operators of Europa-Park, which currently allow up to 25,000 visitors, previously it was twice as much on peak days, meanwhile hope to be able to open continuously until the end of the Christmas holidays for the first time – so far there has been a break of several weeks between Halloween and Christmas. Their new water park Rulantica, which is designed for 400,000 visitors a year and has not yet made it into the ranking due to the pandemic, is supposed to ensure sufficient occupancy.

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