From charleston.net:
For once, the Eagles are playing to an empty house.
A concert runs on TVs for folks waiting to ride a roller coaster based on the band’s hardest-rocking song. But the wait these days is less than a minute — no time to check out the Hotel California.
There is Life in the Fast Lane, but not in the queue line.
That’s the way it’s been all too often during Hard Rock Park’s first season. The rides are running, the music’s playing, but so far this gig isn’t a sellout.
South Carolina is not showing the Grand Strand’s first major theme park a Whole Lotta Love.
Hard Rock finishes its opening season this weekend with scaled-back plans for the fall, and fewer employees than it started the summer with.
While Hard Rock is still trying to find its groove, industry watchers question whether a major theme park can rock on in the thrifty, family-friendly environs of Myrtle Beach — a place with a $3 pancake house on every corner, 100 golf courses and the beach at the end of every street.
“People go there for the beach and
for golf,” said Dennis Speigel, president of the Cincinnati-based International Theme Park Services. “Most of the people going there have a theme park in their own back yard.”
Even if the park is in the right place, it must’ve been the wrong time. The $400 million theme park opened in the late spring, just as the economy was hitting rock bottom and tourism numbers were far from sold out.
“It’s a tough tourism summer,” said Megan Winnett, public relations manager for the park. “They couldn’t have predicted this seven years ago when they started planning this.”
Kimberly Miles, public relations manager for the Myrtle Beach Chamber of Commerce and Convention and Visitors Bureau, said tourists are still coming to town, but they’re staying fewer nights and spending less money. When the park opened in the spring — and was getting the most publicity — hotel occupancy was down.
Since then, business has picked up to last year’s level or higher, but the park apparently hasn’t gotten a free ride.
Regardless, Hard Rock might be the hippest theme park in the country, a slick 55 acres of rides and attractions where guitar heroes play the role of super heroes. The whole place is like a classic rock radio station come to life, a place where the rides keep time and the music changes instantly as you walk from one part of the park to the next. Life is a series of Cheap Tricks and Moody Blues.
But locals have complained about the park’s ticket prices, which started at $50 for adults but have been dropped to $45 $39 on the weekend for “locals”. The state’s other theme park, Carowinds, charges $39 for admission. Ultimately, this is a new animal for Myrtle Beach, and Speigel said there’s a reason no other theme park has opened there before.
This isn’t Orlando or Las Vegas.
