Re-Opening Orlando Theme Parks Expected To Be Slow Process

Reopening Florida’s theme parks, among the world’s most visited attractions and one of the state’s biggest economic engines, could be a long process fraught with logistical and public health considerations, an industry executive told a task force charged with reopening the state for business.

“We are obviously thinking a lot about when and how to reopen. We’ve got multiple teams working on a number of different scenarios,” said John Sprouls, the chief administrative officer for Universal Orlando Resort.

The Associated Press reports Sprouls made his comments on the third day of meetings by Gov. Ron DeSantis’s Re-Open Florida Task Force, an assembly of dozens of leaders representing industry, education and government.

The sessions, conducted via telephone conference calls, were generally sparse on specifics but generous with platitudes meant to boost public confidence in any decision to lift “safer-at-home” orders, reopen business and return normalcy to daily life.

During a meeting of a committee focused on the state’s tourism and other key industries, Universal’s Sprouls said the state’s theme parks will have to reopen with small, limited crowds and that getting them fully reopened could take time.

Any decision to reopen, he said, would be guided by state and local officials, as well as by health considerations.

Around 85 million people visited theme parks in Orlando and Tampa in 2018, the most recent year available, according to an annual report put out by the Themed Entertainment Association and AECOM.

Theme park resorts are not just rides, but hotels, sit-down dining, fast-food, nightclubs, retail and TV and film production. The closures of the theme parks have led to the temporary layoffs of tens of thousands of workers in central Florida. Disney World began furloughing more than 43,000 employees this week, and SeaWorld has furloughed 95% of workforce at its dozen parks across the U.S. SeaWorld said this week it was losing on average $25 million a month with its parks closed, but it had enough access to cash to survive through the end of 2021 under current conditions.

THIS COMPANY MUST DO BETTER. Disney faces a rough couple of years, to be sure. The challenges are existential, even. But that does not constitute permission to continue pillaging and rampaging by management. In fact, if a bonus reflects performance, we might want to claw 14/

— Abigail Disney (@abigaildisney) April 21, 2020

Abigail Disney, the granddaughter of Walt Disney’s brother, Roy Disney, is astonished at the furloughs and expressed her outrage in a Twitter thread on Tuesday. The outspoken heiress blasted the company’s cutbacks while it paid $1.5 billion in bonuses to its executives.