Cedar Fair Hints At What Their Parks Might Look Like When Re-Opening

Cedar Fair held their investor earnings call and released their first quarter earnings results yesterday. As expected, most of the focus was on the impact of COVID-19 on the company and the parks. A few nuggets of information on park operations stood out.

Could Some Parks Stay Closed For The Year?

As we know, all of Cedar Fair’s parks are closed. Most hadn’t opened yet when the pandemic started and forced lockdowns. We now know that Cedar Fair is at least trying to plan around the potential that they won’t open.

As reported by Brady MacDonald over at the OC Register, there’s a line buried in the park chains quarterly report that says, “For purposes of preparing our financial statements, as of March 29, 2020, we estimated that some or all of our parks may remain closed throughout 2020 due to the imposition of external operating restrictions or due to the time it may take to implement additional hygiene protocols and prepare our parks for operation.”

To me this sounds more like a hedge against potential worst case in their estimates. Cedar Fair CEO Richard A. Zimmerman added on the earnings call, “Given the seasonal nature of our operations with Knott’s Berry Farm as our only park with year-round operations, it is important that we are able to restart the parks with a reasonable number of operating days remaining in the year.”

Because its a year-round park, I think its safe to say Knott’s will reopen this year. But some smaller, shorter season parks may not.

So it sounds like if in some locations lockdowns remain in place long enough, Cedar Fair might decide its not worth it to re-open. I believe that Michigan’s Adventure has the shortest operating season, so it might be the most likely to stay closed. I could also imagine parks leaning more into their “end-of-year” events like WinterFest.

Zimmerman also gave us a sense of how long it would take parks to reopen on the call. “Our parks will remain in a state of readiness while we await governmental restrictions being lifted. Until such time, our park GMs and their teams are actively addressing and planning for new measures and guidelines that may be necessary inside our parks. Once we have good line of sight to an opening date in any particular market, it will take us a minimum of two to three weeks to open.”

Brian Witherow, Cedar Fair’s Chief Financial Officer, added, “We have purposefully kept our full-time employees on the payroll and not aggressively pursued furloughs or layoffs as we believe this leaves us in the best position to reopen our parks as efficiently and effectively as possible once restrictions are lifted.”

I assume that timeline includes things like finding/training seasonal workers and finishing any maintenance projects that need to be completed.

Changes You Could See At the Parks When They Re-open

Zimmerman and Witherow also gave some hints at what precautions they’re thinking of implementing when the parks re-open. First they talked about protecting employees and making sure they’re healthy. Zimmerman said, “We’re actively working on new mandatory health and safety COVID-19 training for all employees, and we are introducing protocols to conduct wellness checks of employees each day. We are also committed throughout our properties to implement enhanced and expanded sanitization measures to ensure confidence that our properties are safe to visit and enjoy without undue concern.”

Zimmerman also said that they will plan to do things like implementing social distancing on rides, inside restaurants, and in common areas of the parks. They would implement regular cleaning of rides, handrails, and restrooms along with disinfection of tables, charis, and surfaces in restaurants and along midways. They also discussed adding additional spots for guests and employees to wash or sanitize hands.

Hmm, how to social distance on Fury325?

The park also might be implementing some technology changes.

“We are actively working on enhancements and expanded use of technology platforms, including our park mobile apps in order to improve the guest experience going forward. These enhancements will include such things as the use of a park reservation system to better manage park attendance, expanded use of cashless transactions, the potential introduction of virtual queuing and the broader use of mobile ordering for food, an initiative that we began rolling out in 2019 to good success at several of our parks,” Zimmerman said on the call.

So it’s safe to say some things will be different when the parks do open up.

Park Projects

The last interesting piece of info was about what’s going on with the work at the parks. Witherow mentioned in his opening statements that the parks are deferring or eliminating some $75-$100 million of 2020 and 2021 capital projects.

“We now anticipate spending $85 million to $100 million on capital investments in calendar year 2020, the majority of which will be spent by the end of the second quarter,” he said. That sounds like finishing up current projects in the parks or wrapping up work on future projects to a point where they can pause. It also implies that most of the capital spend cuts will probably be in the form of fewer 2021 projects (which hopefully just get delayed, not eliminated).


To end on a slightly happier note, I present the final line of Zimmermans prepared remarks from the earnings call:

“I am confident that our industry, and Cedar Fair specifically, can develop and execute new operating procedures to address sanitization and social distancing best practices. I am also confident that we can create a guest experience that will be a welcome relief from what most have experienced over the last few months. It will certainly be different, but it will still be fun and have memory making at its core.”

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