Thoughts from the week

Well, I admit my posting frequency has slowed down considerably here lately. It’s not for a lack of interest trust me! It seems to be for a lack of time these days, as my MBA finance course is turning out to be quite the challenge.

Anyhow, I’ve been thinking over several of the Disney related items in the news lately as we ponder the future of our economic markets on one hand and our love for the mouse on the other. Okay, so maybe not in equal amounts granted.

As we roll into the end of Disney’s FY, the past couple of weeks have been crammed with announcements and changes across the Disney front. All those announcements can only be to as setups for the quarters and fiscal year(s) to come. As the finance guys would say, you want to get as much of that good will priced into the stock as expected returns as you can going forward. I think as a result of all this talk, Disney’s stock is still holding it’s own, which is great.

The studio’s has been very active this week with announcements of almost their entire upcoming slate.

Parks and Resorts has announced next’s years promotion: one which as I think about it more and more could be a true stroke of marketing brilliance where everybody can be a winner. And the Magic is out of dry dock with many of the upgrades that are on the Wonder.

The Networks are rolling and making announcements.

It’s a very busy time as you can see for all of the major business units.

The only thing that’s bugging me down in my gut is all the discounts for fall hotel rooms on property. We are going to be going down for some, *ahem* highly motivated looking around shall we say over Columbus Day weekend and the hotels are PACKED on property. It’s always a busy weekend.

But the very next week prices on a value resort are half the rack rate at $59 a night? Stay at Ole’ Key West for less that $200 a night? That bothers me for some reason, especially given that Bob and Tom said forward looking bookings were holding up well through the end of the year. No doubt they are pulling out all the stops to flex the profit potential and margins as much as possible.

Oh, and for those of you lamenting the loss of the Hard Rock Park just up the road from me in Myrtle Beach? We went at the beginning of the year, and frankly we just weren’t that impressed. It’s a park that really catered to adults, with a LOT of adult innuendo in their advertising and shows (a bunch of surfer guys smoking pot in a VW microbus interest you and your tweens? I didn’t think so.) As you would expect from Hard Rock, the food was pretty decent (they had a pretty killer coffee/sweets shop and a darn good barbecue place), and they did the best they could for their nightly closing/fireworks given their location right in the flight path for the airport (no certain who thought of that one), but the Nights in White Satin ride left me wondering what in the heck I’d just seen.

It’s unfortunate… Myrtle Beach could use something, but it’s a tough crowd that, as someone else mentioned, has lots of Six Flags and other parks close to them already when they are at home. On that scale it just wasn’t different enough.