An Auspicious Date for Park

Walt Disney Co. said Monday that it planned to open a Hong Kong theme park Sept. 12, 2005 -- a date chosen by a feng shui master.

The park would be the second one in Asia for the Burbank-based media giant and the third outside the U.S. The company already operates a park in Tokyo and one outside Paris.

Disney has a 43% stake in the $3.5-billion Hong Kong park, a project on which the government planned to spend HK$21.5 billion ($2.8 billion), based on earlier projections.

Ticket prices will range from HK$170 ($22) for seniors on weekdays to HK$350 for adults on weekends, said Don Robinson, Hong Kong Disneyland’s group managing director. Prices are comparable to those for a single-day pass at Disneyland, the original park, in Anaheim.

“We believe that the ticket prices for Hong Kong Disneyland represent excellent value,” said Roy Tan Hardy, vice president of sales and marketing for Hong Kong Disneyland.

“A lot of our work has gone through feng shui masters,” Robinson said, to underscore the role that traditional Chinese beliefs played in building the Hong Kong park.

The feng shui master who chose the opening date “assured us that Sept. 12 is a fabulous day to open Hong Kong Disneyland,” he added.

The opening will take place less than a month before China’s National Day holiday during the first week in October, when many Chinese travel at home and abroad. Chinese tourist arrivals in Hong Kong rose 27% during this year’s National Day holiday to 429,225 from the same period a year earlier, according to Hong Kong’s tourism commission.

Disney’s parks business, including Disneyland and Walt Disney World in Florida, generated operating profit of $282 million in the quarter ended Sept. 30, up 25% from a year earlier.

Disney has received inquiries about the Hong Kong park for group events for as many as 20,000 from Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, China, Australia, Germany and the U.S., Hardy said.

Hardy also said the Hong Kong Disneyland reservation center would open next year to start taking hotel bookings, he said. The Hong Kong park is projected to attract as many as 5.6 million visitors in its first year.

“This is the first Disneyland in China and will be for quite some time the only Disneyland in China,” Hong Kong Financial Secretary Henry Tang said.

Disney President Robert Iger said last month that the company was in talks to build a park in Shanghai. Disney earlier ruled out building a park on the mainland before 2010.

At the Hong Kong park, Disney plans two hotels that would initially offer 1,000 rooms. As hotels are added, the number or rooms could climb to 2,100. There will be eight dining venues with 2,900 seats and an entertainment complex on the 311-acre site.

Disney shares rose 53 cents to a nine-month high of $27.19 on the New York Stock Exchange.