Kennywood hoping people are ready to enjoy park again
At Kennywood last year, the Jack Rabbit roller coaster missed its 100th birthday party.
The football- themed roller coaster Steel Curtain missed its grand reopening. The bumper cars sat out a whole season, as did any game that involved a squirt gun.
After a delayed start, the West Mifflin theme park resumed operations in mid-July in 2020, but fewer people came by to ride the roller coasters and eat Potato Patch fries.
Following health and safety guidelines put in place during the COVID19 pandemic, the park had limited capacity and the season was about 100 days shorter than usual.
Now, the park is preparing for a 2021 season to start on May 8. The plan calls for limited capacity, limited hours and a conservative budget, general manager Mark Pauls said. If things go well, that could change.
“Going into this time of the year, what we’re hearing from the
industry, as well as the area, we really believe that people are ready to go,” Mr. Pauls said.
Generally, hours at the park will run from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m. In the summer, Saturday hours will extend from 10:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. The park will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays, according to its calendar. The Monday exception is May 31 (Memorial Day), when the park will be open from 10:30 a.m. to 7 p.m.
According to its website, the park is asking its guests to follow COVID-19 health and safety protocols, including the wearing of face masks. It is also asking guests to stay home if they have a fever or are displaying other symptoms of COVID-19.
Mr. Pauls hasn’t actually experienced operating the historic theme park during a normal year.
He started as general manager for Kennywood and Sandcastle water park in Homestead in the midst of the pandemic. He interviewed for the role the week before the first business closure orders were put in place, and he was hired right before Kennywood reopened in 2020.
But the “career theme park guy” knows his way around a carousel and a crowd of thrill-seeking people out for a day of fun.
At 16 years old, he started working at Busch Gardens in Williamsburg, Va., as an attendant who hosed down the park and pulled trash in the mornings. During a morethan-30-year career, he has served as vice president of operations at the park where he started, as well as at another Busch Gardens location in Tampa, Fla., and as an executive for SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment.
As the general manager of Kennywood, Mr. Pauls said his role is to support and advocate for his staff.
“My job is to get them the tools they need to do their jobs,” he said.
All that previous experience didn’t prepare him for last year. When he arrived at Kennywood during the pandemic, Mr. Pauls received a 400-page manual with instructions on park operations.
Even with all the steps that were taken to keep guests and staff safe, there were the stops and starts. The same week the park was finally set to open in July last year, state officials announced tighter health and safety restrictions — delaying the opening again.
Nick Paradise, director of corporate communications for the park, said he always thought Kennywood would reopen last summer. It was just a question of when. Mr. Pauls wasn’t so sure. “It was questionable up until the day we got open,” he said.
And despite the vaccines and the loosened state restrictions, he’s still keeping an eye out for unexpected developments.
Could anything stand in the way of the May 8 opening this year? He considered the question.
“Over a year ago, I would have told you, ‘No,’ … but after what COVID did — shocked us all and shut down everything — I can’t say that anymore,” he said.
Slow season in 2020
Kennywood, a Pittsburgharea institution that was founded in 1898 and figures in many a childhood memory, ended up being open for only 43 days last summer. In 2019, it ran the rides and served up the cotton candy for 145 days, including events in the fall and winter months.
Attendance in 2020 was consistent throughout the season but slow, so officials decided to shorten hours and open days to try to push numbers up on the days they were open. Park officials declined to share numbers on attendance for either year.
Kennywood closed for the 2020 season on Labor Day, in part because the numbers weren’t adding up and in part because of the uncertainty of what the fall and winter would mean for the number of COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations and deaths.
The plan this year is to continue operating for fewer days and fewer hours than usual — running five days a week for just one work shift. Normally, Kennywood would operate seven days a week with two shifts of employees clocking in and out.
Mr. Pauls will keep a close eye on attendance levels the first few days. If people are eager to come back, he’ll start readjusting plans.
“We’re ready to be open more and do more as the conditions allow. And with all the changes that have even happened in the last few days, it’s huge for us,” he said.
He was referring to Gov. Tom Wolf’s move to ease health and safety restrictions, to allow for greater capacity at indoor and outdoor venues and to speed up the availability of COVID-19 vaccines to Pennsylvania residents.
Park practices will still be impacted by the virus. For example, bumper cars are back, but squirt guns are not.
Although the Jack Rabbit did celebrate its centennial last year, it’s getting a bonus celebration this year.
To accommodate longer hours, Mr. Pauls would need about six weeks to staff up. Right now, Kennywood and Sandcastle are looking to fill about 1,500 seasonal positions — about two-thirds of the staff it would normally hire for a season.
The two parks have about 75 full- time, year- round workers. The COVID-19 pandemic and a planned restructuring led to about 30 furloughs, but the company brought back most of those employees in March, Mr. Paradise said.
Building the budget
Kennywood’s parent company, Palace Entertainment, owns about 20 parks, including three — Kennywood, Sandcastle and Idlewild Park in Westmoreland County — in southwestern Pennsylvania and one in Lancaster, Pa. Kennywood is the biggest park under Palace Entertainment’s umbrella, Mr. Pauls said.
The company is in the process of setting up headquarters in Pittsburgh and moving most of its staff from California to a new space near Kennywood.
Palace Entertainment is a part of Parques Reunidos, a Spanish company based in Madrid that owns about 60 venues around the world, including theme parks, water parks and zoos.
Parques Reunidos is a privately owned company, meaning it doesn’t have to share financial information publicly, and Kennywood executives declined to share specifics about the park’s revenue or budget. Mr. Pauls did confirm the park suffered significant losses last year.
Overall, the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions estimates the COVID-19 pandemic may have caused $23 billion in economic losses for attractions in 2020, as well as impacting 235,000 jobs in the U.S.
Disney, one of the industry’s biggest operators, reported it lost about $2.6 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2021 from the parks segment of its business.
After hearing from friends at his former park in Williamsburg, Mr. Pauls said the industry as a whole is suffering.
“They tried to make a little money and that’s what they made — a little money,” he said. “You’ve just got to weigh: Is that worth it to try to be open?”
Break-even point
At Kennywood, park officials struggled to make that same calculation. In 2020, they decided on a shorter season with fewer days and fewer hours in an attempt to balance the revenue coming in from guests with the expenses of operating the park every day.
“There’s that break-even point — you’re making money or you’re really losing money,” Mr. Pauls said.
In the amusement park industry, budgets are decided months in advance of opening day. Kennywood officials started planning for the 2021 season around the same time they shut their doors for the fall and winter of 2020.
They planned for a conservative 2021 budget — with revenue markers Mr. Pauls is already planning to exceed — and used 2019 as a base year, keeping 2020 out of the equation because it was so unusual.
“It used to be, back years ago, you built a budget, and you always tried to trim it down from there,” Mr. Pauls said. “This is a situation where you build a budget, and you just add to it. As things improve, we’ll be adding more.
“We’ll be making decisions pretty quick on what we can do,” he said, adding the first thing to come back will be extended hours and more open days.
“You see our schedule change — you know that’s a good thing.”