Hong Kong Disneyland gets lost in translation

Thursday, February 09, 2006

Fourteen-year-old Chinese tourist Li Zeng wandered Hong Kong Disneyland Wednesday -- and left after two hours. Mr. Li isn't that familiar with Mickey Mouse and his companions, and he and his father didn't ride any rides, buy souvenirs or eat food. "We don't understand this park," said Mr. Li, waiting for his tour bus. "We gave up looking at the map."

Five months after Walt Disney Co. opened its Hong Kong theme park in a bid to tap the booming China market, the cultural divide that separates Mickey and Mr. Li is emerging as a major challenge. It is one that the company is now trying hard to bridge, though with mixed results.

The need to adapt was on full display here last week. After Disney underestimated the number of people who would visit during mainland China's week-long Lunar New Year holiday, vacationing crowds poured in, filling the park to its maximum capacity. Disney officials ordered the gates shut, and hundreds of angry Disneyland guests from China who held valid tickets found themselves unable to enter. Some engaged in shouting matches with park staff and at least one excluded family tried to pass a child over the park's wrought-iron fence.

Before last week, Disney's bigger problem wasn't too many visitors, but too few. It drew public rebuke over low attendance from local politicians, who questioned the wisdom of the Hong Kong government's 57 percent stake in the park. Local retailers said they didn't get the sales boost they were expecting from the new tourists Disneyland had promised to draw.

While Disney maintains that the park is overwhelmingly popular with most visitors, some travel agencies report confusion. "Many customers complain they do not know how to enjoy Disneyland," says Chen Mei, the international tours manager of the Ju Cheng agency, which brings groups to the park from the city of Zhongshan in southern China.

Some tourists show up at the park only to wander aimlessly around Main Street U.S.A., snap a few photos with Marie the Cat -- a character from the 1970s film "The Aristocats" -- and then leave. Marie is familiar to some from the movie's repeat showings in southern China, and also happens to look like another Asian favorite, Hello Kitty. However, Disney officials say their research indicates that in Asia, "the mouse beats the cat."

Disney trumpeted attempts to accommodate Chinese culture, some of which later drew fire. Conservationists attacked the company for planning to serve environmentally unfriendly shark's fin soup at banquets, and Disney later decided to forgo the practice. Efforts to woo local celebrities backfired when some complained of mistreatment by American Disney executives. Disney designed the park for Chinese tourists, who the company said preferred photo opportunities over roller coasters, yet many visitors now criticize the park for being too small.

The company is "still learning" about Chinese culture, said the park's managing director Bill Ernest on Saturday during an emotional public apology for last week's ticket fiasco. Said Jay Rasulo, the head of Disney's theme park division: "Part of the way we make people happy is that we listen, learn and adjust as necessary."

These lessons are crucial for Disney as Chief Executive Robert Iger holds what he calls "ongoing negotiations" to open a third Asian park in Shanghai and seeks to build the company's consumer products, movie and television business in China.

To help confused visitors like Mr. Li, since November Disney has started producing special "one-day trip guides" in Chinese, beyond the basic maps, to explain in clear terms exactly why to do -- and what to do inside -- Disneyland. "You can get together with family to relax and improve communication and relationships with the people you love," reads the guide. Disney hands out the fliers inside the park, and at other Hong Kong tourist attractions.

Mr. Rasulo says the guest experiences at the park are "some of the best in the world," with more than 90 percent of guests Disney interviewed last week saying they had a positive experience.

Making sure the Chinese travel industry is satisfied, too, remains a cultural challenge. When the Ju Cheng agency publicly threatened to sue over last week's ticket problem, Disney offered a conciliatory tone -- and refunds for people who couldn't come back on another day.

Even before last week's incident, Disney was changing the way it does business at the park. Disney has given VIP treatment to a new group of Chinese celebrities at its park to help woo fans. It cut the cost of tickets for local residents during a low period for tourists, and added a local promotion, snow, to Hong Kong's subtropical climate. Disney also now produces marketing that includes the testimonials of people who have visited the park, instead of slick studio shots.

Perhaps most significantly, Hong Kong Disneyland is changing the way it works with Chinese travel agents, some of whom have been reluctant to sell tickets. Zhang Jian, communications director of Jiangsu Overseas Travel Agency, complains that selling Disneyland tickets doesn't earn her company any money, "and when there are problems, we have to eat the cost and other troubles."

Most mainland Chinese still take vacations through package tours, and they currently make up about 50 percent of the Chinese visitors to the park. The guides who direct these tours frequently select hotels, restaurants, shopping stops and even tour destinations based on where they share in the profits. Because of lucrative deals with tour operators, one Hong Kong transvestite cabaret brags that its five-times-a-day $20 show draws more Chinese tourists on a regular basis than Disneyland.

Mr. Ernest says Disney, which doesn't have much experience with those sorts of financial arrangements, now realizes changing something as simple as how it offers dinners can make a big difference to the local travel industry. Currently, Hong Kong Disneyland doesn't offer tour packages for visitors from China that include pre-arranged dinners, standard fare for China. Without group dinner deals and considerable commissions, Disney wasn't offering guides much financial incentive to funnel tourists into the park. "We just weren't competitive," Mr. Ernest says, compared to the commissions and deals offered the industry at other attractions in Hong Kong.

Now Mr. Ernest says he is considering starting a "dining with Disney" program. That would be a good way, he says, to entertain guests after the nightly fireworks. Special group breakfasts with Disney characters are another option, he says.

To build relationships, Disney is also giving Chinese travel agents a 50 percent personal discount if they come visit its park and hotels. Disney also beefed up incentives for tour operators to build a Disneyland visit into packages by increasing the margin it offered them to about US$2.50 per adult ticket. It also changed its sales packages to include open-ended instead of just fixed-date tickets so that operators wouldn't have to eat the cost of returned tickets. It was that ticketing system combined with unexpected crowds, says Disney's Mr. Ernest, which created the problems last week.

Disney declines to release specific attendance figures. When Hong Kong legislators demanded some public accountability in late November, two months after the park's mid-September opening, Disney said that it had hosted more than one million guests. While that on average looked set to put the park behind its 5.6 million forecast for the opening year, Mr. Rasulo says the park still expects to reach that level.

With these changes, Disney officials say overall attendance is "ramping up," particularly among mainland Chinese tourists, whose attendance during the Lunar New Year period more than doubled compared to another week-long Chinese holiday in October.

Understanding the peaks and troughs of attendance is another thing Disney concedes it has yet to master. On last week's overload, Mr. Rasulo noted that Disney had a similar experience with the EuroDisney park based in Paris: after the first summer, the park was inundated in September with locals who had been putting off their trips to avoid the early wave of tourists.