Published by: Sam McCaffery/BlooLoop

Published Date: April, 2018

In an earnings call this week, Jim Reid-Anderson, CEO of Six Flags Entertainment, said that the company plans to accelerate its strategy to purchase water parks and theme parks close to properties it already owns.

“There are dozens of parks within reasonable driving distance of our existing portfolio in the US and these parks generate hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue,” he said.

“As with the two recently acquired parks, we will seek to acquire water parks and theme parks at low prices and then realize substantial revenue and cost synergies.”

Six Flags opened two rebranded water parks last year. Waterworld Concord in California became Six Flags Hurricane Harbor Concord while an abandoned water park in Oaxtepec, Mexico that the company acquired in 2015 was renovated and reopened.

The strategy of purchasing parks close to its existing properties was revealed in April last year by the previous Six Flags CEO, John Duffey. The reasoning behind it is to give visitors a reason to keep coming back to the parks and to upgrade one-time guests to season pass holders.

Reid-Anderson said: “We’re laser focused on converting folks to membership, whether they’re single-day visitors or season pass holders. It is a company-wide, park-specific, detailed approach to make sure that whether it’s online or live in-park, we convert folks. And we have been seeing a noticeable change in the way that we have been converting members.”

Six Flags released its first-quarter earnings report for 2018 earlier this week, which showed record revenues of $129m for the period, an increase of 30% on 2017.

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