As Universal Epic Universe approaches the 2-month mark since opening, we wanted to revisit some ticketing data, taking a look at recent changes. Late last month, Universal made some rather significant changes, re-balancing some ticket types, offering more “capacity” for guests looking to visit during the remainder of the summer and into fall. That said, we’re noticing a bit of stagnation as it relates to ticketing purchases. Let’s dive in and check out what we’re deeming a stagnant summer at Epic Universe.
Epic Universe’s Stagnant Summer: A Look at Ticket Sales & Attendance
We’ll start with a caveat. All of the data in this article is probably best described as “leaked” data. That is, the data is publicly available thanks to open data endpoints on the Universal Orlando Resort website, but it’s not something that Universal is publishing in a press release. The data comes from Universal itself, nonetheless. The data is available to read thanks to thrill-data. Ok, with that out of the way, here’s what we’ve noticed.
We’ll start with the headline: ticket sales appear to be relatively stagnant. With no Annual Pass available for purchase, that means that attendance is relatively stagnant as well. Since the park opened on May 22nd, the average number of tickets sold per day is just under 16,000. Now, we can’t equate ticket sales to attendance directly because there are a variety of ticket types. Most of the available ticket types are multi-day tickets that only allow guests to visit Epic Universe on one day and the other Universal theme parks on the remaining days.
For now, we can say that the average number of ticket units sold per day is somewhere around 16,000. If we were to say that one ticket sold equaled one person visiting the park, then Epic Universe would be on pace to welcome some 5.8 million guests per year. That would easily put Epic Universe in last place among the Disney and Universal theme parks in Central Florida – nearly a full 3 million guests behind Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
It’s important to note that Universal is not capping attendance at Epic Universe. That was an unpopular fact with Universal fans when I first wrote about it after Epic Universe opened, but it remains true today. Universal may be creating friction by not selling you the ticket type that you want, but they are not capping attendance.
Back in late May, I asked if the low crowds caused by ticketing friction were a smart strategy or if they were a cause for concern. I think that remains a valid question nearly two months after the park’s grand opening. Ticketing friction remains in the form of unfavorable ticket types, and attendance is stagnant as a result.
Using leaked ticketing data, we can see that Universal has sort of resolved itself to the fact that its current ticketing strategy is going to cause an artificial ceiling on attendance. Back in late June, Universal went through and dropped the daily allocation of Annual Passholder discounted tickets from 2,000 per day to just 750 per day. Even at just 750 tickets per day, Universal is not finding a lot of demand. In short, a great number of Annual Passholders appear to be waiting for an Annual Pass product at this time.
With Universal seemingly writing off Annual Passholders for now, they opened the floodgates, so to speak, and now have really high “caps” for other ticket types. Universal is not hitting those “caps”, so they’re sort of irrelevant at the moment with the exception of the single-day ticket.
While 1-day tickets are not nearly as hard to come by as they used to be, they pretty reliably are sold out for the next 2-3 days at a time, with more “capacity” opening up on the day of. Universal typically throws anywhere from a few hundred to a couple thousand extra tickets into the pool on the day of a visit. Even with all of the ticket manipulation and friction, Universal is still finding itself in that 16,000 to 20,000 per day range in terms of tickets sold.
In order to figure out what ticket product is most popular, let’s take a look at data for today, July 16th. Note that anything that is a multi-day ticket only includes one day at Epic Universe, and then sends guests to the other Universal Orlando parks for the remainder of the ticket’s validity period:
- 1-Day Ticket | Sold Out (7200 total tickets)
- Passholder discounted 1-Day Ticket | Sold Out (750 total tickets)
- 2-Day Ticket | 28% Sold Out (10,000 total tickets)
- 3-Day Ticket (3 parks) | 20% Sold Out (15,000 total tickets)
- 3-Day Ticket (3 parks + water park) | 13% Sold Out (15,000 total tickets)
While each ticket type has a wildly varying number of total tickets allocated to it, I think it’s clear that guests are mostly opting for a 1-Day ticket.
The question returns to what we posed in late May: is this a smart strategy or cause for concern? If theme parks were a bigger part of Comcast’s business, I think that the next earnings call would’ve been a very interesting one. Essentially, why is Universal leaving money on the table?
I will say this. I thought that there would be more chatter about Annual Passes than there is right now. In a mid-May article, I said that I thought that Universal would start to offer Annual Passes by the end of Summer. Now, I’m not so sure.
To their credit, Universal seems to be committed to its ticketing strategy. It’s not going to get a ton of guests through the door, but they appear to be strategically stubborn. Yes, it’s a stagnant summer at Epic Universe, but maybe that’s exactly what Universal wants.
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