In 1967 Disney hired a group named Economic Research Associates to research the economic
impact that Disney World might have on Central Florida.
That report was called the Economic Impact of Disney World.
It wasn’t creative writing, but it worked.
That initial report reflected what they thought Disney World would do to the state during
its first ten years of operation.
The report, as it would turn out, would also be way off.
The ERA report estimated that Disney World would primarily generate tourism revenue.
Now I know that right now that sounds like a comically obvious statement but it’s important
to remember that back in 1967 the grand plan for Disney World was just one theme park.
The real draw was going to be EPCOT, which at the time was going to be a real functional
city with residents who would work either in the city or at a nearby industrial park.
Yet even with a focus on EPCOT, it was believed that the primary source of revenue would be
tourists coming to visit both the theme park and this new city of the future.
ERA estimated that the first ten years of Disney World would cumulatively result in
$3.9 billion in tourism spending in the region, with $2.7 billion of that being at Disney
World itself.
They also estimated that by the end of that ten years Disney would have created 50,000
full-time jobs as well as generate $243 million in tax revenue.
As for the tourists themselves, they predicted Disney would see over 65 million visitors
in its first decade.
That estimation ranged from 6 million a year towards year one, up to 7 million a year by
year ten.
So how well did those numbers size up to the real thing?
Well as it turned out, Economic Research Associates were not even close.
Now there’s an argument to be made that the Disney World we got was wildly different
than the Disney World that Walt planned.
There was no EPCOT city.
No industrial park.
So how could one compare the estimated impact of 1967 report to the real impact of 1981?
But I think it works, specifically because 1981 was still long before the Disney World
we have today.
EPCOT Center, the theme park, still wouldn’t open for another year.
No Hollywood Studios.
No Animal Kingdom.
No Blizzard Beach or Typhoon Lagoon.
They were still very much in that first phase of the original Disney World plans.
So ERAs numbers represented a much more developed Disney World than the one we had in 1981.
And yet, still, they weren’t even close.
By 1981 over 126 million tourists had passed through the gates of Walt Disney World.
At an average of 14 million a year, it had already surpassed the Eiffel Tower, Taj Mahal,
and Egypt’s Pyramids as tourist destinations.
They should have just called Soarin “Places Disney World is more popular than” Those
tourists, by the way, did not spend $3.9 billion as ERA predicted.
They spent $14 billion.
Now that said, the ERA did overestimate in two categories.
They initially predicted that the resort would result in $243 million in tax revenue, but
by 1981 Disney had only paid $191 million in taxes.
Additionally, the report expected Disney to have created 50,000 full-time jobs, but after
ten years they only had anywhere between twelve to seventeen thousand employees on payroll
depending on the season.
That one seems to be the clear impact of Disney not building the city of EPCOT or industrial
park as they originally planned.
Regardless, these numbers show that even Disney themselves didn’t really know what they
were about to unleash on the state of Florida with the opening of Disney World.
Yeah, Disneyland was popular, but this was a whole other beast.
At that point, Disneyland still had a schedule that fluctuated based on the season.
The park was closed on Mondays and Tuesdays from mid-September to mid-March.
Meanwhile, Disney World was open every day.
The 1970s was also a decade in which most families in the United States were still vacationing
by car, and at the end of the day, there were near twice as many people living East of the
Mississippi than West of it.
That also doesn’t account for European tourists, who saw Orlando as a closer destination than Anaheim.
You know... because it was a closer destination than Anaheim.
Lastly, the relatively undeveloped area of Central Florida allowed for more competing
attractions to open up which, in turn, made the region more appealing for families looking
for a vacation.
It created this sort of snowball effect of tourism.
However, it wasn’t without its problems.
The popularity of Disney World resulted in an explosion of growth in the Orlando area.
Hotel rooms in the city went from 6,000 in 1971 to 32,000 in 1981, and the city itself
grew by a quarter of a million new residents.
Thanks to the Reedy Creek Improvement District, Disney was able to bear the brunt of the resort’s
infrastructure costs.
However, the region outside of Disney World also needed to grow and adapt, and that’s
not always easy to do.
Articles looking back on the first ten years of Disney World also cited growing problems
when it came to city issues like sewage disposal, crowded roads, housing shortages, and crime rates.
Airports like MCO had to grow to accommodate the flood of new tourists.
In ‘71 it saw 1.3 million passengers, but by ‘81 that number was 6.5 million.
They had expected that number to double by 1987, but they would ultimately be wrong.
By 1987 it would more than double, with 16.4 million people passing through the airport
annually.
It even created uncertainty elsewhere in the state.
With the arrival of Disney World and countless other amusements in Orlando hoping to ride
Disney’s coat-tails, tourism officials in Southern Florida feared that it would spell
doom for cities like Miami.
They looked north and saw a region with $12 billion worth of attractions, hotels, and
housing in the works and wondered if tourists would even bother coming down south anymore.
Of course, that wasn’t the case, but at the time they didn’t know.
Today all of those numbers seem like child’s play.
Tourism stands as Florida’s number one industry, with over 120 million annual visitors.
Over one in nine Floridians work in tourism, and Disney itself stands as the largest single-site
employer in the nation.
The resort has grown to the point where it’s hard to actually measure the full impact it
had on the state.
Regardless, it’s an impact that nobody, not even Disney themselves saw coming.