Gary Mick: Yeah. Thanks, Ian and good morning. We have a promotion going on right now in the parks that are preparing to open up, which is we are offering the diamond level benefits if you purchase at the platinum base. And so at this stage of our promotional period, we have a healthy increase in the higher tier passes.
Ian Zaffino: Okay. So this is just a take-up spin much better year-over-year than that.
Gary Mick: Yeah.
Ian Zaffino: And then as far as the operating calendar, any intentions to curtail the operating calendar. I know in the past on the previous management team, that was sort of a push to do that, and then there was maybe an expansion of the calendar after that. How are you guys now thinking about the operating calendar and maybe the opportunity to kind of curtail the less profitable or the money losing days? Thanks.
Gary Mick: The operating calendar will be very much the same as it was in 2023. The thing that will be different is the events that we are hosting at our respective parks during the days they are open. So on days where we did an event and it was marginally attended in the prior year, we will still be open, but we won’t invest that much in the event on those days.
Ian Zaffino: Okay. Thank you very much.
Operator: Our next question comes from Robert Aurand from KeyBanc Capital. Please go ahead.
Robert Aurand: Thank you for taking my questions. Maybe a quick follow-up on kind of the year-to-date trends you’re seeing. I know we had some weather in February, but I kind of wanted to ask it in the context of maybe any commentary you can give us on what you’re seeing in Mexico? I know that has an outsized impact in the first quarter and can sometimes skew what we’re seeing domestically?
Gary Mick: Mexico continues to do very well and it’s certainly helpful to the Q1. In the U.S., we are actually down four operating days due to weather versus the same period. So let’s go to the — we call it the first eight weeks ended February 25. And we lost four operating days against a first quarter last year that had bad weather. So weather is still a factor, but it’s really early. It’s the smallest part of our season at this stage we’re not concerned.
Robert Aurand: Thank you. And maybe I can ask one about the Saudi Arabia project. Any updates you can give there under the deal filings indicate opening in Spring 2025. Just anything we should be thinking about from a modeling perspective and how that might flow through?
Selim Bassoul: First of all, we’re very excited about the Saudi project. It’s going to be the largest, most immersive park in the world. In fact, it will be the world’s largest park. I have visited there. I’ve been there. We’re working our partners and our contractors and our team are working around the clock. In fact, I was there recently. And they are working almost 24/7, and we’re expecting to open in the first quarter, by this time next year. And we’re excited. I think what is exciting about it is, in this case, it is not only we’re licensing the park, but we are also going to manage and operate the park, and we are finalizing the agreement with Qiddiya, who our Saudi partner, and I think everything is moving forward to add value there. It would be our first time where we operate a park we don’t own. So we’re very excited about that.
Robert Aurand: Thank you.
Operator: Thank you. [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Chris Woronka from Deutsche Bank. Please go ahead.
Chris Woronka: Hey, good morning, guys. Thanks for taking all the questions so far. Wanted to kind of — this is really kind of a customer mix or behavior question. Is it possible for you guys to kind of bucket out maybe broadly, what happened to a customer as you go back and look at ’23 versus ’22, if somebody was on an unlimited food meal pass that didn’t reoccur last year. Did that person come back to the park? And then kind of secondarily, some of the past programs that expired that you replaced with new plans. Did those — do you see those customers come back to you in a different way or if they drop out or do they move up the plan or move down a plan. Any way to just think about that at a high level? Thanks.
Selim Bassoul: Yeah. We do not divulge this data. We have not divulged in the past, but I can give you some flavor about it. And I think the flavor has been we’ve learned something, which is interesting for us. We’ve run some good stuff that happened. So some of our members that were — some of people want to go in membership ended up in season passes. So our season pass is up. Our single day ticket has been up to in 2023. We feel good about it. I think what has been interesting for us, what we’ve learned, and I don’t know if it’s in the industry-wide or it’s only for us, when it rains on a Saturday, you don’t expect those people to come on a Sunday meaning, meaning, if you missed that Saturday and you say, okay, it’s beautiful Sunday, people have made plans.
So we tend to lose those people when weather is bad on a Saturday. So my expectation would be we’ll make it up on the following day. If you were not coming on a Sunday, you come in the following day, and they did not show up. So for us, we have been impacted by weather significantly. And it’s something a criteria that I did not anticipate in that business when I became CEO. It was not as big of a factor than it is today. So going forward, in 2024, we are working on a program and that affects mostly single-day ticket, let’s put it this way, which is a very healthy, profitable, high margin part of our business. And we are working on a program that we’re launching in most probably soon that I will be able to talk about that most probably guarantees for that single-day ticket against weather.
So we are putting the element of it, and it’s very exciting. It will be unique. It will never have been done in the industry. It will be the first to most probably launch something for our single-day ticket to take away the impact of weather for those guests
Chris Woronka: Okay. Very helpful. Thanks Selim.
Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Selim Bassoul for any closing remarks.
Selim Bassoul: I want to say first, thank you on behalf of the Six Flag team, we appreciate your continued support. Now I want to take a few minutes to add a little bit — to recap a little bit some of what we talked about, I’m sure there are a lot of things going on. And I want to take a minute to talk about our accomplishments in the last two years, but most of probably where we’re going in 2024. And I was preparing a few hand written notes to wrap up our conversation but a lot of things happening, exciting things happening in 2024 for us. So if I look at our accomplishments in the past two years, we did three things that I’m very proud of. One, we basically change our culture from output to outcome. And that means we created a culture of ownership, accountability and performance.
And I’m very proud to say that our team responded well to this, both at the parks and at corporate. However, as I mentioned earlier, I underestimated the cost and complexity of the transformation. We had to change the culture from attendance to yield, from centralization to decentralization, from many layers of management, the company was bloated, honestly, because we expected maybe the result of pandemic to last longer and people staffed it and literally, we realize very quickly in 2022 that the result of 2021 were different. Then, we try to create the beautification of premiumization, trying to attract multi-generation family in our parks. We also — second element is we know that to create a seamless customer experience, we needed to go after the chocking points and that needed innovation.
It needed technology. We had no choice. And in that, we implemented a lot of things. We implemented what I call guest facing technology, where we knew that if I gave you convinced and value you will pay me for that convenience and value. That’s the result of our speedy gates that has been very promising so far, where it’s a toll gate when you come in, you don’t have to go through a man toll booth – poll both and you go in seamlessly in our parks. I gave you an ability to come to our restaurants now and start using self-serving kiosks where you can customize to hence (ph) degree your burger order, even your pizza, your chicken tenders and people are paying us for us. So we understand that indulgence comes only if you’re willing to create convenience, ease of doing business and value.
And in that case, we are focused on those three things: convenience, value, and ease of doing business. And that’s why our per cap will continue growing in 2024, 2025 and 2026. We also, in technology, we had to attack labor. And to that extent, we are automating many of our functions. And we are lucky that AI and our IT team has embraced it very strongly. We are now using AI in many parts of our business, from our customer service, to our personalizing our guest experiences, to improving operational efficiencies, to basically using AI-based safety measures, that’s in our water parks, affecting our life cards who are very — it’s a very tough job, TGS and very expensive to train and hire and get. The third element that I’m very proud about is the change we’ve done.
And I have to say, I want to say thank you for our investors who stood by us. Thank you for our analyst. Thank you for our Board that allowed me to focus on profitability and not revenue as our top priority. We have changed our business model, reflecting a strategic shift in the market condition and our challenges. We are totally focused on increasing our EBITDA, our margins, and we are only doing it at the fact that we’re providing better value for our guests. In that case, we faced tremendous inflation since I took over the job. Right after I took over the job, the Ukraine war started. We had not only inflation, we had supply chain constraints. Second, we had weather climate change that occurred very roughly for us. Those are not excuses.
We are just saying when we’re doing a major transformation, and you compound it on top of it with weather and inflation, it was tough. And now we’re putting this behind us. The transformation is yielding great, great benefits. We are very pleased about it. We’re almost at the end of it. We have another most probably a year completed, and I’m very confident that by end of — second half of 2024, and 2025 and 26 we are back on track to what we promised our investors to be. Very exciting times, and I want to thank all of you for making us better. I know you’ve asked a lot of good questions, tough questions, and we’ve gone through some great wins and some mistakes we’ve made, but we’ve learned the missteps have made us better, and we are a great company going forward.
Thank you.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
