The Disney Co. will reopen its Disney World theme park in Florida next month.
The Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom areas will open on 11 July; EPCOT and the Disney Hollywood Studios portions will reopen on 15 July.
Workers and guests will be required to be masked and submit to temperature checks before entering. Plexiglass panels will separate employees and customers in some areas and cashless transactions are preferred, said James MacPhee, the parks’ senior VP of Operations.
Visitors must reserve tickets in advance, so Disney can control the number of people in the park at one time, and roving social-distance monitors will remind guests to leave space among themselves.
Life-size Disney characters will remain absent and fireworks displays will still be suspended.
The company did not specify the number of the almost 100,000 furloughed workers to be brought back to work.
Hotel Rooms in Demand Again
The rate of occupancy among U.S. hotel rooms was 32.4 percent and 11 million room-nights during the week of 16 May, compared to the low of 21 percent and one million room-nights during the week ending 11 April.
The May number still was only about half the occupancy rate of 61.8 percent at the beginning of March. Revenue per available room, a key measure of the industry’s financial health, was $25.12 during the week in May, 74 percent below the same period in 2019.
The revenue figure is unlikely to return to pre-lockdown levels until at least 2023, according to an analysis by realty firm CBRE Group.
The industry’s recovery also may be tiered. During the same May week, occupancy at budget inns was 44.2 percent but only 18.8 percent at luxury hotels, reports analysis firm STR.
Luxury hotels depend for much of their revenue on conventions and gatherings that use their ballrooms and banquet facilities but “what does a meeting or convention look like in a six-foot world,” referring to social distancing, “is the $100-billion question,” said Jan Freitag, an STR analyst, referring to the value of hotels’ convention business.
The overall occupancy rate for 2020 will be about half that of 2019, analysts say, and daily average occupancy down about 22 percent.
TRENDPOST: Again, as we continually note, with the slew of new regulations sweeping the planet that are being fabricated by government officials without a shred of scientific evidence, the new environments being created will not attract crowds as they did prior to the government takeovers.
In effect, they have sucked the joy and fun out of life that, at virtually every level, is now regulated by official decree.
