Shanghai Disneyland sells out tickets for first two weeks
Visitors who have not bought admission in advance should avoid coming on busy days
The soon-to-open Shanghai Disneyland has sold out tickets for the first two weeks after its official opening on June 16 amid mainland enthusiasm for the US$5.5 billion resort.
Murray King, Shanghai Disney Resorts’ vice-president of public affairs, said on Thursday that attendance management and crowd control measures had been designed to ensure safety.
Walt Disney and the Shanghai government introduced a daily ticket system to “make sure that guests who plan in advance have an opportunity to enter the park with the daily tickets”, he said.
Visitors who have not bought tickets in advance will be advised not to go to the resort on any day that is particularly busy.
Tickets for between June 16 and September 30 have gone on sale. Visitors are only being sold tickets for specific dates as a way to control crowds on a daily basis.
Disney said it would limit the number of visitors each day, but did not disclose the exact numbers.
A daily ticket to the theme park, or Magic Kingdom, costs 499 yuan (HK$593) for peak times such as holidays and weekends and 370 yuan on other days.
The 3.9 sq km Disney resort has been greeted with general enthusiasm since April 26 when the Shanghai Disney Metro station started operation.
As of Wednesday, about a million people, including those allowed to enter the theme park during trial operations, had visited the resort, according to the local government.
Concerns about safety at the Shanghai Disney resort, the sixth of its kind worldwide, mounted after a stampede on the city’s famed Bund killed 36 people on New Year’s Eve in 2014.
It is expected that Shanghai Disneyland will attract up to 30 million visitors a year.
Visitors complained of long waits in queues for attractions during the first day of trial operations on May 7. King said the trial run was “a process of slowly ramping up the whole system”.
Government officials attending the press conference would not reveal a timetable for the construction of the second phase of the resort.
Shanghai Disneyland is mainly targeting the estimated 330 million people who live within a three-hour drive of the resort.
