I think I'm completely out of the loop on what happened with Hogsmeade. Any way I can get an explanation?
Grab a sandwhich and a Coke. It's story time.
Basically what happened was when they were building Hogsmede over here, the management at the time was scared
to death about potentially dealing with the crowds on opening week from Hogsmeade. They saw how bad the crowd situation was in Florida where they had two theme parks to deal with and expected the same situation over here. I remember the discussion well pre-Potter. We all throught the park would be bursting at the seams with massive crowds when Potter opened. We were interested to see how the park would handle these massive crowds.
To combat the crowd concerns, they scrapped all annual passes and created a new AP structure. All of the new passes almost doubled in price, almost as expensive as Disney APs at the time! Worst of all, no pass was offered that included parking (Which pissed off me and a LOT of the passholders.) They responded to the crowd situation by doing what ironically Disney is doing now: shooing away their AP base and catering towards one-day ticket guests. A lot of the improvements and changes to the park revolved around designing the park to accommodate larger crowds.
Well now fast forward to opening day where they had the park open until 10PM, return time kiosks set up at Universal plaza, and a giant queue set up outside. There was a fairly healthy crowd at first. The first half of the day saw about a three hour line for FJ, but come sundown, the park was virtually empty. By 7PM, I crap you not, FJ was a walk-on. Yes. A walk-on.....on grand opening day. No wait whatsoever. It was even the case around the entire park. I think the Simpsons even had a longer wait than FJ! I know they sent a lot of employees home later that day because they weren't needed. What they thought would be the apocalypse of crowds (And even us on the forums for the longest time!) turned out to be a small surge of people on opening day.
I remember it very well. I actually swung by the park on opening day later in the evening to take advantage of an empty park and newly opened Hogsmeade at night. It was great...but not for USH. There were a lot of factors people were discussing as to what was the cause of the lack of interest. Was it the fact that they've been in softs for two months and the diehards already got their fill? Was it the fact that the land was open for six years in Florida and people already had the chance to see it? But what the park knew was the likely reason for the debacle was how much they
grossly underestimated how reliant they were on their loyal AP base. They swung into damage control by rolling out newer and cheaper passes and eventually added one with parking. Even later in the year, they ate humble pie and added parking to the second most expensive behind the just added pass with parking. They had to deal with 20 different APs for about two years before they finally eased into the pass system we have now. We even saw the same situation with SW:GE at Disney! When the land opened the parks were
empty! Even during the entire Summer! But unlike GE, at least USH saw some fair crowds at the park, but not quite what they were hoping for as they lost their AP base.
I seriously doubt the crowds will be an apocalypse on opening week, but I seriously doubt we'll see a repeat of this situation. The biggest issue was screwing over their AP base. Now that they have learned and even won over some loyal Disney fans from having the AP program taken away from them, I think we'll see healthier crowds once SNW opens.