With the success of Disneyland in California and Walt Disney World in Florida, the Walt Disney Co.

began planning to expand its theme parks internationally by the middle of the '70s. In 1983, Tokyo Disneyland opened to immediate success, and by the next year, plans for a European counterpart were in the works. Disney chose a French town, Marne-la-Vallee, as the site for Euro Disney, and construction began in 1988. Despite initial trouble surrounding its 1992 opening, Euro Disney (or Disneyland Resort Paris) now boasts more than 15 million visitors every year. In 2008, it was the most visited attraction in Europe. Euro Disneyland a theme park comprised of an updated, state of the art Disney's Magic Kingdom, is a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company located outside Paris, France, and has experienced numerous complications from its inception. Because the Walt Disney Company executives were determined to adhere to American philosophies, they did not thoroughly investigate all aspects of the European environment. This failure to do adequate research caused the Walt Disney Company executives and visionaries to construct their American dream theme park on foreign soil with little if any regard for the practical reality of the physical, financial, and/or cultural environment of their chosen site. More specifically, the Walt Disney Company's "...biggest mistakes were its overambitious plans to develop the site, plus Euro Disneyland's financial structure itself, which depended on a highly optimistic financial scenario with little room for glitches" (Gumbel & Turner, 1994, p. A 12). These massive oversights were contributing factors to the problems faced at Euro Disneyland.
Opening Day

On April, 12, 1992, despite a few protests, the Walt Disney Company's fourth theme park, Euro Disneyland opened its doors to the public with essentially the same attractions as in the other Disney theme parks in California, Florida, and Japan (Introducing Walt d'Isigny, 1992). Euro Disneyland executives hoped to attract 11 million guests a year, more than twice the number that visit the Eiffel Tower (Introducing Walt d'Isigny, 1992). Half of the guests were excepted to be French. Euro Disneyland was confident that with its superior investment, professionalism and French government assistance, it would succeed. If it did not, it would most likely be the fault of the weather and not of any French cultural chauvinism (Introducing Walt d'Isigny, 1992). Unfortunately, the dream of succeeding did not become a reality and eventually Euro Disneyland brought in new management and made other changes in order to save Euro Disneyland (Gumbel & Turner, 1994). The opening day crowds, expected to number up to 500,000 visitors, failed to materialise, however, and at close of the first day barely 50,000 people had passed through the gates. This may have been partly due

protests from French locals who feared their culture would be damaged by Euro Disney, but whatever the cause the low initial attendance was very disapointing for the Disney company.The first phase of development (the theme park, hotel complex and golf course) had gone massively over budget, and had eventually cost 22 billion French Francs to complete. Over the next few months attendance figures failed to improve much, and by May the park was only attracting something like 25,000 visitors a day, instead of the predicted 60,000. Combined with the admission that only 3 in every 10 visitors were native French, the Euro Disney company stock price started a slow downward spiral, rapidly losing almost a third of its value. Crisis looms... By August 1992 estimates of annual attendance figures were being drastically cut from 11 million to just over 9 million. EuroDisney's misfortunes were further compounded in late 1992 when a European recession caused property prices to drop sharply, and the massive interest payments on the startup loans taken out by EuroDisney forced the company into serious financial difficulties. The situation was worsened by the fact that the cheap dollar was persuading more and more people to forego Europe in favour of holidays in Florida at Walt Disney World.EuroDisney was also over-populated with hotels, especially for a park that can be reasonably well explored within a full day. Coupled with high prices for food and souvenirs, the EuroDisney company started to close hotels during the winter months.A brave face was put on the first anniversary of the park's opening, and Sleeping Beauty's Castle was decorated as a giant birthday cake to celebrate the occasion, however further problems were just around the corner.In summer 1993 the new Indiana Jones roller-coaster ride opened, but disaster struck just a few weeks after opening when the emergency brakes locked on during a ride, causing some guest injuries. As a result the ride was temporarily shut down for investigations.By the start of 1994, with the company in serious financial difficulties, and rumours circulating the the park was on the verge of bankrupcy a series of emergency crisis talks were held between the banks and backers. Cultural Operational Errors There were various errors made in the operations of Euro Disneyland which affected the French culture. An example if this is the Walt Disney Company's policy of serving no alcohol in its parks in California, Florida, and Tokyo which it extended to France. This caused astonishment and rebellion in France where a glass of wine for lunch is a given. After much consideration, in May 1993, the

Walt Disney Company changed its policy and allowed wine and beer in the Euro Disneyland theme park. Another example is the Walt Disney Company's belief that it understood European breakfast norms Disney was told Europeans did not eat sitdown breakfasts. This resulted in Disney downsizing their restaurants before Euro Disneyland opened. Once it opened the restaurants were bombarded with breakfast eaters. In fact, they were "...trying to serve 2,500 breakfasts in a 350-seat restaurant at some of the hotels". Further, guests wanted bacon and eggs rather than just coffee and croissants. Disney reacted quickly with prepackaged breakfasts delivered to rooms and satellite locations.In much the same vein, the Walt Disney Company had difficulty realizing that the Europeans were accustomed to eat at a set time every day .Where Americans are content to wander around the parks with lunch in their hands, a large majority of the European guests would converge on the restaurants at 12:30 p.m. expecting to be seated for a leisurely lunch. This caused the lines to be very long. To complicate matters further, once the Europeans reached the front of the line they were told they could not have wine or beer with their lunch (Solomon, 1994). Thus, the Europeans did not have a positive "Disney experience" while eating their meals. In addition, it was difficult for Euro Disneyland's managers to staff for these one or two hour "rush hours."A final example of a cultural error is the Europeans approach to vacation time. The Europeans are reluctant to take their children from school for a vacation in midsession whereas Americans do it frequently. Also, the Europeans prefer a few longer holidays rather than several short breaks. The Walt Disney Company was convinced that it would be able to "Americanize" the European habits. Unfortunately for the Walt Disney Company, this was not the case. Real Estate Market The Walt Disney Company executives involved in the development of Euro Disneyland were determined they would not repeat two mistakes which they had made in past ventures. One mistake was allowing other companies to build lucrative hotels surrounding their theme park, as happened at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, where the Walt Disney Company owns only 14% of all hotels. The other mistake was in letting another company own a Disney theme park, as in Tokyo, Japan, where Disney just collects royalties from an immensely profitable attraction Thus, in France the Walt Disney Company bought far more land then it needed in order to eventually build 700,000 square meters of office space, a 750,000 square meter corporate park, 2,500 individual homes, a 95,000 square meter shopping mall, 2,400 apartments and 3,000 time share apartments .

Euro Disneyland planned to develop the land and then sell it to prospective buyers, making a large profit. In addition, this would allow Euro Disneyland stringent control over designing and building of future areas within the resort and then the ability to sell off the completed commercial properties in due course and at a large profit. In fact, Disney budgeted for real estate to account for 22% of revenues in 1992, 32% of revenues in 1993, 40% of revenues in 1994, and 45% in 1995 .Euro Disneyland executives must have known rather rapidly that the financing structure for the resort was in trouble. Unfortunately, this revenue generating plan never really "got off the ground" due to the collapse of the real-estate market which, in turn, caused the demise of the planned development around the theme park .Thus, Euro Disneyland did not receive revenue from property development as had been anticipated.