Disney World has turn out to be a repeat vacation spot and second home for a bunch of adults who love Disney. Now the corporate appears to be trying to copy that magic at its international properties, using American influencers and bloggers to attract U.S. fans to Disney theme parks in China and Japan.
The skilled content creators are a few of Disney’s most dear fans — making a living by sharing travel suggestions, updates and slices of life within the parks with their large online followings.
On June 6, Tokyo Disney Resort will open a large expansion that features latest lands and attractions modeled after its hit movies “Frozen,” “Tangled” and the animated classic “Peter Pan.” For a media preview event in May, the resort invited several high-profile U.S.-based Disney content creators to see the expansion, the primary time a few of them experienced Tokyo Disney and shared it with their followers. In 2023, a few of the same creators were invited to media previews for the “Frozen” and “Zootopia” attractions in Shanghai and Hong Kong.
The invitations to U.S. fan media indicate an evolution in who Disney appears to be attempting to attract to its international parks. As they were originally conceived, Disney’s international parks were meant to “bring the unforgettable Disney magic to a world audience,” in line with the company. But international park numbers have never quite caught as much as the attendance figures at California’s Disneyland and Florida’s Disney World. While the international parks themselves have at all times taken steps to accommodate diverse audiences — providing shows and attractions in multiple languages — Disney appears to be marketing the international parks to American audiences in additional direct ways.
Along with the content creator efforts, Disney has begun to incorporate its international parks in its own content consumed by Americans. Within the Disney+ show “Behind the Attraction,” which premiered in 2021, quite a few variations on American rides at international parks were discussed and digested for American audiences.
While Tokyo Disney Resort has been consistently popular with locals, Disney and other U.S.-based entertainment groups have recently found that Americans are willing to partake in familiar culture while traveling abroad, boosting numbers in each foreign and domestic markets, and making a latest goal demographic for international projects.
Social media content showing the brand new expansions has resonated widely with Western audiences online. Some YouTube vlogs featuring the brand new Tokyo attractions were viewed upward of 100,000 times each on the primary day they were posted by English-speaking creators. The official Disney Parks Instagram account, which posts content from all the locations, has been repeatedly flooded with Americans commenting how eager they’re to experience what the international parks offer.
“Disney gives us the chance to cover it and get coverage to our audience, because we do have such a vital audience to Disney,” Quincy Stanford, who works for the Disney parks fan media operation AllEars and was invited to the Tokyo media preview, told NBC News.
“People who find themselves in search of out AllEars are in search of out Disney planning information, and that implies that they’re in search of out spending money at Disney,” Stanford added. “We have now a possibility outside of a broader media outlet to achieve their audience.”
Disney has been inviting each fan-run and traditional media outlets to cover its latest attractions within the U.S. parks for years, but Stanford said the Tokyo invitation got here as a “surprise” to the AllEars staff, which has been publishing content online for the reason that late Nineties.
“It’s a really rare experience to see American media invited over to Tokyo,” Stanford said.
Tokyo Disneyland opened in 1983, and in newer years, social media has shown American fans just what they’re missing on the opposite side of the world.
While many features of Tokyo Disneyland are similar to at Disneyland in California and the Magic Kingdom in Florida, it has some unique rides. The opposite Tokyo Disney Resort park, Tokyo DisneySea, is essentially unique and is taken into account by many fans to be the best Disney theme park on the earth.
“With Covid and the pandemic, social media went further than we even thought possible, and it exposed people to a component of Disney that they had never seen,” said Emma Kenner, one other AllEars staffer who traveled alongside Stanford to Tokyo. Disney parks social media content experienced a giant uptick in attention following the reopening of the U.S. parks in late 2020, with people wanting to visit after the one prolonged closure in Disney history. Disney creators world wide grew their followings, and demand for content from international Disney parks rose alongside them.
“It makes people need to go and experience it for themselves,” Kenner said.
Aside from the invitations to the exclusive previews, Stanford and Kenner said, Disney has at all times remained “hands off” with fan coverage. They do not receives a commission by Disney and the corporate doesn’t tell them what to cover or the best way to cover it. Disney fan media is thought for frank and sometimes even harsh coverage of what Disney is doing, but the general tone stays passionately positive. The Walt Disney Co. didn’t reply to a request for comment.
Disney is not the only American entertainment operation pulling homegrown fans into other countries, either. Greater than 1 / 4 of Taylor Swift tickets in Paris were bought by Americans, Paris La Défense Arena told Rolling Stone, and social media content has celebrated the cheaper prices for tickets and merchandise for each Swift and Disney internationally.
The American influx into other countries hasn’t been without controversy. Overtourism is a serious concern in Japan, with the country taking steps to limit crowds at some popular tourist attractions. But post-lockdown international travel continues to blossom years after places just like the Disney parks reopened.
“I feel people discover a sense of comfort to find those American entertainers and opportunities once they’re traveling,” Kenner said. “Having that one thing that feels familiar makes a little bit little bit of the trip more comfortable or less stressful.”
