What Universal Kids Resort Reveals About The Future Of The Experience Economy

Universal Frisco was always designed as a smaller-scale destination for young families rather than another Epic Universe. The conversation it sparked wasn’t simply about what was built, but about the growing gap between expectation, social media and the reality of experience. (Tom Fox/The Dallas Morning News via Getty Images)

The Dallas Morning News via GettyImages

Universal’s new children’s resort in Frisco, Texas was never supposed to become a business case study. It was supposed to become a blueprint.

Instead, online conversation quickly shifted from anticipation to expectation, as social media filled with comparisons between polished concept artwork and the reality guests encountered on opening. Whether every criticism (ranging from the abundance of concrete landscaping over theming and a Jurassic Park themed play area some have suggested looks more like an high-security camp) ultimately proves justified is almost beside the point.

In destination businesses, perception shapes commercial reality long before visitor numbers tell the full story.

The timing is significant.

Universal is investing more than £5 billion in its new Bedford resort (topped up with £1.3 billion from UK Government), expected to welcome around 8.5 million visitors a year, while Disney is developing its seventh global destination in Abu Dhabi through a capital-light partnership with destination excellence experts, Miral.

Different financial models, different climates and different audiences, yet both projects are being built for a generation whose expectations have never been higher.

It’s also important to be fair to Universal. Having spent time reading the original planning documents, development strategy and intended positioning for Universal Kids in Frisco, it’s clear this was never conceived as another Epic Universe. It was designed as a neighbourhood-scale resort for younger children and young families, reflecting a model Universal has successfully operated in other international markets where smaller, more accessible attractions sit alongside destination parks. In many respects, Frisco appears to be delivering exactly what it set out to do. The challenge is that most consumers never read planning documents. They consume short-form content. When cinematic drone footage, influencer previews and comparisons with Orlando dominate social feeds, expectations can quickly drift away from the original proposition. In the experience economy, the story consumers believe is often the one they scroll past in thirty seconds, not the one that took three years to plan.

So Frisco may be the news-cycle story but let us look more widely at the ever-evolving experience economy – and associated communications, launch optics and the reality of consumer sentiment.

Because the next decade of destination entertainment won’t simply be won by bigger rides or more sophisticated technology. It will be won by understanding how consumers now define wonder.

I’ve never viewed retail, hospitality, tourism and entertainment as separate industries. They’re all in the same business: earning people’s time, trust and emotional investment. That’s been the focus of my work for more than twenty years, and it’s why I think the reaction to Frisco says something far bigger than one park or one opening. It points to three shifts every destination business needs to understand before it even opens the gates.

1. Experience Begins Long Before Arrival

For decades there has been much focus on guest journey started when someone walked through the entrance or checked into the property.

It doesn’t.

Today, it begins with the ‘reveal’ of the submitted planning orders, communities of fans and critics feeding the noise with reactions and theories on concept drawings, a TikTok video, an influencer preview or a drone shot shared months before opening day.

Every render, every teaser and every carefully curated first look becomes part of the product itself, and that creates an entirely new commercial challenge.

Marketing teams should no longer focus on simply building awareness clocking up every mention as a win. This is the biggest opportunity to managing expectation.

The industry has entered an era where beautifully produced content can unintentionally become its own benchmark. Guests aren’t comparing today’s attraction with yesterday’s attraction. They’re comparing reality with the most cinematic version of reality they have already watched dozens of times online.

We’ve seen this before.

From the much-publicised Willy Wonka experience to the immersive Barbie attractions, the gap between expectation and delivery has become commercially brutal. Consumers are remarkably forgiving when expectations are managed honestly. They are far less forgiving when anticipation has been engineered beyond what reality can sustain – and that’s an important distinction.

Nobody expects the burger they unwrap at a motorway service station to look exactly like the advertising photograph. We instinctively accept that advertising presents an idealised version of reality.

The experience economy operates by a very different set of rules.

People don’t simply consume experiences; they document them. They photograph, film, review and broadcast them as an extension of their own identity. And on today’s social platforms, measured praise rarely travels as far as surprise, disappointment or controversy. A critical reel often attracts more engagement than a complimentary one.

That means expectation is no longer managed solely by the brand. It is constantly being recalibrated by thousands of creators, commentators and consumers, each bringing their own audience, perspective and agenda. The commercial challenge isn’t simply creating an extraordinary destination. It’s ensuring the reality consistently stands up to a level of scrutiny no advertising campaign has ever faced before.

Expectation has become one of the most valuable assets a destination owns.

It can also become one of its greatest liabilities.

2. The Guest Has Become the Story

Perhaps the biggest shift is one that artificial intelligence will only accelerate.

For decades, destination entertainment has been built around intellectual property.

Harry Potter, Frozen, Minions, Jurassic World, Marvel…

Those stories remain enormously powerful, but creating the next globally recognised character has become significantly harder.

When I was growing up in the 1980s, childhood was remarkably shared. We watched many of the same films, followed the same television programmes and arrived in the playground speaking a similar cultural language.

Today’s childhood looks very different.

A ten-year-old and an eighteen-year-old can live under the same roof while inhabiting entirely different digital worlds. Roblox, Minecraft, anime, TikTok creators, YouTube communities and now AI-generated entertainment mean culture has fragmented at extraordinary speed.

Perhaps that’s one reason the industry continues returning to familiar franchises. Buzz Lightyear and Woody have been delighting families for three decades. The Minions continue multiplying. Kung Fu Panda keeps returning because shared cultural references have become increasingly difficult to create from scratch.

But I also believe something else is happening.

My own children rarely ask me to tell them an existing story.

They ask me to invent one about them:

• Every adventure is different.
• Every ending belongs to them.
• No one else has heard it before.

And within that might just be a significant lesson in future-proofing destination businesses.

The next generation of guests won’t simply want to observe the story.

They’ll expect to matter within it.

The attractions that thrive won’t necessarily be those with the biggest intellectual property. They’ll be the ones that make every family feel that their experience was uniquely their own.

Technology will make personalisation easier, and human creativity will make it memorable.

3. Quality Is Felt Before It’s Seen

One of the easiest mistakes in experience design is assuming immersion is just visual.

It isn’t.

It’s sensory.

Guests don’t consciously score the texture of a handrail, the soundscape between themed lands or the quality of materials beneath their feet.

They simply feel whether somewhere has been crafted with care.

One of the reasons attractions such as Disney’s Rise of the Resistance have been so successful isn’t because of the technology alone. The experience works because technology supports the illusion rather than dominating it. Guests move through physical environments, interact with cast members who never break character and become participants rather than spectators.

The technology disappears and the permission to immerse yourself begins.

Because theme parks aren’t temporary pop-ups, they’re legacy investments designed to serve families for decades.

Quality cannot stop at structural engineering. It has to extend into hospitality, storytelling, landscaping, acoustics, food, service and every seemingly insignificant detail that guests may never consciously notice but will always remember emotionally.

In an age when extraordinary digital experiences are becoming commonplace, craftsmanship becomes a competitive advantage.

Back To The Future x AI

The future of theme parks won’t be determined by who builds the biggest attraction. It will be determined by who creates the deepest emotional memory.

Universal’s Bedford resort and Disney’s Abu Dhabi destination will be separated by thousands of miles, radically different climates and entirely different financial models, yet both are being designed for the first generation to grow up with almost unlimited entertainment, infinite choice and artificial intelligence capable of creating new characters, stories and worlds on demand.

That abundance raises the threshold for wonder. Spectacle will become easier to produce, personalisation will become expected and yesterday’s extraordinary technology will age faster than the physical destinations built around it. The commercial advantage will therefore sit less in what guests can see on a screen and more in what they can only feel by being there: anticipation that begins before arrival without inflating beyond delivery, environments rich enough to reward every sense, and experiences in which the guest becomes part of the story rather than another person moving through it.

The industry already knows how to engineer capacity, throughput and technical brilliance. Its next challenge is more demanding because it requires equal precision around human behaviour. The strongest destinations will understand when excitement becomes exhaustion, where families naturally reconnect, which interactions create trust and what persuades guests to stay for another meal, return for another visit and tell the story long after they have gone home.

Artificial intelligence will make content more abundant, but it cannot make a shared memory more meaningful simply by making it more spectacular. That value comes from the cast member who notices a nervous child, the detail a family discovers together, the meal that anchors the day and the fleeting sense that this experience could not have unfolded in quite the same way for anyone else.

Universal, Disney x Miral and other destination leaders have the scale, creativity and ambition to build extraordinary places to visit. The opportunity now is to ensure that every investment in technology strengthens, rather than competes with, the human experience around it. The future of theme parks will not be decided by how convincingly they simulate another world, but by how deeply they involve us in one – a place for us to ‘be’.

The ride may create the headline, but the human experience creates the memory, the advocacy and the return visit. That is where the next era of destination value will be won.