Disney ($NYSE: DIS) may have finally found a way for its Disneyland Paris park, long considered to be one of the failures of former CEO Michael Eisner, by Disney fanatics and experts alike, to be the talk of the world.
And it was by discounting its tickets so low that Europeans were going mad like hatters to take advantage of this fire sale.
On June 13, anyone could purchase a ticket into Disneyland Paris through a third party website — 365Tickets — for a deeply discounted rate. The deal treated adult tickets as the same price as kids tickets, a savings of £33.91 (for our friends in the U.K.) on an otherwise £76.52 one-day pass.
And the world went nuts on Facebook.
Since we started tracking Disneyland Paris' social metrics, there wasn't a day the park got over 300,000 stories — including personal posts, photo tags and the like — in a 24-hour period. That changed when the discount deal launched, and the park's "Talking About" Count set a record more than doubling the previous record at the beginning of our data crawl.
In 2014, Disney had to put in a €1 billion ($1.25 billion) bailout plan to save this park from crumbling, as it had outstanding debt for double that value. Long before that, it had to undergo another bailout plan in 1993, one year after the park opened, that saw Saudi investor Prince Alwaleed throw millions of Euros into it.
Why was this park such a failure? The park formerly known as the Euro Disney Resort had issues with low attendance, working conditions that allegedly drove some employees to take their own lives, and ultimately, due to both of those problems and more, the French government and its people.
Right now, Euro Disney, a subsidiary of Disney traded on European markets, is trying everything it can to turn around the public image of what was a dark age amid the "Disney Renaissance" of the 1990's. While this deal will pack the parks in the heat of summer, it's not clear Disney can keep up the sales, mentions or trajectory outside of the US.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.
Further Reading:
- Disney is desperately seeking engineers and is on a hiring spree for Disney+
- Apple is hiring an entire film studio from the ground up in Culver City
- Amazon doubles down on live sports: hiring for the division has increased 100%