Disney Only Toying With Theme Park Idea

Walt Disney Co.’s designers, engineers and builders are fully booked into the next century and will not be able to take on a possible new theme park in Orlando until 2001 or later, a senior Disney executive said.

Disney has been rumored to be actively weighing a fifth Orlando theme park. It last week entered leisure cruising with the inaugural voyage of the Disney Magic, a 2,400-passenger liner, to the company’s private, renovated Castaway Cay island in the Bahamas. In April, Disney opened a fourth big theme park, Animal Kingdom, at its central Florida complex at a reported cost of $750 million.

The company also is building a second theme park in California near Disneyland, continuing to add attractions at Animal Kingdom and preparing for a second 85,000-ton cruise ship scheduled for delivery from an Italian shipyard early next year.

“It’s really premature to talk about a fifth gate at Orlando,” Judson Green, president of Walt Disney Attractions, said during a meeting with reporters aboard the Disney Magic. “The fact of the matter is we are only beginning to think what that theme might be.”

A leader in broadcasting, filmed entertainment and cable television, Disney has done well at its theme parks in recent years. They accounted for $1.1 billion in operating profit in fiscal 1997 and drew 38 million customers. But the parks are facing increasing competition.

Orlando rival Universal Studios is building a second theme park scheduled to open in 1999 and Sea World, another big theme park in Orlando, is adding eye-catching attractions and may go ahead with a second park of its own. Other theme park operators also are beginning to invest overseas, where Disney has theme parks in France and Japan.

Some industry analysts say the stiffening competition and any possible economic downturn in the Americas might eat into the high profit margins at Disney’s theme park business. And, in an era of aging populations in North America, Europe and Asia, analysts say the parks draw too few single adults and older vacationers whose children are grown.

Green and other Disney executives said the company was increasingly marketing to people without children and expected the Disney Cruise Line to help drive business at the Orlando theme parks.

“The cruise line is an extension of Walt Disney World,” Green said. “Our penetration in the pre-family and post-family [markets] is increasing.”

Disney heavily promotes weeklong packages mixing cruises with a three-day or four-day stop at its Orlando parks and has bookings of 90% through August, Disney Cruise Line President Arthur Rodney said.

“Over 40% of our bookings are non-families,” he said. “We are getting a lot of business from the West Coast who hadn’t been to Disney World. It’s actively enlarging our market.”