EuroDisney Grand Opening April 1992

Article 10 April 2012 in Travel Weekly

Tom Allen, Disney Park & Resorts’ sales and marketing vice-president when Disneyland Paris opened 20 years ago, recalls the trials and tribulations and how the UK trade prevailed to make it a success

It’s April 12, 1992, the opening day of EuroDisney (as it was then called), and I’m looking round the ‘Wild West Show’ arena half an hour after the official opening of the Park – and it smells.

Mixing with bison and horses having their breakfast – it wasn’t meant to be like this.

A short 18 months earlier I had joined EuroDisney to head up the travel industry office in London.

Step 1 – find an office, which I found one very snowy day in Northumberland Avenue in London.

Step 2 – find some great staff. A few months later and Elizabeth Harraway, Peter Welch and Debbie Palmer had joined me to form the basis of the team.

Our job – persuade the UK and Ireland travel industry that this brand new holiday destination was going to become an integral part of the travel business, and we were worth putting up with a lot of hassle to work with.

There are enough stories connected with the opening of EuroDisney, now Disneyland Paris, to write a book. So, I thought to celebrate the opening twenty years ago I would offer a brief snapshot.

As background, The Disney Resorts in the USA – Walt Disney World in Florida and Disneyland in California – had very little experience of working with the leisure travel industry.

All their sales efforts were in the corporate and incentive market. The rest was consumer direct business, working on the old adage – we’ll build it and they’ll come.

And although competitive pressures would alter that in the US over the next few years, at EuroDisney working with the travel industry was a new experience for the American executives.

They just didn’t understand it, why it was so important, and still believed, right up to the opening, that consumers would just turn up in their millions.

And would they listen to us European executives about the importance of the travel industry? Would they heck. They certainly did after opening.

So we had no strategy and no pricing policy, and knocking on our door were UK travel companies – Paris Travel Service; Airtours; Cresta; Wallace Arnold; Shearings; P&O Ferries; Stena Sealink; BA and more.

There was also a host of coach operators including a few new arrivals such as Mouse Trips. We had some fun with them getting them to alter their name to Magic Trips.

We came up with a market-unfriendly strategy of getting the operators to commit to rooms. The trade went ballistic, but eventually decided to play ball.

We called our partners ‘TOP’ operators, which meant one thing to them, but to us meant ‘Take or Pay’.

To cut a long story short, we entered into agreements with a whole range of tour operators. Prices were only released a few months before opening, a disaster for brochure production and sales schedules in those days.

Rooms available to tour operators were restricted to 40% of the hotel inventory, and despite all the problems, the UK operators as well as most other European countries excluding Germany, filled their rooms.

This, however, left 60% for the consumer direct market lying ever so empty. Working with the trade was set to change for the better following this experience.

We also had to introduce the market to a whole new set of Disney rules – the ‘creative guidelines’.

Getting across the concept that you couldn’t use Disney characters to sell Disney was a challenge in itself, but getting the detail correct was challenging in the extreme.

In the UK we took the view that guidelines meant that – they were guidelines, not rules, and tried to be flexible.

The stories are legion. When Paris Travel Service came up with Mickey Balloons on a brochure cover, and Alan Croft tried the line ‘they are not Mickey Balloons, they are upside-down cows udders’ we let him get away with it.

In fact we were able to get the guidelines altered to allow balloons. So far, so much fun.

We always knew the coach market would be important to us, but we couldn’t get agreement for free entrance for coach drivers and tour guides, which was normal for all other attractions in Europe.

Instead we built a coach drivers lounge. In the first few weeks, as thousands of coaches descended on EuroDisney, and the coach operators discovered that the coach drivers lounge was smaller than the dog kennels – and located next door – rebellion was at hand.

This brought out the best of Disney in terms of moving fast, so we announced the building of a huge coach drivers’ lounge, and a change of policy on tour guide tickets.

I became increasingly impressed with how quickly Disney could move to fix issues, and increasingly despondent at how they couldn’t foresee them, which brings me back to where I started in the Wild West Show arena.

All the operators had been pressing us for a location to base their reps for their hotel guests. They wanted desks in each hotel lobby, as was normal throughout European leisure destinations.

Despite all our internal wrangling we couldn’t get the concept understood, much less get desks provided, so we came up with the idea of one centrally located tour operator desk for all to share, and started internal discussions to achieve that.

Jon Winder, my boss in Paris, worked wonders at internal politics, and eventually got agreement on the concept – but we couldn’t find a location.

It is worth remembering that the overriding pressure was to get a Disney theme park and seven hotels all open by April 12 (initially it was to be a rolling hotel opening which was altered to open them all together – no pressure then).

So for the park operators a tour operator desk was just a bloody nuisance. But to us it was vital.
So at 9am I am in the park doing a live radio interview with the UK, and at 9.30am Mickey Mouse and Michael Eisner are due to open the Park from Cinderella’s Castle.

“Tom – phone call for you”, (no mobiles in those days). It was Jon Winder, watching the opening from home on TV as he had been too busy on phone calls to get to the park.

“Get over to the Wild West Show and have a look, we can locate our tour operator desk there”.

“But I’m just about to watch the opening ceremony,” I said. “This is more important than the opening ceremony, get over there and agree a location,” came the reply.

So I headed over, but only after watching the opening ceremony. This was what I had worked for, night and day, for 18 months and I wasn’t going to miss it.

Well, even the UK tour operators were not going to put their reps and guests in the equivalent of a smelly cattle shed, and we eventually got our tour operator desk in the French tourist office in Disney village – a lot less smelly, but just as difficult to understand as the bison.

And anyone who remembers those days will remember the horrendous press coverage we received for a few years after the park opened, partly because Michael Eisner was rude to Lord Rothermere at the VIP opening party.

My personal favourite was the Evening Standard headline “Eurodisney to close” – very helpful. But that’s another story, which along with all the others will just have to wait for the book.
There is no room here to expand on some of the other tales such as Eisner inspecting the newly built ballroom at the Hotel New York and, as he turned and exited, the roof caved in behind him. Or the antics of the UK and Ireland travel trade at the soft opening a few nights earlier.

Suffice it to say, thanks to a great team, and tremendous support from the trade, the UK was the only country to beat attendance targets in the first year of opening.

And it has gone on from strength to strength to be a vastly important market for both Disneyland Paris and the US destinations.

Tom Allen is now chief executive of Tom Allen Partnerships, the travel and leisure consultancy, and also of Socentra, the social engagement travel consultancy.

Social Engagement Thoughts

People are our most powerful media – When people talk big things happen. They share, they debate, they recommend, they buy. (The Brooklyn Brothers)

Over the last few years consumers’ relationships with brands have been changing and this change has had a dramatic effect on how communications strategies should be implemented.

Developing campaigns that enable consumers to co-create with us, using digital and social platforms in the centre, enables us to enrol advocates and give them a voice through which to tell their stories and create Word Of Mouth momentum.

This strategy relies on collaborations with key Influencers who have stories to tell themselves. Collaborating with relevant Influencers will create a socially-fuelled content-driven campaign mechanic that talks directly to our target audience through their existing passions.

Simply focusing on traditional advertising, and owned social properties such as Facebook and Twitter, is not enough, because people still need a reason to come and explore those platforms. They are brilliant at creating awareness and housing interesting content. But to genuinely engage with our target audience we need to be in the spaces where our consumers already are.

Think about this – Social Media is no longer a fad, it is a fundamental shift in the way we communicate.

Consider the following:

• Over 50% of the World’s population is under 30
• 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
• Years to Reach 50 millions Users:
  • Radio (38 Years)
  • TV (13 Years)
  • Internet (4 Years)
  • iPod (3 Years)
  • Facebook added 200 million users in less than a year
  • iPhone applications hit 1 billion in 9 months.
  • If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 3rd largest after China and India and before USA
  • The fastest growing segment on Facebook is 55-65 year-old females
  • 50% of mobile internet traffic in  the UK is for Facebook
  • The #2 largest search engine in the world is YouTube
  • There are over 200,000,000 Blogs
  • 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
  • 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
  • 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations
  • Only 14% trust advertisements
  • Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
  • 90% of people that can skip TV ads do so

In the near future we will no longer search for  products and services they will find us via social media

I have been looking at some work done by John Quelch and Katherine Jocz at Harvard Business School on Recession Psychology.

They think we should look at our customers in a slightly different way.
We are used to segmenting them into demographics (over 40; middle income; empty nesters) or lifestyle (adventure seekers; going green)

In a recession these segments tend to be less relevant than psychological segmentation
- Which takes into consideration emotional reactions to the downturn

The New Segmentation:

The ‘slam on the brakes’ segment
• Feel most vulnerable and hardest hit financially
• Reduces all types of spending
• Typically lower income consumers
• Anxious higher income if health or income circumstances change
The ‘pained but patient’ segment
• Resilient and optimistic about long term
• Less confident about their ability to maintain their standard of living short term
• Selectively economise in all areas, but less aggressively than ‘slam on the brakes’
• The largest segment including the great majority of households unscathed by unemployment
• A wide range of income levels
The ‘comfortably well off’ segment
• Feel secure
• High end purchasing continues, although less conspicuously
• Top 5% income bracket
• Also, less wealthy but confident of the stability of their finances
The ‘live for the day’ segment
• Carries on as usual
• spending remains largely unchanged
• Extend their timetable for larger purchases
• Typically urban and younger

And of course, each of these segments will allocate its purchases among the following categories:

Essentials
• Necessary for survival or perceived as central to well being
Treats
• Indulgences whose immediate purchase is considered justifiable
Postponables
• Needed or desired items whose purchase can reasonably be put off
Expendables
• Unnecessary or unjustifiable

I have adapted this to look specifically at the travel industry and offer some suggestions
I would argue that travel, certainly the annual holiday, can varyingly fall under all these categories.
The general trend we are seeing is business is down some 20/30% but with a very late booking pattern.
Which suggests some people regarding their holiday as expendable, but most as a treat with the decision to actually spend postponed as late as possible.

I have also looked at how you market to the customer based on both his segment and his attitude to travel as a category – that’s for the next blog

Travelview

This site will be my musings on what is going on in the travel industry.

My first ‘blog’ thought is about marketing travel in a constantly changing environment

Consider the dramatic changes in the travel and leisure marketplace in recent years.

The real revolution of the Internet is that it has incredibly increased the consumer’s knowledge – and driven a quest to gain more from life and their travels. It is changing the way they research their holidays and leisure time.

It is also changing how, where and when they book, thus impacting and changing distribution channels. And as well as the consumer changing, so are travel agents who are fast becoming travel providers competing with tour operators.

Consequently product offerings must be geared to your customer and his changing wants and needs.

And more importantly, your marketing must be focussed on where he is looking. Traditional marketing is in serious decay. Brand loyalty, or what little there was, is disappearing. Marketing must now be targeted at the new marketplace – on-line searching. And it must be measurable.

‘50% of my advertising works, I just don’t know which 50%’ – is dead!

We can now track what works and what doesn’t work. What gives us ROI – and what doesn’t?

You can see the customer journey through your website, assess where you are losing them, and fix it. Marketing is now about getting them into your site, retaining them, and converting them – at reasonable costs. Remember, every day hundreds of thousands of consumers are putting search phrases into the web which your product would match – are you there for them?

But that’s not all. On top of all this change we are in a sustained downturn in the overall economy, with no certainty as to when it will improve.

Wow, so much change!

But what do we think might change as we look forward?

Exactly the same – the consumer, distribution channels, marketing and the economy will all continue to evolve and change rapidly – it is the new way of the world.

Our challenge is that we can only guess at how they will change.

So we need to build business plans which accept an uncertain future caused by an ever changing world and based on:  

• Understanding the consumer
• Addressing product and distribution changes
• Measurable marketing
• An Organisation with a flexible culture and people who embrace change

Are you ready?

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