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by Keith
Miller
The end-of-year holiday season is a boon for many attractions, as Halloween, Christmas, and New Year’s have become popular times to visit parks, zoos, and family entertainment centers. But in the United States, nestled in between those busy times is one holiday that has proven tough to take advantage of: Thanksgiving.
Many attractions, especially amusement parks, don’t see any way to attract crowds around the Thanksgiving holiday, so they close after Halloween. But a handful have experienced success and are willing to discuss how they’ve done it.
 Parks and attractions point to several aspects of Thanksgiving that make it a difficult holiday to capitalize on. “Christmas and Halloween are both focused on kids, and that makes them much easier to build around and market,” says Marq Lipton, vice president of marketing for Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk in California (www.beachboardwalk.com), which keeps its Neptune’s Kingdom family entertainment center open during the Thanksgiving holiday, including Thanksgiving Day. “Also, Thanksgiving is when retailers are making a big push for Christmas, so media costs are very high. So we don’t do a Thanksgiving advertising promotion.”
Sharon Parker, public relations director at Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington, Texas (www.sixflags.com/overtexas), which is also open around Thanksgiving, says even decorating a park for Thanksgiving is difficult. “When you’re theming for Halloween and Christmas, you can easily come up with items to decorate the park with because there are so many things to use, but that’s tough with Thanks - giving,” she observes.
Also, for many parks and attractions, the weather in late November can be an iffy proposition, and that presents some potential headaches of its own. So, given all that, is Thanksgiving worth your time? A few attractions that have managed to remain operating around the Thanksgiving holiday share with Funworld their formulas for success.
 It Can Work
There are a few attractions that see several benefits to being open around Thanksgiving. First, they say it provides a valuable bridge between two very profitable periods—Halloween and Christmas—and can prevent parks from having to shut down after Halloween.
“The day after Thanksgiving is frequently one of our top five busiest days of the year,” says Pete Owens, public relations manager for Dollywood in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee (www.dollywood.com). “Being open during that time really took this park to a nine-month season.”
Also, these facilities say it allows their guests to see their parks in a different light—a more restful, family atmosphere— that isn’t always present during the hot and hectic summer season. They note this is helped by the fact that the guest groups are much more multigenerational than at other times of the year—kids, parents, and grandparents, plus a variety of extended-family relatives. Finally, attractions point out that being open around Thanksgiving affords them the perfect opportunity to promote and sell season tickets for the next year, especially with the gift-giving Christmas season at hand.
How They Make It Work
Santa Cruz’s Lipton says although Thanksgiving has always been a traditional eat-at-home with- family holiday, once Thanksgiving Thursday is over people are ready to get out. “We’ve found that people are really looking for things to do,” he says. “The VFR market— ‘visiting friends and relatives’—is here, and residents want to get out of the house, find something to do with them, and show these out-of-towners what the area is all about.”
Since ad rates on traditional media are too high at that time, the park alerts guests that it’s open at Thanksgiving through its event calendars and via Facebook, Twitter, and an online e-newsletter.
 Of course, Thanksgiving is a holiday with a tradition built around sharing food with others, and the Louisville Zoo in Kentucky makes the most of that by having a food drive to benefit Dare to Care, a local food bank. Any guest who brings in a can of food receives admission to the zoo for only $5.
“I think we raised over 7,000 pounds of food last time, which equates to about 5,000 meals,” says Kyle Shepherd, the zoo’s media coordinator. “We did it from mid-November through the end of January.”
Like most FECs, the Fun Depot in Asheville, North Carolina (www.ashevillefamilyentertainment.com), doesn’t have any problems attracting guests around Thanksgiving since kids are out of school and the facility offers a lot to do indoors, which removes weather as a factor. But owner Dave Day says there’s something else he does the day after Thanksgiving that makes it a banner time for the Depot: “We try to [promote] the ‘Black Friday’ shopping day as a day that people get a gift card from us.”
 An Early Christmas for Parks
Zoos and FECs don’t depend nearly as heavily on outdoor rides for their survival as do amusement parks, so most of the former are open from Halloween through the winter months, anyway. But the Thanksgiving season is a much more challenging time for amusement parks, and the few that have been very successful with the holiday have done it with an interesting strategy: They start celebrating the Christmas holiday in early November. This allows them to transition from their Halloween and other fall festivals straight into Christmas, which has become a highly successful shoulder season for parks. So they’re open at Thanksgiving—but they don’t have to make it their parks’ focus.
Dollywood goes directly from its fall “Harvest Celebration” into its “Smoky Mountain Christmas” event, and Owens insists it’s definitely not too early to start observing Christmas. “We opened ‘Smoky Mountain Christmas’ on Nov. 6 last year,” he says. “Even that first weekend, four days out of Halloween, we had big numbers. After all, retail is already putting on Christmas in October, so it’s not too early. As soon as you get close to Thanksgiving, people are in the mood for Christmas.”
Parker believes it’s the Christmas retail frenzy that drives many guests to Six Flags Over Texas. “As stores have pushed and pushed ‘Black Friday,’ some people want to escape that craziness,” she says, “so we start our ‘Holiday in the Park’ event over Thanksgiving weekend, and it’s become a family tradition with our guests.”
Silver Dollar City: Open on Turkey Day?
Silver Dollar City in Branson, Missouri, follows the same strategy, starting its “An Old Time Christmas” celebration in early November. But the park has managed to accomplish something quite rare for amusement parks: It opens on Thanksgiving Day and even has some guests come to the park for a Thanksgiving meal.
 “We’re open on Thanksgiving Day from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m., and we have multigenerational families come here and have their Thanksgiving dinner with us,” says Janet Oller, the park’s director of marketing. “Families just want to spend time with each other that day.”
Oller notes it’s tough to market strictly to Thanksgiving because the day itself is about being at home with family, so she suggests taking a different tack: “Market a family togetherness- type outing, and do it Thanksgiving evening, when the activities at home are over.” She says the park even opens all of its attractions that evening, so guests get the unusual experience of riding them at night.
Dealing with Inclement Weather
Weather can certainly throw a wrench into the best plans of any promotion, and parks say it’s just something they have to deal with at Thanksgiving. “If there’s bad weather, we make sure to clear paths so people can safely walk through, and we have heated buildings where they can get out of the elements,” says Shepherd.
Weather can even force these parks to close completely at Thanksgiving, but it has to be really lousy, because bad weather is just a part of celebrating the holiday season. “If there’s a really inclement weather system, we could close the park,” says Oller, “but I’ll tell you that we’ll move heaven and earth to keep it open. It just has to be safe.”
Contact News Editor Keith Miller kmiller@IAAPA.org.
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