They are trying to up the ticket average for the parkers. Standard operating procedure nowadays at
Disneyland. Its all about the money money money and ringing out every dollar possible.
I cannot agree more...numbers don't lie. I've been with the argument of creating a new parking structure for a few mins and because of that I am ran some numbers on the cost and return of building a new parking structure parking overall just for customers going to DL and DCA.
Some have mentioned that DLR does need another parking structure and another mention it cost up to as much as $60k a spot. According to
www.carlwalker.com, the national median for a parking spot construction was $18K in 2015. I took the Los Angeles price ($22,500) and adjusted to $26,000 a spot for a 5000 parking structure (half of the size of Mickey and Friends) for a total construction cost of $130M.
I made a few assumptions when calculating the income earned from parking:
-No AP parking passes allowed (next to impossible to enforce in the real world).
-For 220 days, only half the structure is used and for the rest of the days, the structure is full.
-Parking price will remain the same at $20.
Final result:
-On the days that the structure is half full, the total income earned is $11M
-On the days that the structure is full, the total income earned is $14.5M
-At those rates, it would take Disney 5.1 years just to break even.
Disney (like all other companies) don't want to wait that long for their return on investment. And there could be potential of raising the parking price (if the Dodgers did it, why not Disney?) for several reasons but the biggest one is to make their money back faster. So if the price is raised to $35 (still using the same dates) then it would take only 2 years 10 months.
Will the new parking structure built next to Star Wars Land (6,800 spots) reflect these numbers when it opens? Who knows?
Since the DTD parking structure has pretty much already paid for itself over time, it seems that Disney Brass only wants to discourage short visiting customers to DTD and focus more on those staying longer (Disney Hotel guests). The longer a customer stays, the more they will spend.
There are some people that the extra $20 they would have to pay for going over their alloted time is nothing to them, but there are a lot more where that $20 means a lot...who do you think Disney Brass is focusing on?