BarcelonaMerlin Entertainments, the company that owns Legoland and operates several theme parks in Europe, wants to vary the prices of tickets to its attractions based on supply and demand. This way, tickets will increase in price on sunny summer weekends and cost less on rainy days in the off-season. The measure, advanced by Financial Timesaims to restore the number of visitors Merlin’s parks had before the pandemic and will be implemented by the end of the year at the company’s top twenty sites and next year at some of the parks it manages in the United States.
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Merlin chief executive Scott O’Neil says the dynamic pricing model, which will use artificial intelligence to determine the cost of tickets, is “very intuitive”. “If you visit a park in the UK on a sunny Saturday in August you expect to pay more than if you go there on a rainy Tuesday in March,” he argues. The dynamic pricing model is an established practice in some industries, such as airlines and hotels, but it is also starting to be implemented in restaurants and some leisure facilities.
Merlin implements this model to try to recover the number of visitors that its attractions received before the pandemic. Last year, around 62 million people passed through one of Merlin’s 141 facilities around the world. That’s 13% more visitors than in 2022, but the number is still below the 67 million people who visited a company attraction in 2019.
Billing, already at record levels
However, in terms of turnover, 2023 was the best year for the company, which also owns Madame Tussauds wax museums. As they announced this Monday, Merlin had a turnover of 2.1 billion pounds (about 2.45 billion euros), 8% more than in 2022. Merlin attributes the success to international visitors from cities such as London, where almost one in four tourists they entered one of the company’s attractions. “It seems that customers are choosing fewer attractions, but spending more money,” says O’Neil.
On the other hand, Merlin recorded a pre-tax loss of 214 million pounds (about 250 million euros) to amortize the cost of Legoland parks in New York and South Korea, which were built during the pandemic. O’Neil is optimistic about the New York park, but says changes will need to be made in the management of the Korean park. The developer of Legoland in the Asian country defaulted on debt in 2022.
2024-03-25 11:08:11
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