Disney to Offer Park Discounts

Walt Disney Co., seeking to boost lagging attendance at its Anaheim theme parks as the holidays approach, on Tuesday rolled out another discount offer for area residents.

Southern California residents can buy two tickets for a few dollars more than the price of one until Dec. 18, a discount that is considered unprecedented for this time of year.

Area adults can buy two tickets for $49--$6 more than the price of one. The same discount is available for children, whose tickets will cost $39 for two, compared with $33 for one.

Guests can use their tickets to visit both Disneyland and California Adventure on any two days during the promotion, or they can opt to visit the same park twice.

The unusual offer comes at a time when a flurry of holiday shows, parades and seasonal displays typically draw huge crowds to the theme parks, observers say, making such discounts unnecessary.

Before Sept. 11, attendance at Disney’s new California Adventure theme park was dramatically below projections, rarely topping 20,000 visitors a day. And Disneyland, which up until the terrorist attacks had been doing well, only recently has begun to attract crowds at normal levels for this time of year, officials said.

On the Saturday after Sept. 11, attendance at Disneyland barely reached 26,000--far less than the 50,000 people predicted.

While acknowledging the promotion is unprecedented for Disney, officials said it is intended to showcase both parks’ holiday shows.

In addition to Luminaria, a holiday light display on the waters of Paradise Bay in California Adventure, the company said that beginning Thanksgiving Day it will run the resurrected Main Street Electrical Parade seven nights a week at the park. Currently the parade runs only on weekends.

Tim O’Brien, a senior editor for Amusement Business, said the discounts signal that Disney is “desperate to pull in traffic.

“And with travel as dismal as it is overall these days, they’re fishing where the fish are,” said O’Brien, whose publication tracks theme park attendance and other industry trends. “They’re going after the locals.”

Disney also offered a discount during the peak summer season--free admission to California Adventure for area children accompanied by an adult, whose ticket also was significantly reduced.