Six Flags is Quickly Going Bankrupt… Again

Six Flags is losing a lot of money for the first time in a long time and could go bankrupt again.

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“Six Flags Magic Mountain 003” by Roller Coaster Philosophy is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

By: Jake Themely, Journalist

In the early 2000s, Six Flags went bankrupt before coming out of bankruptcy. This happened because Six Flags spent too much money on all of their parks and they couldn’t afford to maintain them anymore. Since then, Six Flags has been well-known for its budget theme parks with lots of thrilling coasters but not much theming or a nice atmosphere.

The new CEO of Six Flags, Selim Bassoul, has come up with a new plan for Six Flags to improve the experience of the parks and make them feel more premium. His plan was to raise prices so that fewer people would come to the parks, that way wait times would be shorter and the guests in the park would spend more money. This would also make it so that Six Flags wouldn’t have to spend more money on staffing the parks and the parks would be cleaner. It also wanted to attract more families, so it decided not to add any new roller coasters to any of its parks for the next few years. This plan, however, backfired on Six Flags with them losing a lot of money in 2022. Even though Selim said that he expected Six Flags to lose money, the amount of money it made fell super short of those lower expectations.

The reason why Selim Bassoul’s plan backfired is that he decided to raise prices first and improve the parks later, rather than improving the parks first and raising the prices later. People don’t want to spend more money on an experience that is cheaper than the alternatives from Cedar Fair, Busch Gardens, or Disney. Selim had to change his decision not to add any new roller coasters because he wanted to attract back people. In conclusion, Six Flags is losing a lot of money for the first time in a long time and could go bankrupt again.

 

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