ORLANDO, Fla. — In secluded pockets throughout the forests and savannahs of Disney’s Animal Kingdom, designers are crafting an experience unlike any other to be found in the theme park.
Among them, a three-hour African jungle trek in which small groups will pick their way through wooded overgrowth, peer over a cliff at a pool of hippos, cross a rickety bridge above Nile crocodiles, and dine in a safari-style camp where the gazelles are nearly close enough to touch.
But the experience won’t come cheap. Disney is accepting reservations for tours that will begin in January, and plans to charge $189 a person, on top of the basic park admission.
Disney’s “Wild Africa Trek” is among the latest projects to sprout from an industrywide effort by theme parks to develop attractions for guests who want intimate, personalized experiences - and are willing to pay for them.
Recently, SeaWorld Parks and Entertainment detailed plans to build a tropical reef in Discovery Cove, itself a boutique experience with daily admission capped at just over 1,000 people and base-ticket prices starting at $129. One of the new reef’s features: An underwater tour, limited to six people at a time, that will cost an additional $59 a person.
“There’s a certain category of guests who want more. They want to go deeper, they want to really plunge deep,” said Joe Rohde, senior vice president of creative for Walt Disney Imagineering, Disney’s attractions-design unit. “Not everyone wants this.
But we want to make sure we are serving everyone.”
Theme parks have long sold exclusive activities for an extra fee. Disney, for instance, offers everything from a $16 “Behind the Seeds” tour of an Epcot greenhouse to a day-long, $224 “Behind the Magic” tour of the entire resort. SeaWorld Orlando has $40 penguin encounters and $149 shark dives, among other animal-related experiences. Universal Orlando sells VIP tours of its parks that can reach $185 each.
But the parks are now devoting even more attention to such offerings as they try to mine their properties for new veins of revenue. And they are designing ever-more-elaborate experiences.
SeaWorld, for instance, has worked with a California diveequipment company called Sub Sea Systems to develop “SeaVenture,” the dive experience it is adding at Discovery Cove.
Guests will don dive helmets attached to air hoses and descend a ladder into about 12 feet of water. Once submerged, they’ll follow a path that takes them through schools of fish and rays and past venomous lion fish. They will be able to touch star fish and sea urchins and watch sharks through 21-foot-long panoramic windows.
“It’s sort of like a dark ride, but under water,” said Stewart Clark, the SeaWorld vice president in charge of Discovery Cove. He added that SeaWorld is confident there will be strong demand for the experience, which will begin in June. “Right now, based on the level of interest, it would be sold out in about three minutes every day.”
Disney’s Wild Africa Trek, meanwhile, is designed to replicate an authentic African bush walk. Guests - in groups no larger than 12, led by two Disney guides - will have to twist and bend their way through a jungle landscape that has matured during the 15 years since it was first planted as part of the preparation for Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
“You don’t see a big, dead palm tree in the midst of Disney World. But you do in Africa,” Michael Colglazier, Disney World’s vice president in charge of Animal Kingdom, said recently, while leading a tour of the area.
Colglazier dubbed the experience “achievable adventure.”
Workers are installing a series of safety cables at various points along the track so that guests can be clipped into via safety harnesses. That will allow them toinch up to the side of an 8-foot-high cliff at the edge of a hippo pool, and then cross a pair of rickety suspension bridges, including a 180-foot span stretched just above a ravine filled with Nile crocodiles.
There will be plenty of pampering, too. The bush walk will be followed by a leisurely savannah drive that ends at an open-air overlook, where the guides will serve hors d’oeuvres such as curried chicken salad and melon balls marinated in ginger andmint. Disney guides will take pictures throughout the tour, which will be included in the package price.
Disney says it plans to run a half-dozen of the tours each day, although the scheduling will vary seasonally.
It’s not just the high price point that makes such projects attractive to the theme parks. They also rely in large part on existing infrastructure, so the parks don’t have to invest much money building them.
SeaWorld has incorporated SeaVenture into “Grand Reef,” a saltwater environment that is being built to replace an existing reef and which will beused by all Discovery Cove guests. And Wild Africa Trek is a way for Disney to squeeze more use out of the hundreds of acres of animal habitat it has built in Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
Rohde calls it offering “different scales of adventure,” from the crowd-absorbing Kilimanjaro Safaris ride to the intimate jungle treks.
Disney is doing relatively little construction for Wild Africa Trek, beyond building the suspension bridges and the savannah outpost. The more extensive work involves training for the tour guides and the animals. During a recent preview of theexperience, for instance, an animal trainer squatted by a ledge and tossed chunks of watermelon to a pair of 4,000-pound hippos, conditioning the animals to appear and look up whenever a group of people shows up on the ledge.
“It’s about leveraging the infrastructure we have here at the Harambe Reserve,” Colglazier said, using the name Disney has given its fictional African preserve.
Analysts say the limited upfront spending means such projects are low-risk bets for the theme parks.
“It could be a pretty good cash infusion without a lotof capital outlay,” said Nima Samadi, a travel-industry analyst at IBISWorld, a Santa Monica, Calif., consulting firm. “It’s the kind of thing where they can try it out for a year or two and, if it doesn’t work out, they can pretty easily scrap them.”
Travel, Pages 60 on 11/28/2010