This is gonna be a long post...
This is probably the biggest story of the report. Factors of Orlando terrorism, bad local press, delayed attraction openings, and election uncertainty played important roles in the decline of destination-based tourism. Clearly, people opted to keep their trips closer to home last year. Looking like the trend may continue this year based on recent hotel occupancy numbers. Doesn't look like Pandora or Volcano Bay will have any real positive offset of the decline, although they may do enough to level out the downward turn.
This is the first summer that the Orlando terrorism attack last year would really affect. It happened late enough into the summer that vacations were already booked. (I'm assuming these events don't cause many last-minute cancellations, unless refund policies are changed because of the event). A lack of strong IPs (Kong, Avatar) probably didn't help at all on the Orlando front. Brexit was also fairly late into the summer, so I'm not sure if that strongly affected these earnings at all.
I think we're starting to see SeaWorld being forced to transition from a national theme park chain to a regional theme park chain. There's no expectation that any Six Flags or Cedar Fair park would make worldwide attendance records. Yet, they get more combined annual visitors (and have higher market caps) than SeaWorld.
Either that or an entertainment company (WB?) could view a SeaWorld buyout as a $2B way of quickly entering the USA theme park market. I don't see that happening though.
Merlin owns a lot. It owns 100+ midway attractions in 20+ countries and 4 continents (making 44% of the 2016 revenue). 40 new Midway attractions are opening between 2016 and 2020. There are 8 legoland parks in 6 countries and 3 continents (making 34% of 2016 revenue). The 6 resort theme parks in 3 countries make 22% of the 2016 revenue. However, it is very important to note Merlin owns over 3000 hotel rooms (with plans already in place to add 2000 new accommodation rooms by 2020).
Merlin is weird. They have midway attractions everywhere - both large tourist areas and places like Auburn Hills MI, which is just a rich suburban area. In comparison to Disney World, they're unbelievably accessible. I'm shocked that Disney or Universal hasn't tried to build more regional attractions. (I know DisneyQuest, but that opened at a terrible time).
All the top waterparks in the US were either stagnant or trended negative. At the same time, it was warmest year since 1880. I would argue heat should've brought more people to water parks but instead it didn't do much.
The Disney waterparks had a small decrease, which probably isn't that big of a deal. There's also a lower-bound established for Volcano Bay. It's highly unlikely that VB will have less people than Wet + Wild (except that VB opened in May and won't have a full year).
The big question is what Universal establishes a win as. Does coming in 4th nationally mean VB was a success? What about beating Aquatica but losing to the Disney parks? I don't think VB is going to drive major guest spending, so there's going to be an attendance component that dictates if Universal is happy with VB.