Dubai Parks and Resorts — which includes Motiongate Dubai, Bollywood Parks Dubai, and Legoland Dubai — reported 2.3 million visitors last year, with 796,000 coming in the fourth quarter, when the weather is better in the United Arab Emirates. However, that works out to fewer than 9,000 visitors a day across the three parks during their busiest quarter.
That's not good. For comparison, many regional U.S. theme parks welcome more than 10,000 visitors a day on average through their operating seasons. The Dubai parks averaged slightly more than 2,000 visitors per park per day over the year last year. We do not know the actual breakdown between the parks, however.
Developers in the UAE have been building multiple theme park resorts, including the IMG Worlds and Yas Island projects in addition to Dubai Parks. Yet none of them have yet cracked any of the TAE/AECOM's regional attendance lists. Warner Bros World on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi will be the next to make an attempt, when it opens this summer.
What's holding back the UAE parks? We talked about this last month, but the Dubai Parks development faces a couple of additional obstacles that the other parks in the UAE have tried to avoid. First, the DPR parks are mostly outdoors, which helped keep down construction costs and creates more opportunities for creative development, but makes the parks a less attractive destination during the many months when the weather is brutally hot in the UAE.
Second, the DPR parks are located in the most remote location of the three theme park development sites in the UAE, standing about 40 miles away from the Dubai airport, well past downtown and the bulk of Dubai's attractions.
All the parks feature compelling IP, including Marvel and Dreamworks Animation, so that's not what's keeping visitors away. But other than Ferrari World's Formula Rossa, none of the parks as of yet offer record-setting or virally popular world-class attractions that can make fans around the world crave a visit. Global promotion is an issue, too. I've seen multiple advertising campaigns for Dubai from the Emirates airline, but none of them that I have seen have mentioned Dubai Parks or IMG Worlds.
The UAE has proven itself to be one of the world's top tourist destinations. But up to this point, those tourists just aren't making their way to the region's theme parks.
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And Warner? Main attractions are Scooby-Doo and Tom & Jerry. Who do they want to appeal with that?
Time will tell, but I remain skeptical.
It's as if they spent some money, then sort of backtracked and watered down every attraction. They needed the best Disney style creative team.
The location isn't ideal either
Non of the above happens at the UAE. At the moment it attracts wealthy people who want to buy overpriced brands in expensive mega malls. None of them want to be caught dead in a theme park, especially not a theme park that is not the biggest, most expensive or whatever superlative the UEA needs to attract people.
Neither parks offer much that a western equivalent doesn't however the one unique point is the dreamwork area in Motiongate which I was pretty impressed with. Harsh height restrictions and the costs of tickets would really struggle to entice people there though which is why we didn't do IMG.
Other problems for Dubai Parks & Resorts include:
-Marketing / Sales
-Accessibility / location
-Public perception (the emirates went from 1 theme park in summer 2016 to 6 by this summer, so this kind of tourist attraction is really new for this market)
-No anchor brand as of now (Disney, Universal, Six Flags, Sea World...) although it's slowly coming
But I think it will slowly work out. Attendance is steadily growing. Tourism is increasing every year and the UAE are just not looking back, so big projects will still come along.
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