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First impressions: 2024 Epcot International Food & Wine Festival
It’s time again for the Epcot International Food & Wine Festival, the annual Walt Disney World showcase of smallish plates and sips.
The format remains much the same this year, with marketplaces surrounding the lagoon and up into the area formerly known as Future World. There are scavenger hunts, cheese-based challenges and the nightly Eat to the Beat concert series.
We made a loop and at least looked at everything. Some items will be more suited for cooler weather, so mental notes were made. But here are some first impressions from the 2024 event.
New view
A brand-new space that opened at Epcot this year is CommuniCore Hall, a flexible-use building. During festivals, it will serve food inside and from a counter outside. The interior of Food & Wine features the new Macatizers marketplace with four varieties of mac and cheese. (There are nine adult beverages for sale here, too, but we’re not seeing macaroni there.)
Nearly half the inside of the hall is devoted to merchandise, including a cap with a logo representing Spaceship Earth. Are those slabs of cheese as legs? (I also overheard a woman talking smack about Figment on the merch: “This isn’t his festival!”)
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Summer has been a cooling-off period for theme parks, experts say
An economic pinch on the middle class, the cost of theme park experiences and the lure of fresh travel destinations elsewhere contributed to fewer hotel visitors in Central Florida and sluggish attendance at Orlando’s theme parks this summer, experts say.
For the past couple of months, Central Florida’s attractions have been jammed on some days but uncharacteristically uncrowded on other days.
“It’s very mixed, depending on the week,” said Ethan Hershaft, who frequents the parks regularly as the owner of the Orlando Tourist channel on YouTube. “July wasn’t as busy as last year. In my opinion, nothing felt like ‘OK, this is peak season.’ I didn’t really get that feeling this summer.”
Florida resorts, in general, saw attendance surge coming out of the pandemic era, but area hotels’ occupancy rates have dipped every month of 2024 compared with a year ago, according STR’s Destination Report, which monitors U.S. markets.
“Now the market is normalizing, going back to more sustainable, typical rate growth,” said Michael Stathokostopoulos, senior director of hospitality analytics at CoStar Group.
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