Glad to see Animal Kingdom be the 2nd highest attended park at WDW now according to TEA. They invested a lot and did the expansion in a very concise and organized manner.
I’m not surprised to see VB still below TL and BB, with only an estimated 250k increase over last year. I wish they had the correct capacity numbers while they were constructing the park. I feel like if they did, we’d see 4 Oh Ya/Nos instead of 2, 2 Coasters side by side, 8 Mat Racers instead of 6, and another QS restaurant. Potentially even another tower altogether. The demand is there, they just can’t fill that demand.
On the surface, that makes the lack of using the expansion pad confusing. But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that because they aren’t getting as large and fast of a return as they originally expected, it’s setting that expansion back a hair. That said, nothing in the theme park world gets your money back faster than a water park. Low operating expenses, low upfront capital, and lots of revenue. And considering the big expenses are already covered in the Volcano, wave pool, restaurants, technology, backstage and entrance, I’m hopeful we see something before Park 4 opens. One mammoth coaster and another tower of body slides and single tube slides would do wonders for the park in terms of rounding it out. Although that wouldn’t do much for capacity- we’d need large raft rides and a coaster for that.