Bigcoasterguy wrote:While at the park today I noticed they had begun assembling the new water slides In the parking lot by Thunder Road. They also have begun major land prep (digging, clearing ect.)
chknwing wrote:correct me if I'm wrong but part of the new toll plaza road will be in the land carowinds purchased right? So its a safe assumption that these plans for expansion were in motion as far back as 2011.
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Steven E. Kent – Goldman Sachs & Co.
Just on Charlotte for example is it – that market is just grown so much, or is it that there is new competition. How do you decide because that one was to me an interesting one versus this, so where it’s a very obvious these cabins workout well, then you’ll add more of them and then when those revenues are to flatten out, you’ll stop. So why Charlotte versus some of others and how did – and then maybe just give us an insight into how this process works, every manager I assuming of every property things and amusement park things that they need more capital. They need the newest biggest best ride, so how do you as the CEO and your team think about that?
Matthew A. Ouimet
Yes, so I’ll give you Charlotte and then I’ll answer the other one. So and I’ll take a step back. So this company bought the Paramount Parks about five or six years ago, seven years ago now, and that’s a time what they believe and proof through was those parks were undersized relative to their markets and they went in and invested substantially and what we call big deal, new rides et cetera. And markets like Toronto, markets like Kings, or Cincinnati markets like Richmond, and in all cases got a dramatic growth in EBITDA. That same logic really applies directly to Charlotte because if you look at the size of that market today and the forecast for that market going forward. The prediction is that Charlotte will be the size of Houston in the next 20 years.
And so having a modestly sized park there versus that population along with the transient tourist that pass through there. So we – it was pretty obvious to us that there was a disconnect there in terms of growth opportunity and it’s also relatively a low risk investment, right. So I know the market, I know how much it cost to go in there and put in the coasters et cetera. We’ve run the play book before, so we feel pretty good about that.
As for the process there are two ways we approach it. One is we went back and looked at all of our parks for the last seven or eight years. Every new rider attraction or show we put into those parks and we graded them red, green and yellow. Right, so green being an obvious home run, yellow being not sure, but maybe the guest enjoyed it and red being something we wouldn’t repeat. And then as part of that, so that helps us to grow what type of ride optimizes the attendance and pricing impact. The only other thing we did is that identified the gaps. So do they need thrill, do they need family, or do they need water, our water park attraction. And so we built a five-year menu base to offset, that is iterative with the general mangers; debate is what they see in the markets each day. And so you are right every general manager thinks they need more capital. And then we try Richard Zimmerman my COO and Brian our CFO to spend a lot of time with our capital menu trying to which we optimizes it for this system right. And that’s one of the reason we sold two water parks, we had two standalone water parks in Southern California that we ended up selling because they never got to the priority from capital standpoint
