Term Paper on "Euro vs. Florida Disney"

Term Paper 8 pages (3224 words) Sources: 1+

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Euro vs. Florida Disney

Success of Florida Disney:

Walt Disney Company -- WDC theme park and resort complex in Florida comprises of varied set of service and entertainment properties covering an area of 30,500 acres. An excess of 50,000 'cast members' or employees in Disney parlance provide services to more than 1, 00,000 guests daily. World Disney World Resort -- WDWR properties possess a huge amount of independent authority and flexibility, and the organization is distributed in a greater manner compared to other more conventional industries. One of the major components of the huge Disney enterprise is WDWR. Due to its size, employee and visitor population, and organization, the facility is fundamentally a distinct community. (World Disney World Resort: Environmental Management Case Study)

Walt Disney translated his dream by illustrating Mickey Mouse in a comic strip during the 1920s. About 80 years later his dream turned true when WDC became of the richest corporations of the world. Because of strong leadership and excellent management skills, Disney has been able to make forays into many fields like entertainment, communication, and technology and customer service. Disney earned a good reputation in their businesses and persists to do so by leading by example and management by walking around. The Florida Disney is successful for its customer service and empowerment of its cast members. The cast members get a totally special type of training and several special facets of leadership at the WDW. Among these are that leaders should motivate their cast members to build an emotional rapport with the guests, irrespective of the cast members remaining on stage or off. (Disney World Paper)

Disney CEO, Michael Eisner states that WDW is propelled by an 'emotional engine' rather than an 'economic engine' Realizing this particular aspect, the restaurant manager initially makes the Cast Members to bask in the guest experience prior to their training on the specific roles they are assigned to carry out. In that guest experience, the Cast Members visualize the big picture and their role in it. In the innovative system of WDW, the Cast Members are given themselves to 'own' the guest experience as opposed to the top-down culture of commanding and issuing directives. However through the trust of the Cast Member's instincts and judgment to identify and refer to the elements is according to Disney 'bad show', the manager models a leadership style which motivates and rewards employee involvement.

The leadership approach at Florida Disney is the outcome of a transformation of a business thinking that happened within Walt Disney which is called as 'Performance Excellence'. Identifying novel competitive force in the early 1990s it was understood at Disney that to remain a benchmark in creativity, customer service and entertainment, every Cast Member at Florida should assume the role of an active partner in the success of the company. This initiative makes linkages to the leadership behaviors to the fundamental and quantifiable measures of Disney's business which is the totality of Cast experience, Guest satisfaction, and customer loyalty. And in the beginning it was realized that the concept of Performance Excellence revolved on two major factors which is involvement and passion. (Disney World Paper)

The Florida project's purpose for creating Disney World was to build a brand new type of city which was safe unlike any other urban community in America. Walt Disney himself wanted EPCOT which means Experimental Prototype Community for Tomorrow to become the new city, having its own residents. The choice of Florida was because of its beautiful weather conditions throughout the year, but the downside was that the population is low. To address this, Disney decided for investment in marketing to draw people from across the world. At present WDW occupies 30,500 acres and 35,000 people work for the company. The World Disney World Parks and Resorts earned revenue earnings for the year 2004 was $7,750,000,000. (Walt Disney World: Project News)

Walt Disney World located in Florida is the icing of the cake of the Walt Disney Company which is a $23- billion media business which might just be the single most powerful and influential force in the globalization of Western culture. In the high-tech world in the new millennium, the real control to promote and consolidate consumer capitalism does not rest with the International Monetary Fund, Texaco or Monsanto rather with the control over the 'infotainment industry' encompassing film, TV, music, ideas and information which according to a writer has been coined as the 'the sinews of our post-modern soul'. The Florida theme park drew 1.2 million tourists last year with the bulk of them being British nationals. However, 40 years back, this region of central Florida was unscathed by mass tourism with a low population of little over 20,000 in Orlando. The Florida Park houses an awesome 43 sq miles of land that is double the size of Manhattan. Huge road signs guide the visitors into the Disney's Animal Kingdom; the latest of the parks is a massive 500-acre $800- million project. (Inside the Disney Dream Machine)

Animal Kingdom is Disney's maiden initiative into real life which is the 'amazing reality of nature'. The primary attraction is a recreation of an African savannah having imported wildlife, plants and flowers. Besides, there is the Tree of Life which is an astonishing 14-storey baobab that has been conceived by the Disney 'imaginers' a term coined perhaps by Walt Disney himself to describe the people he recruited to design his inaugural theme park in California. The steel made massive baobab with painted concrete has its trunk and roots carved into characteristics of 325 various types of animals. A serpentine queue of visitors silently reorders within the 170-foot base of the tree gradually proceeding to the cinema inside the trunk. Inside are filled up with new vista, music plays from invisible players, video screen give a sneak preview of what's happening inside and posters span the walls. More than 3,400 people work at the Animal Kingdom and a phenomenal 50,000 in total at the Walt Disney World.

It is a powerful remark on the changing characteristics of the U.S. economy that the place at present houses the highest number of workforce in the country at a single worksite. A significant feature at the Florida theme park which contributes for the success of the park is that employees i.e. The cast members are assigned jobs on a routine basis as per age and appearance. Translated in practice, this implies that all the pretty, young people' are assigned the primary frontline jobs. Cultural influences play a major role in assignment of job responsibilities. Haitian women are assigned housekeeping. Puerto Rican young people get to work in food services and its preparation, African-American work as cooks or stewards or in food preparation. The Florida Disney theme parks are regarded as much about buying as they are regarding entertainment where the average spending by the visitors is $21 per person. (Inside the Disney Dream Machine)

What went wrong in Euro Disney in France?

While the Florida Park is an icon of success, on the other hand the swarming crowds at the Euro Disney are no indication of its profitability with its revenues dropping and Euro Disney facing net losses. The matter that defies everybody's imagination revolves around the fact that how can such a crowded tourist destination afford to make losses. For one, the problem has been the opening during 2002 of another park, Walt Disney Studios. On an average the number of foreign tourists visiting France dropped by around 2.5% during the year 2003. It was expected that the second park would increase the number of visitors from roughly 12 million to the region of 16 million to 18 million levels which is supposed to bring profitability. After passage of two years and expenditure of 600 million euros in construction, the number of visitors hovered to just around 12 million visitors for the two parks taken together. One more problem might also be the product. There have not been any new big rides since years and the park has failed in its effort to make people to spend sufficiently. Besides, the problem might also be cultural influences: a blend of French political anti-Americanism and influential pretentiousness. (Trouble in le Royaume Magique: Over-expansion hurts Euro Disney) lot of explanations were put forth for Euro Disney's losses like some of the guests complained about the weather conditions, maintaining that such ventures work better in countries having more sunshine like the one at Florida. There were others who objected to the exorbitantly high prices of the attractions and regional facilities like hotels or restaurants. Astonishingly, citizens of France did not visit them and it was the Germans and Englishmen who would land up here from their nations. Besides the sale of the Disney products like the Mickey souvenirs had very few takers, contrary to what was seen with the Americans. It might be such that the advertisement campaign was not effective. (Dinechin, 1994)

Cultural Differences:

There was a lack of foresight on the… READ MORE

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