Orlando, Thursday, 30 October 2025.
The TEA attendance report for 2024, published last Wednesday, confirms Magic Kingdom as the world’s most visited park (about 17.8 million visits), while China’s Chimelong Ocean Kingdom again ranks among the global leaders. For retail and operations teams, the headline isn’t just Disney’s scale but the split in growth models: legacy destination resorts drive multi-day stays and IP-led spend, while high-capacity regional parks compete on price, throughput and local demand. That divergence creates different pressure points — sustained crowding and staffing volatility at major destination parks versus throughput and margin management at regional operators. The most intriguing takeaway: Disney still places 12 parks in the top 25, underscoring platform-level advantages that intensify benchmarking demands. Expect capital-allocation shifts toward capacity upgrades, queue technologies and revenue-mix strategies, and sharper KPI sets for network planning. This snapshot should prompt portfolio re-evaluations and operational pilots focused on crowd-flow, staffing elasticity and ticketing/pricing levers.
Attendance snapshot and what the numbers say
The Themed Entertainment Association’s (TEA) 2024 global attendance ledger — reported by industry outlets last week — confirms Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom as the planet’s top single theme park, recording about 17.8 million visits in 2024 while Disneyland in California followed closely, and China’s Chimelong Ocean Kingdom again appears among the worldwide leaders [1][2]. The TEA dataset shows Disney placed a plurality of sites in the top 25, a platform-scale result that underpins the company’s market leverage in retail, food & beverage and IP-driven guest spend [1][2][5].
Why legacy destination parks keep pulling multi-day, high‑spend guests
Large destination resorts such as Walt Disney World translate intellectual property and multi-day resort design into prolonged guest dwell time and higher ancillary spend per party — an effect visible in Disney’s top‑of‑market placements (12 parks in the global top 25) and attendance gains across its Florida parks in 2024, including Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, which all reported attendance increases that year [1][2]. Those multi-day flows create operational realities: sustained peak‑period crowding, complex staffing schedules across hotel and foodservice, and heavier reliance on cross‑park transportation and guest‑flow management systems [1][2].
Regional, high‑throughput parks: volume, price and local demand
By contrast, high‑capacity regional resorts in Greater China and other Asian markets—exemplified in the TEA ranking by Chimelong Ocean Kingdom and strong growth from parks like Universal Studios Beijing and Shanghai Haichang Ocean Park—tend to rely more on high daily throughput, value pricing and densely localised demand to drive attendance growth, rather than multi‑day resort stays [2][5]. The TEA report and coverage highlight faster percentage gains from several China parks in 2024, signaling a growth model focused on utilitarian capacity and ticketing throughput rather than extended resort spend [2].
Operational pressure points: crowd flow, staffing elasticity and guest experience
Operators managing legacy destination parks face persistent crowd‑flow and staffing pressures: more nights of programmed events, multi‑session openings and large daily peaks require flexible labour models and investments in crowd‑management tech, while regional operators must prioritise throughput optimisation and margin control to sustain volume‑led economics [4][2]. Reported attendance dynamics for 2024 — including Magic Kingdom’s continued year‑over‑year gain and Universal’s U.S. parks seeing small declines — underscore how different operational strategies produce divergent stress points for scheduling, guest circulation and labour [2][1].
Capital allocation signals: where investment dollars are likely to move
The industry signal from the 2024 attendance rankings points to near‑term capital allocation toward three buckets: (1) capacity improvements (rides, ride capacity re‑profiling, ride maintenance cycles), (2) queue and guest‑flow technologies (virtual queues, advanced reservationing and real‑time crowd analytics), and (3) revenue‑mix initiatives (food & beverage experiences, IP retail, tiered ticketing). The prominence of Magic Kingdom and other Disney parks in the top ranks makes platform‑level benchmarking and cross‑park performance KPIs more valuable for corporate network planning and for investors weighing destination versus regional exposures [1][2][5].
Benchmarking and KPIs for portfolio decision‑makers
Expect more granular KPI sets to emerge for portfolio management: per‑capita spend segmented by day‑visitor versus resort‑stayer, throughput per operating hour, event‑session net yield, and labour‑cost per revenue hour. The TEA report’s release — covered in industry outlets as a stabilising post‑recovery snapshot — is already prompting operators and investors to re‑examine network positioning and to pilot operational interventions targeting crowd‑flow and staffing elasticity [5][2].
Data caveats and limits to inference
The TEA attendance figures cited in coverage are a focused snapshot for 2024; they report annual attendance totals and percentage movements but do not publish all underlying daily‑session or 2023 raw figures required to independently reproduce certain percent‑change calculations from the public summaries alone. Where necessary raw 2023 attendance values are absent from the cited coverage, detailed percentage recalculation cannot be verified here [alert! ‘2023 park-level attendance numbers required for arithmetic verification are not provided in the linked sources’] [1][2][5].
Bronnen