Three months after the debut of Universal Epic Universe theme park, Mark Woodbury, the CEO of Universal Destinations & Experiences is talking about the future – not just in Orlando, but also in other U.S. cities plus the U.K. and Asia.

In an interview with Jessica Reif Ehrlich, BofA Securities Inc. analyst, this week, Woodbury addressed bringing the Universal brand to new markets, including the year-round haunt in Las Vegas and the under-construction kids park in Texas.

And Orlando’s newest park is off to a “pretty great start,” Woodbury said, and he covered ticket prices, financial priorities and the looming possibility of expansion at Epic Universe.

Here are highlights of Woodbury’s thoughts from the session.

Woodbury on Epic’s performance so far

“It’s doing exactly what we wanted it to do, in terms of driving incremental attendance to the resort as a whole and the performance line for caps, very strong since we opened the doors. And you can see it in merchandise. You see it in the food offerings. A lot of great creative work went into both of those. Not without challenges when you open an entire theme park at once. … It’s always a little complicated to get it to ramp up to full speed, and we’re in the process of doing that now. Nothing that we didn’t expect.”

On Epic expansion

“If you fly over Epic or you look at Google Earth, you’ll see how we planned the park, and you’ll see greenfield space between the existing worlds, and that is strategically positioned to give us flexibility to expand the world or create a new world, and so that’s how we look at it. I don’t really have anything to announce specifically as attractions, but I can tell you that there are multiple attractions in the works, not just at Epic, but when you have the three parks, the cadence of product delivery across the resort to continue to drive the resort is really a key part of our strategy going forward. … We have a clear line of sight into how far we can take this. It’s considerable, and we have a pretty sophisticated and well thought-through long-range plan that takes us out another decade in terms of product offerings, not just not just in Orlando, but around the world.”

On a ‘Wicked’ world?

“I think I might have stirred that pot when I saw the ‘Wicked’ sets and said it was theme park waiting to happen.”

On Epic ticket prices

“We’re looking at top line revenue generation at the front gate. I mentioned that a place like Epic right now is premium over the other two parks. We think it garners that because it’s first park built in 25 years, most technologically advanced park and all those things that make it what it is, so it’s at a premium.

“But we’re also looking closely at consumer sentiment. We’re looking closely at the marketplace in each of our businesses to manage price, and then we’ve got the ability to dynamically price much better than we had historically.”

On the Epic-adjacent hotels

We’re seeing great performance in that (Helios Grand) hotel in terms of occupancy and ADR (average daily rate). And then the two other hotels, Terra (Nova) and Stella (Luna), 1,500 rooms that are part of our value proposition. The great thing about that is we introduced those 2,000 rooms. Now have 11,000 total, and we saw no cannibalization. In fact, we see ADR growth across the resort on the back of this and strong occupancy sustained.”

On Orlando market share

I think that we have a we’re in a really strong position to continue to drive incremental growth to the overall marketplace, to take share in the process of that. You know, our chief competitor, Disney, is a strong competitor. They’re going to be investing pretty heavily in the market, too. I think it’s a case of, you know, all ships rise with the tide. We’ll both drive audience to the marketplace, and we’ll be able to take our share.”

On post-Epic capital expenditures

“When you look at the cycle, the development cycle of a major theme park like Epic, a multibillion-dollar investment, the big part of that CapEx lands in the last two years of that development cycle. So that, in the case of Epic, would be ‘23, ‘24, and then when you look forward to UK, it’ll be ‘29, ‘30 to open in ‘31. So that in-between period, we’ll see less investment on individual [sites] at that scale. The individual things that we’re looking at range from big attractions to new lands, but even at that, and even when you look at the Kids (resort) and Horror (Unleashed) , those are in the hundreds to several hundreds of millions of dollars versus billions for the theme park.”

On Universal Kids Resort

“We have a terrific pipeline of intellectual property in the form of DreamWorks and ‘Trolls’ and ‘Gabby’s Dollhouse’ to build around. And so Frisco (Texas) is our first Universal Kids Resort that allows us to both segment the audience and segment our portfolio of properties and in the process build a regional product that is sort of a rite of passage for families and much more accessible for young families in a regional form. They get to that park from all over Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and 300-room hotel as part of it, great product and a feeder as they age up to become aligned with our brand and then grow into our bigger parks.”

On Universal Horror Unleashed

“We’ve had great success with our Halloween Horror Nights over the last 32 years. Fantastic business for us. But it’s really a local place with a local regional play for Orlando, and it’s a local regional play for Los Angeles. So there’s a lot of space in the rest of the U.S. and internationally to bring to life the horror franchises that we’re known for in our film business, as well as our parks, and Universal Horror Unleashed is exactly that. It’s 120,000 square foot a year round horror experience. … We’ve been open for a few weeks in the soft-opening period in Vegas, we go grand open on the 18th, and reaction to the product has been really great, and performance to the product has been really great from a per-cap standpoint. And then we plan to roll that out. Chicago is our next place. And we pick those destinations because they have a great base population and they have big inbound tourists.”

On odds of success in Vegas

“We’re going to hit the ground running. … I know people comment often recently that Vegas business is down. They still have close to 40 million tourists that come to Vegas, and we only need a very small margin for that to make this very profitable.”

On developing a park in England

“Our hope is that that process will go very smoothly. But parks are complicated organisms, and this takes some infrastructure in the form of rail expansion and highway off-ramps and things like that — not things that we haven’t done before, but they’re complicated. … We think we have a pretty good handle on it at this point.”

On its UK strategy

“The best way to look at it is look at it like one of our standalone parks. It’s a full-blown Universal theme park with a 500-room hotel that is part of it, very much like Epic in terms of big park with a hotel. It’s designed in a way that we don’t see as cannibalistic to our strong UK visitation to Orlando. So we’ve created a different mix of attractions that we think will work great in the UK, but basically it’ll perform very much like one of our standalone parks in terms of attendance, in terms of per caps and overall EBITDA performance.”

On the weather in the UK

“You design it in a way that allows you to really take advantage of the great weather and protect against the inclement weather as best you can. But Japan, it gets very cold in the winter, very hot in the summer. China has its cold climate as well. The issue in UK is precipitation, but you’d be surprised to find that it’s a lot less than Orlando, and it just rains. It rains less and more frequently, which is not a bad problem. The torrential downpours are the bigger realm.”

On developing an international park vs a domestic one

“When you get into the detail of design … the main product is Universal, and it’s Universal-branded IPs, but then you get really focused. Menu – it’s very unique culturally. You have to pay close attention to that. And the other place where international development is unique is around humor. Humor varies very differently in different cultures.”

On artificial intelligence

“We look at how AI can help us enhance growth and revenue generation, and we see several areas for that dynamic pricing, making dynamic variable pricing much more efficient and much more real-time. We see new product offerings. We see AI assistance at our call centers, and that enables our agents, to move much quicker, to better customize offerings for the consumer. Same goes for our AI-assisted, conversational AI on our website. …

“Then on the savings front … probably one of the bigger areas for us that’s unique to our business is how AI can assist in predictive maintenance on the rides to reduce maintenance costs, which is a considerable piece of business for us. So being able to employ that employee a different way to look at that machine learning in terms of how guests use the park, to be able to direct them to revenue-generating opportunities in the form of food and merchandise, to manage crowds and all those things are in deep work right now.”

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