Play-and-Stay Blog

When you ask people where Disneyland is you generally get the same response, “Florida” however this is incorrect. Disneyworld is in Florida and Disneyland is in California, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong.
The newest, smallest and least well known of these parks is Hong Kong Disneyland (traditional Chinese: 香港迪士尼樂園).

Built on reclaimed land in Penny’s Bay, Lantau Island and jointly owned by The Walt Disney Company and the Hong Kong government, Hong Kong Disneyland is an unusual branch of the pervasive Disney empire.
Disney have had mixed results building parks outside of America, the Tokyo resort was largely well received. In contrast the Paris park was plagued by bad press and resisted by the locals with a well known Parisian stage director describing the park as a “cultural Chernobyl” and the park’s strict rules on staff appearance were perceived to oppose the strong individual liberty laws of France.

Keen to avoid another fiasco Disney designed the park as sympathetically as possible to local culture; incense was burned after the completion of every building and the parks layout was designed in accordance with the tenants of Feng Shui.
Some locals complained about the aesthetics of the park but thankfully the public mainly reacted positively, so positively in fact that the parks relatively low visitor capacity was to become its biggest downfall.

With a maximum capacity of  34,000 visitors per day Hong Kong Disneyland is the smallest of the Disney parks, this combined with the high population density of Hong Kong and the popularity of the Disney franchise in Asia resulted in some serious overcrowding problems. The Hong Kong government put pressure on the park to reduce its stated capacity to ease the problem but the park refused, instead extending opening hours slightly. The visitor capacity problem came to a head during Chinese New Year 2006 when visitors were turned away from the park despite bearing valid tickets due to the fact the park was already at full capacity. Visitors who were turned away attempted to force entry into the park and Disneyland was forced to heavily revise its ticketing policy around these busy times.

This incident permanently damaged the park’s public image, attendance dropped sharply and the park failed to meet its targeted visitor numbers resulting in the Hong Kong government refusing to put any more money into the park until it began to turn itself around. With heavy criticism for the park’s size and its lack of high profile attractions found in other Disney parks such as Paris and Tokyo the lack of extra funding may only serve to make the problem worse.

This year Disney will be adding a number of smaller attractions such as a version of its famous “It’s a small world” ride in an effort to boost customer numbers. It is possible that these more low-key attractions will boost numbers slightly but with the reputation of the park heavily damaged in Hong Kong it may take a far grander gesture to win the public over.

With Disney’s resources it is unlikely that any of their parks will ever completely close down, becoming a dark and scary real life episode of Scooby-doo, but the Hong Kong park certainly needs to pull its socks up to live up to the reputation of its overachieving older siblings, Florida and Tokyo.

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 19th, 2008 at 10:30 am and is filed under Theme Parks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.