Mr. Theme Park

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Hi everybody, it's No Show.
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I'm Matt Brown.
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He's known as Mr.
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Theme Park, and for good reason, Dennis Spiegel has spent over 50 years shaping the places where the world goes to play, starting his incredible journey at just 13 years old, taking tickets at Cincinnati's historic Coney Island.
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He climbed the ranks of Taft Broadcasting to help build iconic regional destinations like King's Island, King's Dominion, Canada's Wonderland.
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In 1983, he founded International Theme Park Services, directing over 500 massive projects across 55 countries.
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He is a premier global consultant, a master storyteller, and is the ultimate authority on the business of fun.
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Over his career, he has personally tested hundreds of roller coasters, rides, and park food menus worldwide.
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Quote, a ride isn't just about speed, it's about the emotional story it tells you from the queue line to the exit.
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Better words never spoken.
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Hold on tight, everybody, because we are going on a ride.
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Welcome to No Show, Dennis Spiegel.
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Hey Matt, happy to be with you.
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As I say, we're not stealing hubcaps, we're building memories.
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Let's let's dig in.
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If you had to deliver a State of the Union for the theme park industry today as a whole, what is your core diagnosis?
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Still the greatest place on the planet Earth to bring a family and have a great time.
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Theme parks are perceived to be expensive and they can be, but they still provide a wonderful opportunity for families to get together, come to a place and have a great time.
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I think when you look at theme parks and you equate the price to other experiences out there, pro football, concerts, movies, etc., when you break it down on an hourly basis, it's still a wonderful place to come and come as a family.
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Has the fundamental business model of a theme park changed?
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You know, for decades, it was about kind of making money by getting more people through the gates.
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And it seems like when you when you read the news now, it's more about making money from fewer higher value guests.
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You know, when you're talking about Disney or when you're talking about Universal, you get the feeling that that the Six Flags model of the regional park is kind of on a separate track.
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Do you think that's the case?
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Well, they there's always been a separation between the destination parks, which are the Disney, the Universal, the SeaWorld type parks that are open year-round, and the Six Flags, as you said, Cedar Fair, which merged last year, and now that's all under Six Flags.
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And there's there's always been a gap there, but they serve two purposes.
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The the regional parks, which is Six Flags Parks, let's say the Dollywoods, the Hershey Parks, they're the local park that serves the community within, we say, a 250-mile range.
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That's a couple of hour drive to a theme park.
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The destination parks, they have certainly evolved over the last 15, 20 years, and through the technological advancements that we see in our industry.
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Good example of that is Epic Universe, which opened last year in Orlando.
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Uh, I was invited down three months before it opened to take a look at it and give them my appraisal.
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And it was one of the most spectacular uh theme park attractions offerings I've ever seen.
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The regional parks can afford, cannot afford to spend what the destination parks.
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An attraction at a Universal or Disney can be $100 to $300 million plus.
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Typical roller coaster regional park is $25, $30 million.
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A smaller ride might be five to ten.
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So they're never going to be at that level, but there's a place for both in the marketplace.
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The regionals support the locals, their destinations support the family vacation that comes on in every few two or three or four-year vacation cycle.
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So uh still a place for both of them.
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And I might add that last year in America, over 375 million people went to theme parks in America, more than all professional sports teams rolled together: basketball, football, hockey, everything.
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So uh it really is a wonderful place to go, and people still love us.
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That's great.
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I've always wondered, too, if the secret for indies like Dollywood and Hershey is the goodwill of those separate brands.
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And I have to say, we are recording this on Tuesday, August 25th.
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A couple hours ago, they announced that Dolly Parton has died and gonna have to fly the flags at half-mast for a while, I think.
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But I'm wondering, A, what the future of that park is gonna be.
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B, she engendered such goodwill from almost every quadrant of America.
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You know, I know that park kind of lived other lives before she took over and kind of rebranded it, but I'm I'm curious what the future of that park is.
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And I wonder if that park succeeded because of her personal brand.
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Well, let me tell you, I Dolly's manager and the president of her company, who just retired recently, Ted Miller, was one of my first friends in the theme park business.
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He and I started out at the same age, uh, 50 some years ago, and have remained friends all through the years.
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And through Ted, I got to meet and be with Dolly uh uh several times, have lunch and dinner with her, and just enjoy her.
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I want to tell you something.
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The way you described her, you always hope when you meet a celebrity that they're gonna live up to your expectations and they won't let you down.
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She not only doesn't let you down or didn't let you down, she exceeded everything.
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And the time spent with her was just fabulous.
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She is what you saw on television.
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She was the same way, off and in the back room.
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It never changed, and she was wonderful.
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The impact that she had on that park down in Pigeon Forge when it was uh, it was actually uh Gold Rush Junction early on, did about 150,000 people a year, okay?
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Real tiny small park.
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It was bought by Silver Dollar City, the Hershen family in the mid-80s.
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They called it, they changed the name to Silver Dollar City, and that elevated the attendance back then around 82 uh to about 250,000.
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They got into business with Dolly, saw the opportunity to put her entertainment value into that park.
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That year they named it Dollywood, and it opened.
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The park went from 250,000 to a million two hundred thousand the next year.
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We've never seen in the industry before or since that kind of uh impact from a person's intellectual property name.
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So she she really uh brought that park into vogue and it's been growing ever since.
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It hasn't stopped.
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And you know what?
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Because of Dolly being who she was and the way she was and her generosity and contributions to everything, that park will continue to grow for years under the Herschel banner with her name on it.
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You just wrote, I think, a piece sometime over the last week of how that park is a good example of one of the regional parks that has made a pretty major investment.
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I think they're doing, is it called Night Flight, which is like this $50 million addition to the park, which people are just raving about.
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I'm curious too.
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I like I know she let the business people run the thing, but it does seem like she had, at least from a brand perspective, she had a a pretty decent amount of involvement with that place.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Well, first of all, one of the reasons she wanted to be involved with that park in that market is because that's where her family is from.
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She was from.
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She was born in Severeville County, which is where the the park is, down of Pigeon Forge, Gatlinburg, that whole area, the Smoky Mountains.
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So she's employed a lot of her family through the years, and she loved that park.
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She was there all the time.
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Whenever they wanted her to come out for something special, an introduction or an announcement of some type, Dolly was there uh in spades recently with her health.
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She wasn't able to be there for that ride you mentioned.
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It's called uh Night Flight Expedition.
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It is a $60 million ride.
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It incorporates audiovisual, roller coaster, water attractions, story immersions.
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It's the biggest ride Herschan uh family entertainment's ever put into a park.
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And Dolly was totally invested into that.
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She loved the ride.
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She'd been on it.
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I was told it'll live on with her, and that park will continue to grow and and prosper because of the Hershen name and the way they do business in our theme park industry.
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You've worked all over the world.
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Is it universal what people want from theme parks?
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I wonder when you go into different regions, is the need basically the same?
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Are the rides basically the same?
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Or have you encountered situations where, for one reason or another, culturally certain rides or certain experiences just do not translate?
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The one thing I have found during my 50 years in the business, the common denominator among everybody in the world, everybody wants to have fun.
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You evolve the level of entertainment in an emerging market, just like we did here in America.
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And the best example I can give you is uh when we introduced the roller coaster, there weren't any loops in them.
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And then Cedar Point put in the corkscrew, kind of a barrel.
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Woo! That was really exciting.
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And then after the corkscrew, we figured out, well, if they like that, now we can put a loop in this.
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Why?
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To entice people to come back.
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So you don't start an emerging market with a well, except in Saudi Arabia, with a 600-foot of roller coaster where they just did in Kidia Park, Kidia Park in Riyam.
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Uh, you usually start out slower and you build that uh that pace.
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And uh that's how you entice people to come originally and keep coming back.
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Our business lives on repeat visitation, and repeat visitation is built on new product and new introductions, and that's why we do it on intervals of one to two to three years in a park, uh, to give them something new to get them to come back and have them something, uh, have something new that they can enjoy.
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What's the nuttiest concept that died during the feasibility phase?
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Did did you ever get hit with somebody who's like, we're gonna build a water slide across the English Channel?
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Or we're gonna we're gonna we're gonna send kids to the moon in our new ride.
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Did you ever encounter anything that was just just off the wall that kind of made it uh an executive meeting?
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One thing we always laugh about in our staff meetings here at ITPS is that as long as somebody has a crazy idea, we have a job.
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Okay.
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And a few years ago, a gentleman came to us.
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He wanted to create this roller coaster, and he wanted to do it on a new park he was talking about down in Texas, and all of this kind of made sense.
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He wanted to create a roller coaster that the station looked like a six gun, a cowboy six gun, and the trains would load in the barrel of the six gun in Texas, you say.
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And then, as we do, we have multiple trains.
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So you would be in the train, we could have six trains in there, and you would rotate up to the barrel to be launched or shot out, and in the at that, this was his idea, and at that time of launch, the hammer would come back and boom, shoot you out of the thing with the noise, and you'd be launched like like we do with lineal induction motors.
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Sounded like an interesting idea.
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Well, at that time, this is 15, 18 years ago.
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Uh, we didn't have exactly the the type of uh uh of engineering that we have today, and uh, but a company did try it with a smaller model down at Myrtle Beach theme park, uh the hard rock park at Myrtle Beach.
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And uh they tried to build it, and the damn thing just never worked.
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They got stuck in the chamber, they couldn't get out of it.
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I went down to see it.
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I went, oh my god, I'm sorry you ever heard this idea.
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Well, uh, feasibility and taste issues aside, I am, I have to admit, I'm a little curious to see it.
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See, that's the thing about these rides, is that they can just be insane, they can just be batshit crazy.
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Yeah, exactly.
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Like, oh, all right, I kind of want to see it, I kind of want to get in it and do it.
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Let's talk trends here for a second.
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If you were appointed theme park czar for a day, you have a magic wand.
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Is there a a park trend out there or operational practice that you would ban immediately?
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Yeah, uh there is.
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This is a two-edged sword in in my mind.
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Can I guess?
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Can I guess what you're gonna say?
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And it's the cell phone.
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Oh, the cell phone, that's not what I was gonna guess.
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I thought you might say fast pass.
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Well, that I'm coming to that.
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A cell phone, really, because uh, I mean, go to the kitchen table, go to a restaurant, and look around, you see everybody sitting there texting, and no one talking.
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Today in the theme parks, we're using those smartphones to improve your your uh stay while you're there to get you quicker on the rides, find out where the crowds are, tell you things that are happening in the park, but still they're a pain in the butt.
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And you know, we have issues every once in a while when somebody sneaks one on a roller coaster and it flies out of their hand, hits somebody in the lip or something.
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Uh but we've got to have them.
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We're gonna use them, we're gonna continue it, but I wish we could control them not only at the theme parks, but in life in general.
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Let me talk about the fast pass, okay?
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The fast pass is important.
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It's gonna be here, it's part of the fabric of where our industry is going.
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There'll always be someone who will pay that additional money, no matter how much it is, to avoid standing in line.
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But it's always gonna piss somebody off who's in line, who sees them get ahead of the line.
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Now, Disney actually has done a very good job of circumventing the primary line with secondary lines for the VIP.
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So you really don't run into those conflicts as much.
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But, you know, it's expensive to operate theme parks.
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Labor's expensive, the cost of sale issues uh that are associated with the park.
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And we can't keep always raising the price.
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And the way you do it is through what I call the biggie fry.
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You want the biggie fry and the 58-ounce coke.
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Okay, well, we're gonna sell that to you for our X here, and you can do this.
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And that's what they've done with dining passes and programs like that.
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It can just feel a little bit like some economic stratification, which I think when you're in the park can come over a little bit as a drag.
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Theme parks, I think for a long time were sort of democratic in their own way.
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And I think Disney was maybe at the top of that list of like, oh, everyone can come here.
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And now it I feel like we're getting away from that.
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Well, let me tell you the one thing that's always irritated for me from when I got into the business at King's Island, Coney Island, to today, and no matter where I go, it's the parking charge.
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I mean, you it when we started King's Island, parking was $2.
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It's $26 now.
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You go to some parks, it's $50 for VIP parking.
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What is the additional cost?
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It's a way that parks have developed a way to really maximize their profit margin on that single issue.
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If you probably took a poll of all of the people who go to theme parks, that's probably, along with the the fast pass, the most distasteful thing they do when they go to a park, pay that park each ar.
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What ride have you ridden more times than any other in your life?
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Uh well, it'll be a roller coaster.
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And uh I remember when we opened King's Island uh and we introduced the double racing coaster in 1972.
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I rode that 33 times in a row.
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And uh I got it, I got so bored on it after a while through the years, and I didn't do this while the public was there, but I would get my assistant to go out with me.
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We'd ride the ride, I would stand up backwards, put the lap bar up, fold my arms to it, and tell him to hold his arms around my legs, and I would watch the ride backwards, standing as we went through the ride.
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And uh, not a safe thing to do.
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Don't don't ever try it.
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But as a result of that, that ended up being the reason Kings Island put the trains on the coaster backwards, giving people new experience for about 15 years because it gave a it took that ride and made it a totally different experience.
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So the coaster has always been my kind of my favorite ride.
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Uh and I've, as you said at the outset of the show, uh ridden hundreds of them all all around the world, uh, everywhere I can, China, Japan, you name it, and uh still like that.
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The only thing I can't do today is uh I don't like the teacups or something that goes around a circle.
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I get vertigo, but I can go up and down and out and back and do that kind of stuff.
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What's your favorite theme park food?
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Uh I like a corn dog.
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I can eat that at the theme park or a state fair.
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Totally.
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Oh no.
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Believe it or not, I like cotton candy as sticky and as humid as it can get in in the park uh during the summer.
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Uh, but you know what's happened to food and theme parks, Matt?
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Uh, there's been a lot of branding that has come in.
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Theme parks have figured out we can make more money by doing this, by bringing in uh the low uh an international pizza chain or a hamburger or something.
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The major thing is it's still finger food.
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People come to the American theme parks, they want to eat it quickly, get through the park, have fun.
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They're not there to sit down and have a three-hour dinner.
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In Europe, that's a little different.
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They will do that.
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I feel like, given the number of times that you've ridden roller coasters and your propensity for corn dogs and cotton candy, you have a you have a strong gut.
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You could your stomach can take a lot of things that it gets hit with.
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And I admire that.
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I wonder, too, with some of the regional parks, how many of them?
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I've not done research on this, but how many of the regional parks are, if at all, are embracing kind of the food truck vibe?
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Interesting.
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You would ask that.
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That is an evolving concept that's coming into the park business, just as you've seen it spread through downtown urban areas of cities around the United States.
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We're working on a project outside the country.
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Uh, I was just there uh two weeks ago, and one of the discussions I had with the owner, developer, was that he wanted to create a food area developed around food trucks because he had seen the great success that it had in the United States.
00:20:46.559 --> 00:20:51.039
So it's something that's on the just on the cusp, it's starting to come.
00:20:51.039 --> 00:20:53.119
You're gonna see more of it in the parks.
00:20:53.119 --> 00:20:56.319
And the great thing about that is you can move them.
00:20:56.319 --> 00:20:57.519
They're mobile.
00:20:57.519 --> 00:21:04.559
When we put a restaurant in and it's got the foundation, we can't move that with the flow of the people during the day.
00:21:04.559 --> 00:21:13.920
But we can take a food truck and we can move it into a an area that's more heavily trafficked during the evening hours or during the early hours.
00:21:14.079 --> 00:21:17.680
You can add more trucks, you can change with culinary trends.
00:21:17.680 --> 00:21:26.000
I was reading a little bit about how some casinos uh in different parts of the country are experimenting with it too, just to kind of juice their their food revenue.
00:21:26.000 --> 00:21:29.759
And it's easier to just outsource it.
00:21:29.759 --> 00:21:32.079
Charge them a fee, it'll be a huge fee.
00:21:32.079 --> 00:21:36.799
But you they come in, they take care of everything, they pay you a fee, and then you're done.
00:21:37.680 --> 00:21:48.160
One thing we we probably should have talked about, and we can do it some other time, maybe, is how important the hotel aspect has become to the theme park industry.
00:21:48.160 --> 00:22:02.480
Uh, not only the destination parks, but the regional parks now, the Dollywoods, the Hirsch, Hershey's, all of the parks are looking at adding hotels on property because what does it do?
00:22:02.480 --> 00:22:07.279
It keeps the guests there longer and it creates a bigger spin in park.
00:22:07.279 --> 00:22:14.160
And in Florida, uh in 2010 when Harry Potter opened, they didn't have any hotels.
00:22:14.160 --> 00:22:18.400
Disney, of course, was the major domo with their however many they had.
00:22:18.400 --> 00:22:24.000
And what happened was Universal finally said, hey, let's build some hotels.
00:22:24.000 --> 00:22:36.240
They have 11 or 13 now on site, and they're planning more hotels because, again, just keeps the people there, keeps them on their property, and it creates a bigger spin for them.
00:22:36.240 --> 00:22:38.480
So regional parks are doing that now.
00:22:38.480 --> 00:22:54.400
They're adding the clamping, Great Wolf Lodges around them, the Kalaharis, things like that that that uh really create the vicinity of or the plethora again of uh people who visit theme parks.
00:22:54.640 --> 00:22:57.279
Did this ever come up when you were starting out?
00:22:57.279 --> 00:23:04.640
Um, did did did the hotel component to theme parks, was that ever raised when you were beginning your career?
00:23:05.119 --> 00:23:19.680
Yes, it was, but it was secondary because we needed to put all of our cash into the theme parks, and we didn't have the money back when the industry was building and developing to put into the hotels.
00:23:19.680 --> 00:23:23.920
Uh that didn't mean that we didn't reach out to some hotels.
00:23:23.920 --> 00:23:40.079
We had one at Kings Island from a local developer uh who totally full ran 110% occupancy during the summer, but 26 miles north of Cincinnati in the winter, he probably ran about a 20% occupancy.
00:23:40.079 --> 00:23:42.240
So there wasn't that happy medium.
00:23:42.240 --> 00:23:44.160
But uh it's changed now.
00:23:44.160 --> 00:23:55.039
It's changed dramatically, and they figured out ways to, even with the drop and occupancy, to have hotels in or on properties, and uh they do quite well with them.
00:23:55.039 --> 00:23:59.759
I mean, they during the season, they're full, over full.
00:24:00.480 --> 00:24:03.119
Dennis Spiegel, thank you for being a guest on No Show.
00:24:03.119 --> 00:24:04.160
It was amazing.
00:24:04.640 --> 00:24:05.759
My pleasure.
00:24:05.759 --> 00:24:07.599
Let's do it again.