South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
How and when will Orlando recover?
Theme park officials, analysts offer varying 2021 predictions
The year 2020 brought images of Orlando never seen before.
Interstate 4, the eternally traffic-clogged gateway to the theme parks, was quiet. The Magic Kingdom, the world’s busiest park, was empty for months, a happy place that previously had shut down for just a day or two for hurricanes or other emergencies.
The corona virus pandemic is expected to recede in2021as vaccines become available. But restarting Orlando’s tourism machine will bea monument al task, and experts don’t agree on how much longer the region and its hundreds of thousands of industryworkers will suffer.
Disney should start to bounce back in the spring, Wall Street analyst Bob Boyd predicts. By the end of 2021, Boyd said Disney and the other theme parks could face a new problem: Not being able to find enough employees to hire.
“The really, really good news we’ve had on the vaccine front is actually quite a bit of hope for later in the year,” said Boyd, who follows theme parks at Pacific Asset Management.
But Dennis Spiegel expects 2021 will be “another bump in the road” as he predicts the industrywon’t fullybounceback fortwo more years. In the meantime, he wonders if more reductions could come, like some parks operating onlyfivedays aweekto save money since there aren’t too many other things left to cut.
“What do people do when they travel, particularly for the family vacation to Orlando? They make that reservation four to six months in advance. Some even further. And nobody’s doing that right now,” said Speigel, CEO of International Theme Park Services.
Disney parks chairman Josh D’Amaro spoke of the theme park industry’ s resilience inNovember.
“Our industry is hurting, it’s hurting from the presence ofCOVID-19 in ourcommunities,” D’Amaro said at a virtual convention in November. “But unlike some industries impacted by the pandemic, ours is here to stay, and it’s here to grow.”
Thethemeparks, the lifeline of Orlando’s economy, have struggled in the pandemic, and so have the nearby hotels, restaurants and rental car companies, all of which endured mass layoffs.
In March, the Orange County tax collected on hotel roomssuffered theworst