And so more of — what you’re going to continue to see more of the ability to get savings out of the system will lie in the third and fourth quarters with a bigger focus, of course, in the third quarter.
Michael Swartz: Okay, that’s helpful. Thanks, Brian.
Brian Witherow: Thanks Mike.
Operator: Our next question comes from Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Chris Woronka: Hi. Good morning, guys. Thanks for all details so far. I wanted to revisit the comments about adjusting the park operating days, and totally understand it certainly from an operational expense standpoint. But I guess, your plan or your goal is to get more attendance into fewer days. And the question is how much risk do you see to that? And also from an in-park spend standpoint, if the parks are going to be a little bit more crowded on certain days, particularly in shoulder seasons, is there any inhibitor then on an ability to spend in-park?
Richard Zimmerman: Yes, Chris, let me jump in here. This is Richard. When I think about the days that we’re stripping out, a lot of them were the days that we saw in the first quarter that we added the test, keeping some of our markets, Charlotte, Richmond and Great America, open throughout the — on the weekends through January and February. By default, kind of like WinterFest, those were lower length-of-stay days. They weren’t full summer days, where you get a 6-, 7-, 8-hour length of stay. So by default, what we’re stripping out is a much shorter length of stay. You’re losing the visit. So as you think about the revenue implications of that, as long as you get those guys to come — and we’re confident that we can drive the attendance in the operating calendar we’ve got.
The operating calendar, we always constantly fine-tune year-by-year. And there’s the constant debate on our side. Do you add days? Do you take days out? Where is the opportunity? But in terms of driving the per capita, I would point you back to whether it’s July, August or, in particular, October, there’s such flexibility and scalability in each of our sites. We drive our highest per caps on our biggest days. And that’s not just admission pricing, it’s also per capitas within the park because you drive longer length of stay. So we’ve got an ability to scale what we do. We’ve built all of our new food facilities, so on lower demand days, we could only open one line, not two. We open a half of a facility. We’ve got that ability within our — the way we construct our experience to really take and go grab as much revenue as we can get from our guests and give them an opportunity to make sure we’re servicing them at a level that they want.
So I’m mindful that we’ve got to be prepared for it. But we’ve built our parks to be able to drive per capitas even on the biggest of days.
Chris Woronka: Okay. Super helpful. Just as follow-up to that, I mean, the number of park days, it looks like, that you haven’t planned right now rounds to down 5% for the year, right? It’s down 4.7%, 112 days. If we try to think about that in terms of hours, and maybe this is an exercise in splitting the atom, but it would certainly be less than that in hours, right, based on what you just said.
Brian Witherow: Yes, just the way the math would work, it would be less than that. But as you know, Chris, the other thing, and this is our anticipated calendar coming in, weather will, we saw in ’23, have an impact on it as will demand. If demand comes back strong, we are not opposed to sliding an incremental day in here or there to meet that demand. And that goes for operating hours as well, right? We will shrink hours during the course of the year based on weather factors, maybe not close the whole day, but close up early or we’ll extend hours around demand. So the key here is — again, I’ll go back to that word nimble. We have to remain nimble and flexible around some of these things while responding to how the market is evolving around us.
Chris Woronka: Got you. Thanks Brian. Just one last one for me if I can real quick is do you think it’s — is there thought given to maybe starting to attach some kind of ancillary presale for the season pass products? And it obviously involves some kind of discount. But it gets you guys, whatever it might be, $50 or $75, $100 of built-in revenue that they’re going to spend and encourage them to come. Is that something that’s on the radar yet?
Brian Witherow: We’ve used from time to time those season pass credits — credit dollars, if you will, in markets here or there trying to test various things that resonate. I think what you’ll — what I can tell you, Chris, is that you’ll continue to see us finding ways to evolve season pass. It’s such a critical part of our overall attendance at north of 50% of the attendance mix. So finding ways to engage and create that stickiness for that season pass holder is key. So nothing concrete I can point to right now, but certainly something we have tested. And we’ll likely continue to look for ways like that to continue to drive more demand for the season pass product.
Chris Woronka: Okay, very good. Thanks guys.
Operator: Our next question comes from Eric Wold with B. Riley Securities. Please go ahead.
Eric Wold: Thanks. Good morning. I guess, kind of taking the season pass question kind of to a longer-term kind of broader sense, you talked in the press release that the 20% increase in unit sales will be a nice tailwind for this year all season long. Maybe kind of thinking beyond that, can you — do you have the data to kind of — or at least you could share what unit sales are now versus what they were pre pandemic? Any sense of how that demographic buyer has shifted back then? And then maybe even what the average distance is from a park versus back then? I’m trying to get a sense of what’s changed in terms of maybe the TAM or kind of the reach around these parks that could have a much more broader long-term benefit versus kind of short-term pricing fluctuations for a given season.
Brian Witherow: Yes, Eric, it’s Brian. I’d start with this in terms of the demo of the season pass holder. We haven’t seen a significant change in that area. We have seen that radius around the park, the product continued to maybe inch outward a little bit further over time. Maybe that’s been exaggerated post pandemic. We’ve seen a lot of regional business models where folks are more willing to drive from a little further out as opposed to getting on a plane, which is more expensive, more complicated. And so we are seeing our season pass penetration maybe reaching a little bit further out. I don’t know yet that it’s a material shift, but it is moving in that direction. And lastly, in terms of the pre-pandemic versus post-pandemic volume, we are still — even 2023, in spite of it being a shortfall of a couple of hundred thousand units to the ’22 record level, that pass program was still above our 2019 season pass program in total units sold.
So we have — we set a new bar and are continuing to try and work our way north from there.
Eric Wold: Helpful. Thanks very much.
Brian Witherow: Thanks, Eric.
Operator: Our next question comes from Lizzie Dove with Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Lizzie Dove: Hi there. Good morning. Thanks for taking the question. I just wanted to dig a bit more into attendance on per cap. Like as I look to what you talked about in 3Q for October trends, you talked about a 2% increase in attendance and a 3% decrease in, in-park spending. So it feels like there was just a meaningful step-down in November and December to kind of end up where you did for the full quarter, especially as I would have thought October was the biggest contributor. So maybe if you can talk about that and just kind of anything that changed as you got through to the later months of the quarter.
Brian Witherow: Yes, Lizzie, it’s Brian. It really dovetails back to my earlier comment that it’s a little bit of mix. And the parks that are operating, particularly still in November and December, you’re losing maybe one of your top two parks in terms of ticket pricing in Cedar Point as it shuts down at the end of October. Knott’s is the other one, sort of one, two, typically in terms of pricing point on tickets and season passes, et cetera. And Knott’s is the one park where we did roll prices back pretty significantly for that fall renewal because of how we felt the market had moved from where our ’23 pricing was originally set. So because Knott’s is a little bit more a piece of that pie, it’s really just a function of the mix play and the seasonality of our business.
I think the other thing is, as it relates to the in-park spend, that’s where a Cedar Point or even the Schlitterbahn Waterparks come into play, not being present in those as much in those fourth quarter numbers. Those are two of your biggest and your highest overall per cap parks. They have the longest length of stay of any parks in our system. So as they come out of the numbers, those variances get swung a little bit more mathematically, if I could say that, than overall. Now that’s not to say that the pricing strategy or the pricing program that’s in play right now is not going to have an impact on admissions per cap going into ’24. There’s certainly going to be some mathematical impact on pricing as we go into ’24 on a park-by-park basis.
So Knott’s admission per cap is not going to be where it was in the first half of 2023 because of the changes we made there as an example. That said, we expect to see a lot more attendance and a lot more revenue. And that’s ultimately for us what matters most is the revenue number. As Richard said earlier, it’s about optimizing volume and pricing. It’s not about maximizing either one of them independently.
Richard Zimmerman: And Lizzie, I’ll go back to my comments, which were in November and December, WinterFest has a much shorter length of stay. Particularly on the East Coast, we were pleased with the attendance. Toronto had a very strong WinterFest program. And there, when you look at U.S. reported, you lose on the foreign exchange piece of it. So we’re driving a lot of volume up in Canada with a lower length of stay, there’s just a mathematical impact on your per cap.
Lizzie Dove: Got it. That makes sense. And just one follow-up, so I know last year in the first quarter, you had a couple of big headwinds from particularly the California weather, which was really bad. You had, I think, the impact of the season pass, which had previously been extended and was not in 2023. So I guess, any kind of early reads on what you’re seeing so far in January and early February? I know it’s a much lower volume quarter, but I see California has had some kind of weather issues, so just kind of any early reads there of what you’re seeing.
