Data from the amusement industry’s trade body, the Themed Entertainment Association (TEA), has revealed the theme park which experienced the greatest growth over the past two decades and, surprisingly, it doesn’t have Disney’s name above the door.
There is no doubt that Disney dominates the themed entertainment landscape. Its 14 parks attracted a total of 145.2 million guests in 2024 giving it more visitors than any other operator according to the TEA’s latest data. What’s more, eight of the world’s top ten most-visited theme parks carry Disney’s brand including the Magic Kingdom in Orlando which leads the way with 17.8 million guests streaming through its turnstiles in 2024.
It took Disney more than the wave of a magic wand to earn its status. The origins of its theme park division date all the way back to 1955 when Walt himself swung open the doors to Disneyland in California and forever changed the landscape of the leisure sector.
The amusement parks of his era had few rides that parents could enjoy with their offspring but Walt changed that by infusing his attractions with the stories from his blockbuster movies which he knew appealed to adults as much as children.
No longer was a roller-coaster a winding track supported by bare steel struts. Instead, the version in Walt’s fairytale-themed park is a runaway mine train integrated into a mock-up of the mountains from Bryce Canyon National Park in Utah. Likewise, many amusement parks have carousels with saddles sitting atop models of mythical creatures which spin around a central point but only Disney’s has seats integrated into models of the eponymous elephant star of 1941 film Dumbo.
It took Disney’s rivals decades to muscle in on this market and over that period the Mouse gained an almost-unassailable lead. Its parks have the highest attendance in every country where they operate which makes them the industry equivalent of a supertanker. They are hard to dislodge from the top spot but, equally, they aren’t able to grow that fast any more.
The reasoning for this is simple – Disney’s parks have been around for such a long time that many of the people who wanted to visit them have visited them. Disney is such a well-known name that it’s hard for it to attract new guests who weren’t already aware of its parks. It has essentially saturated the market leaving little opportunity to make massive gains in attendance.
However, as a result of being around for such a long time, Disney’s parks have become embedded in popular culture and benefit from affinity across generations. Parents who visited Disney’s parks as children go on to take their own kids there to relive those memories. Combined with the strength of the Disney brand and uniformly high standards in its parks, it has an extremely high level of repeat business. So although few Disney outposts have blockbuster growth, their attendance doesn’t tend to dip.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that the revenue from its theme parks has stagnated. Disney has capitalized on the powerful ‘pull’ of its brand by sharply raising the price of the tickets at many of its parks with a one day pass to the Magic Kingdom alone surging by 250% to $209 over the past 20 years. The price of food and beverage has followed suit and as they have some of the highest margins it has given a sparkle to Disney’s bottom line. Last year its Experiences division, which includes theme parks, produced nearly 40% of the company’s $94.4 billion revenue and 57% of its $17.6 billion operating income.
Magic Touch
Disney’s chief rival Universal Studios has got some way to go before it catches up. Owned by Comcast, Universal parks generated just 8% of the media giant’s $123.7 billion revenue last year and 8.2% of its $37.4 billion Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization (EBITDA). However, the division peaked in the fourth quarter with its EBITDA crossing the $1 billion mark for the first time in the company’s history. Similarly, its revenue surged during the latter half of the year following the opening of its Epic Universe mega park in Orlando. It is a common trend.
As shown in the charts below, Universal’s parks started with lower attendance than Disney’s outposts so they have been able to surge in growth over the past 20 years in a way which its rival cannot match.
During the past two decades, Universal, like a number of theme park operators, benefited from designers leaving Disney and bringing their expertise to its rivals. It also snagged one of the most enchanting licenses in theme park history.
The transformational transaction came in 2007 when Universal got the rights to develop theme park attractions based on the boy wizard Harry Potter. It has made the most of it.
All of the parks owned by Universal are home to intricately detailed lands based on the Potter movies and they have had a spellbinding effect.
The TEA data shows that since Universal added the lands to its parks, attendance has surged by an average of 34.2%. The first to get this magic touch was Universal’s Islands of Adventure park in Orlando in 2010 and since then, visitor numbers have increased by a staggering 58.9% to 9.5 million.
Known as The Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the land at Islands of Adventure is dominated by the soaring spires of Hogwarts Castle. Potter’s alma mater sits on a man-made mountain and is home to a high-tech hybrid of a simulator and a roller coaster. However, for many guests that isn’t the land’s most enchanting aspect.
At the foot of the castle is a full-size recreation of Hogsmeade, the Dickensian-esque village from the Potter movies. Looking like a scene from a Christmas card its highlight is a row of houses which appear to be made of wood and have sharply sloping roofs stacked with snow. Fake smoke billows from the chimneys and the windows are filled with moving models of the colorful creatures from the films.
Shops lie behind the façades and the items on sale inside are even in-keeping with the theme. In Honeyduke’s you can buy exotic sweets like Chocolate Frogs and Fizzing Whizzbees whilst the Owl post office even has its own stamps. The biggest draw is Ollivanders where, with the help of some special effects, children are ‘selected’ by a magic wand (and usually end up buying a model of it).
Dream Ticket
It has become a magnet for Potter aficionados who come dressed in sorcerers’ gowns despite the searing heat in Orlando which can soar past 100 degrees in summer. The land is so detailed that it is more like a movie set than an area in a theme park. It’s a dream ticket because it allows fans to live out their fantasy of being part of the beloved movie franchise.
Testimony to its popularity, a carbon copy of the land opened with Universal’s Beijing mega resort in 2021 and was also added to its parks in Hollywood and Osaka in 2016 and 2014 respectively. It helped to give the latter the greatest attendance boost, in percentage and actual attendance terms, of any of the top 25 most-visited theme parks over the past two decades. In 2016 alone its attendance rose by 4.3% to 14.5 million and the TEA put it down to the lasting effect of Potter’s spell even though the land had opened two years earlier.
“Universal Studios Japan had another strong year with more than 14 million visits, largely due to the continuing appeal of its Harry Potter attractions,” said the TEA report in 2016. Crucially, it added that “attendance at theme parks in the rest of Japan was largely flat.”
The park’s success put it on the radar of Comcast which had a 51% stake in it with the remainder in the hands of investors including Goldman Sachs and private equity firm MBK. That all changed in 2017 when Comcast paid $2.3 billion to take full ownership of Universal Studios Japan but the studio’s investments in the boy wizard didn’t stop there.
Instead of copying Hogsmeade again, its next Potter land was completely new. It opened at Islands of Adventure’s neighbor, Universal Studios Florida, in 2014 and is based on the spooky Diagon Alley. Models of towering colorful characters are embedded in the wonky buildings on the street which leads to the stone facade of Gringotts bank. An ultra realistic model of a dragon is perched on its roof and spews out fireballs thanks to flamethrowers hidden in its jaws.
Inside the bank is another cutting-edge attraction. This time it’s a high-speed chase past soaring 3D screens. The ride cars spin on the track to face the screens and suddenly drop at one point. It’s so dark that the track can’t even be seen which adds to the sense of immersion.
Over the 12 years since Diagon Alley opened, attendance at Universal Studios Orlando has increased by 34.5% to 9.5 million. During that time Islands of Adventure got another shot in the arm when it opened Hagrid’s Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure, an innovative roller coaster themed to the friendly giant from the Potter films.
The pièce de résistance of the Potter portfolio premiered in the new Epic Universe park last year and is partly themed to the Fantastic Beasts spinoff movies. It features a life-size recreation of central Paris and is home to a high-tech stage show and a simulation of an enchanted elevator – actually a ride car which rises and falls as it roves around.
The clearest way to see the power of Potter’s spell is looking at the increase in attendance numbers as Universal’s parks occupy four of the top five places. The only exception is the Disney California Adventure park which has had a massive expansion over the past two decades including the addition of new lands based on Marvel Comics and the Cars animated series.
Indeed, all of the top ten parks with the highest growth have heavily invested in new attractions over the past 20 years. In contrast, as this report explained, Disneyland in Paris hasn’t built a new attraction since 1995 and the results are plain to see as the park sits near to the bottom with almost zero attendance growth over the past two decades.
Calculating Growth
It’s a different story for the park’s neighbor, Disney Adventure World. Currently in the midst of a $2.3 billion renovation, it has added lands themed to Marvel and Frozen over the past five years with another based on The Lion King still to come. It has turbocharged the park’s attendance which surged from 2.1 million in 2005 to 5.6 million in 2024 giving it over 160% growth. Despite this stellar performance it didn’t make the cut.
In the early days, its 2005 attendance was so low that it didn’t make it into the top 50 most-visited parks worldwide as can be seen on page 54 of this document. That too excludes it from the growth comparison.
In order to compare the changes in their growth between 2005 and 2024, the same parks need to be tracked. A park that is in the TEA’s Top 25 in 2005 but not in 2024 (or vice versa) cannot be included as it may not be possible to find reliable records of its attendance in either year. This isn’t a problem with Disney Adventure World as although it was outside the top 25 in 2005, its attendance then and in 2024 is known. So why can’t its growth be compared?
The answer is that a cut-off point needs to be drawn. If the comparison extended beyond the 25 or 50 most-visited parks worldwide then why not 100, 150 or more? This would open the doors to, for example, including little-known regional parks with attendance which rose from 20,000 to 80,000 comfortably giving them the highest growth. In short, it would distort the results.
So why set the cut-off at the top 25? The reason is that this limit is set by the TEA data. As shown on the link above, in 2005 the data covered the Top 50 most-visited parks worldwide but it isn’t possible to track all of them because the number was reduced to 25 in the 2024 data (see here). Accordingly, that also has to be the baseline for 2005 which rules out Disney Adventure World.
The other key exclusions are parks which were built during the 20-year period which is being analyzed. This is because they can’t be tracked for the same length of time as the others so it would not be like-for-like to include them. This excludes parks such as Universal Studios Beijing, Shanghai Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland which narrowly missed out on being included in the 2005 data as it opened in September that year.
It also excludes the marine themed Chimelong Ocean Kingdom and Chimelong Spaceship parks in China which have contributed to the country becoming a theme park powerhouse in recent years. In 2005 none of the 25 most-visited parks worldwide were in China but the country was home to six of them by 2024.
Changing Of The Guard
The rise of China is far from the only trend that is revealed in the 20-year comparison. It also shows how ingenuity can trump investment. The clearest example of this is Germany’s Europa-Park which is the fastest-growing non-Disney/non-Universal park in the western hemisphere. Unlike its American counterparts, it has achieved top-tier growth without relying on well-known brands. The same goes for its Dutch counterpart Efteling which just missed the cut by being outside the top 25 in 2005.
Europa-Park has surged in popularity by mastering regional destination tourism, unique cultural programming and showcasing pioneering attractions. In turn, it has ploughed its income into expansion which has helped it to transition into a multi-day resort destination. In 2005, Europa-Park was primarily treated as regional, single-day theme park but in 2019 it opened the massive, heavily themed Rulantica indoor water park in order to attract guests who would otherwise skip the resort during colder months. To cater for the influx of guests it has also built a massive, highly themed resort district over the past 20 years and is now one of Germany’s largest hotel hubs.
Meanwhile, the main Europa-Park has doubled down on its strategic selling points. Its European themed zones allow it to market to neighboring countries while the rest of the park acts like a showroom for its owners, the Mack family. They also own Mack Rides, one of the world’s leading roller coaster manufacturers and Europa-Park often gets their latest creations first. Over the past two decades Europa-Park has opened massive roller coasters such as Blue Fire, Wodan and the record-breaking Voltron Nevera. They don’t just drive attendance, they also showcase Mack’s cutting-edge technology to other operators who may want to buy it for their own parks.
At the other end of the spectrum are the Lotte World Adventure and Everland parks in South Korea. They are the only ones with declining attendance and it reflects broader changes in the country.
According to data from the World Bank, the percentage of South Korea’s population aged 0-14 fell from 19% in 2005 to just 11% in 2024 due to a fall in the country’s fertility rate. Indeed, in 2023 it had the world’s lowest birth rate driven by sky-rocketing house prices and higher economic participation by women. The fewer children there are, the smaller the market for traditional family entertainment and as Walt realized back in the 1950s, keeping them happy really is the magic formula.
Additional reporting by Chris Sylt
