Just the ticket: huge demand for Shanghai Disneyland sees first day sold out within five minutes

Tickets for the first day opening of Shanghai Disneyland in June were snapped up within five minutes of going on sale yesterday, reflecting huge demand from enthusiastic mainland visitors who have been looking forward for the amusement park for years.

Tickets for visits up to September 13 are available, but the tickets for the grand opening, on June 16, were sold out in five minutes after the online sales system was opened from 12.01am yesterday.

The massive demand for tickets was also popular with ticket scalpers, who have been charging up to eight times the normal price.

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The resort, three times bigger than the Hong Kong version, will offer an “East-meets-West” fusion of classic Disney entertainment and traditional Chinese elements, Disney said.

The park’s Enchanted Storybook Castle was set to be a landmark attraction for Shanghai Disneyland because it would be “the first castle to represent all the Disney princesses”, as well as being “the tallest, largest and most interactive Disney castle in the world”, the company said.

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Chang Jiang Securities analyst Li Jin wrote in a note yesterday that the Shanghai park was likely to trigger massive consumer demand, while the resort’s revenue was estimated to be between 24 billion yuan (HK$29 billion) and 40 billion yuan a year.

There are fears the opening of the Shanghai theme park may hit tourist traffic to Hong Kong. More than 20 per cent of mainland tourists who visited Hong Kong in 2014 included a visit to Hong Kong Disneyland, according to Hong Kong’s tourism board.