No roller coaster goes up indefinitely, and for some U.S. theme parks and the hotels around them, they've seen demand hit a drop of its own.
There are hundreds of theme parks spread across the country, ranging in size from a few acres and attractions to entertain guests for a few hours to giant, sprawling parks that need multiple days and hotel stays to see everything.
While amusement parks are normally a big draw for kids, teens and adults alike during the summer months, there have been signs this summer was a bit different.
During the company's second-quarter earnings call, Six Flags Entertainment CEO Richard Zimmerman told analysts and investors the company saw a significant decline in attendance at the company's parks during the first six months of the year. He pointed to lower renewal rates, sales of season passes and single-day passes "all largely influenced" by extreme weather conditions and economic uncertainty.
"As a result of these temporary macro headwinds, we believe many guests delayed park visits during the early weeks of our operating season, making fewer impulse buys, delaying purchases of season passes and memberships and displaying a more value-conscious mindset," he said. "In our business, the impact of short-term, macro-level disruptions such as weather are amplified earlier in the year when visitation urgency is lower and there are plenty of opportunities to still visit later in the season.
"The second half of the year has historically been the defining period for our business."
Forbes reported in late August that overall spending at U.S. theme parks was down 5% year over year, citing data on credit card spending from Consumer Edge. Forbes pointed to lower- and middle-income park guests feeling less financially secure. At the same time, bigger destination parks — such as the Disney and Universal parks with higher admission prices — saw increased visitor spending from May through July, indicating financial resiliency among wealthier guests.
Regional park guest profile
The downturn that Six Flags reported during its most recent earnings call is concerning for the hotel industry, said David Sangree, president of Hotel & Leisure Advisors. While many of the park guests are there for a day trip, there’s still a sizable amount who book an overnight hotel stay.
Along with weather events, a main concern among theme park and waterpark operators is that middle- and lower-income customers are feeling the effects of the economy and reduction in any kind of financial aid they’ve received in the past.
“They have less money to go to these parks,” he said. “Many of those people go for the day, but those that might have gone for overnight, they’re not doing that as much.”
A subscription service Sangree uses that can track attendance levels at different amusement parks based on anonymized cell phone data has provided a baseline level of average attendance. It shows a broader look at theme park attendance beyond what comes from the publicly traded companies.
A look at the stats for a couple of different theme parks shows they are experiencing a demand decline similar to what’s been reported by Six Flags, he said.
“Part of the issue, of course, is that the prices of a lot of these parks have gone up a lot,” he said.
For the waterparks, such as Great Wolf Lodge, many of the guests are families, Sangree said. It may be a combination of parents and children, grandparents with grandchildren or three generations of a family going and staying together.
Great Wolf Lodge this year eliminated its $40 resort fee, which factored into the advertising campaign this season, he said. That’s not something many other hotels have done. However, these properties still charge for parking. While Great Wolf Lodge may raise its rates to make up for the loss of the resort fee, the economic pressure consumers are facing this year may stymie that.
“That is just a quandary for owners,” Sangree said. “Do we eliminate our resort fee? Do we keep it? How do we play this game now that we have to show the full rate to customers?”
‘Felt a lot less this year’
Hersheypark is a regional theme park in Hershey, Pennsylvania — east of state capital Harrisburg — that attracts mostly drive-to guests, said Elias Thompson, regional vice president of operations at Shaner Hotel Group. It attracts guests from big feeder markets such as New Jersey, New York and even Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
While some regional theme parks can attract people for a day or so, Hersheypark has been able to draw people in for things beyond the park itself, he said. There’s the Giant Center arena, which hosts concerts, the Hershey Story Museum and Hershey’s Chocolate World as well as multiple restaurants in the market.
“They’ve done a good job to bring in a guest and try to get them to stay more than one night,” he said.
During a typical year, Hersheypark draws in visitors from spring through Labor Day into parts of October as well as Christmas with its holiday events, Thompson said. It’s during the summer months in particular that the theme park can compress the entire market, pushing corporate demand and even some leisure as far out as Mechanicsburg and Lebanon.
“This year, we saw a little bit of that during certain events, big concert events that are coming in, but we definitely felt a lot less of it this year,” he said.
Shaner has two hotels close to Hersheypark, the Courtyard Hershey Chocolate Avenue in Hershey and the Hampton Inn & Suites Hershey Near the Park in Hummelstown. It also has a TownePlace Suites Hershey under development set to open next spring. A little farther out, Shaner has the Fairfield Inn & Suites Lebanon Near Expo Center and the Fairfield Inn & Suites Harrisburg International Airport, which in higher-demand years can benefit from the compression caused by the theme park.
Many of Shaner’s Hersheypark regulars come back every year, and they usually come in on a Friday and stay through Sunday, Thompson said. Now they may come Saturday morning and go to the park for the day and stay one night or may leave without staying over.
Shaner executives first started to notice something was off when the year-over-year pickup normally seen in June wasn’t as strong as expected, he said. They typically start seeing bookings for June as early as April, but it was a bit softer compared to 2024. The booking windows haven’t really shifted much; it’s just a matter of volume, he added.
Hershey Entertainment & Resorts, the owner of Hersheypark, doesn’t announce how well the park is doing until the first quarter of the following year to give the full season a chance to finish out, Thompson said. Even so, the Shaner Hotel Group team can get an idea during the season based on how many specials the park runs through the year discounting prices to boost ticket sales.
“We have seen that a little bit this year, which makes us think that they're also feeling the pinch a little bit,” he said. “But I can definitely tell you, with the hotels in our entire market, I speak to a lot of the [general managers], a lot of the different companies that are based in Hershey market, and we're all feeling it. There's definitely been a lot less travel into the market during this park season.”
Destination parks
Some major theme parks in the U.S. have so much for guests to do that they will stay overnight or multiple days to see it all. Walt Disney World Resort and Universal Studios Florida in the Orlando area are two prime examples of this type of destination. Due to the proximity of these parks to each other, travelers will often attend both parks within the same trip.
Another benefit these parks have — along with other theme parks along the Sun Belt — is the lack of seasonality, said Chantal Wu, senior director of hospitality markets at CoStar. Orlando has a peak season during the summer months since most schools are out, and September is usually softer as school resumes, but October picks up with Halloween events and the parks see attendance grow for the winter holidays as well.
Demand for the Orlando area has grown through the summer, due in large part to Universal opening its Epic Universe park in May, she said. It’s the newest park to open in the market, which has not seen a completely new resort open in more than 25 years. The demand growth wasn’t instant, however, as the Epic Universe park didn’t open with much fanfare before Memorial Day weekend and guests may have wanted to let the park work out any last-minute fixes, she said.
The new park has induced demand into the market as a whole, bringing in incremental demand to Universal’s other parks in Orlando, Wu said. The opening of the park also added 2,000 new hotel rooms in the market. Roughly 1,500 rooms are value-proposition rooms spread across two new resorts, Stella Nova and Terra Luna. The remaining rooms are luxury rooms in the Universal Helios Grand Hotel.
Even with the additional 2,000 rooms in the market, occupancy has grown, even if just slightly, Wu said.
Though Disney World and Universal Studios can each draw from the same overall pool of potential guests, Wu said they each almost cater to two different types of guests. Disney is oriented more to guests with younger children in their groups and overall is a more kid-friendly experience. Universal tends to cater more to groups with kids age 10 and older.
“Opening up a new park does not necessarily cannibalize the demand for Disney,” she said. “It's somewhat bringing just additional, incremental demand to the whole market.”
Orlando’s hotel performance struggled in 2023 and 2024, according to CoStar data, with 12 out of the 24 months showing year-over-year revenue per available room declines primarily due to drops in occupancy.
In 2024 in particular, the Orlando market saw RevPAR drop by 0.9% due in part to a 1.3% drop in occupancy paired with 4.4% growth in average daily rate, Wu said. However, the trend reversed in February 2025 with 12-month trailing RevPAR growing by 0.8% that month and steady increases through July. RevPAR is at 4% growth, thanks in part 3.2% ADR growth.
“Since we're talking about both occupancy and ADR growth here, it looks like the market enjoyed more ADR growth recently,” she said. “I think this is really because of the strength of the upper-tier class hotels in the market. They are definitely pushing the rate ceiling.”
Aside from leisure demand, there’s a significant group component to the Orlando market that boosts midweek performance, Wu said. It makes up about a third of total hotel demand in Orlando as the Orange County Convention Center is ranked the country’s second-largest convention center. It hosts roughly 200 events each year.
While Universal is trying to charge a premium for its new Epic Universe park, it’s also monitoring consumer sentiment to make sure prices aren't pushing too high, Wu said. Universal uses dynamic pricing for admission tickets, making the park more competitive on certain dates when volume seems low.
The middle class is feeling financially squeezed while there’s still a lot of spending strength in the upper-upscale and luxury hotel segments, Wu said. Those with higher incomes aren’t feeling as much pressure from the economic cycle in general, and they’re still spending like they did previously, booking all the packages, which may combine park admissions and hotel nights.
The Lake Buena Vista submarket, where Disney World is located, is the highest-rated submarket in Orlando and has grown RevPAR by $14 year over year in July 2025, she said.
“I think that kind of speaks to how luxury truly does not have a ceiling,” she said. “You can just keep pushing the rate higher.”