Niles: Weather is no excuse for SeaWorld’s performance ...Middle East

What do I want most to see from theme parks this year?

Accountability.

Very little runs perfectly in this world. The best engineered ride systems can fail from time to time. Even when they work properly, people can force them to shut down by messing around or not paying attention as they should when getting on or off the ride.

Ideas that sound great in conference rooms sometimes fail when brought to life in the parks. A recipe that tasted great in the test kitchen just seems off when prepared at scale. A show that everyone on the entertainment team loved elicits yawns from a more diverse audience in the park. A dark ride that fans loved a generation ago now no longer hits — or worse, is offending many of today’s fans. Even if a park nails everything, maybe a big storm hits, and everyone stays home for a few days.

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If it ain’t broke, it will be at some point. When that inevitable failure happens, what customers, fans and employees most want are not managers who will whine, “it’s not my fault,” but who instead will put up their hand and say, “yeah, that’s on me.”

Last week, United Parks & Resorts — the company that owns the SeaWorld theme parks — reported a drop in attendance for 2024. In announcing the results, CEO Marc Swanson said that the company’s attendance would have gone up if not for a run of storms in the Southeast late in the year, including hurricanes Debby, Helene and Milton.

“We’ve had a pretty bad run of unusually poor weather over the last couple of years,” he said.

That may be true, but as the old saying goes, “there’s no such thing as bad weather — only bad clothes.” Dealing with storms and heat waves are part of the business of running any outdoor attraction. The “bad run” of weather that has happened in past years is no anomaly. It’s the future, as climate change continues to disrupt established weather patterns.

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So plan for it. While parks can do better in designing spaces that provide comfort in poor weather, no design is going to make people want to visit in a hurricane. For that, companies and markets need to accept that, going forward, theme parks in Florida and the Southeast are likely to lose several days of attendance each year during hurricane season.

United Parks has issues that go beyond the weather, however. The company’s practice of adding surcharges to in-park purchases — now up to 9% at SeaWorld Orlando — has enraged many of its fans. Disney and Universal continue to run away from the rest of the industry with billion-dollar investments in IP-driven attractions that companies such as United Parks cannot match.

But explanations never are an excuse. Great managers take what they are given and make it work. Accepting responsibility for a failure is a weakness only to those whose focus is fixed on the past. For those who look ahead, taking accountability gives us faith that you are working to make us a better future.

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