Disney Revenue Hurt by $200 Million From Hurricane Milton

By Douglas A. McIntyre Updated Oct 14, 7:30AM EDT · Published Oct 12, 7:13AM EDT

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Disney Revenue Hurt by $200 Million From Hurricane Milton — © abalcazar / iStock Unreleased via Getty Images

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Disney World was closed because of Hurricane Milton. But the hit to its revenue was modest and the park quickly reopened.
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When Hurricane Milton hit Orlando, all the area’s major theme parks closed, including Universal Orlando, Busch Gardens, and LEGO Florida. The largest closure was Walt Disney World, which opened in 1971. Walt Disney himself conceived of Disney World but died in 1965, leaving his management team to finish it.

Disney World survived the wind and rain from Milton well, and the park reopened Friday. However, according to one estimate, the storm cost $200 million in revenue and $20 million in operating income. The forecast came from Bloomberg Intelligence, which also reported that attendance may be lower than usual for several months, making the financial hit worse.

The number for the loss is very modest compared to the size of Walt Disney Co.’s (NYSE: DIS | DIS Price Prediction) quarterly revenue. Last quarter, its Experiences unit, which includes the theme parks, posted revenue of 2% to $8.4 billion, compared to Disney’s total revenue of $23.1 billion, which was 4% higher.

However, Experience is critical to Disney’s profit-making success. In the quarter, its operating income was $2.2 billion of the company’s $4.2 billion total. When management said in its quarterly comments that Experience revenue might be soft in the upcoming quarter, it drove shares lower.

Given the modest hit Milton will make on its quarterly numbers, Disney only has one problem. The hurricanes may keep on coming.

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About the Author Douglas A. McIntyre →

Douglas A. McIntyre is the co-founder, chief executive officer and editor in chief of 24/7 Wall St. and 24/7 Tempo. He has held these jobs since 2006.

McIntyre has written thousands of articles for 24/7 Wall St. He is an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income and travel.

His work has been quoted or mentioned in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Time, The New Yorker, HuffPost USA Today, Business Insider, Yahoo, AOL, MarketWatch, The Atlantic, Bloomberg, New York Post, Chicago Tribune, Forbes, The Guardian and many other major publications. McIntyre has been a guest on CNBC, the BBC and television and radio stations across the country.

A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard College, McIntyre also was president of The Harvard Advocate. Founded in 1866, the Advocate is the oldest college publication in the United States.

TheStreet.com, Comps.com and Edgar Online are some of the public companies for which McIntyre served on the board of directors. He was a Vicinity Corporation board member when the company was sold to Microsoft in 2002. He served on the audit committees of some of these companies.

McIntyre has been the CEO of FutureSource, a provider of trading terminals and news to commodities and futures traders. He was president of Switchboard, the online phone directory company. He served as chairman and CEO of On2 Technologies, the video compression company that provided video compression software for Adobe’s Flash. Google bought On2 in 2009.