News: Florida’s Fun Spot America and Gatorland Have Requested Specific Dates For Reopening

Disney4me · May 18, 2020

While Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings doesn’t suspect that Orlando’s major theme parks such as Disney World or Universal Studios will reopen until June at the earliest, theme parks have been working on submitting reopening plans.

Disney Springs

In today’s meeting of the Orange County Economic Recovery Task Force, the plans for three smaller Orlando theme parks were discussed by the Tourism subcommittee.

Three presentations by Fun Spot America, Gatorland, and ICON Park were given this morning, reiterating the guidelines that were submitted to Mayor Demings last week, but with new details — both Fun Spot and Gatorland have now requested specific reopening dates.

©Gatorland

Fun Spot wants to reopen this Friday, May 22nd while Gatorland wants to open Saturday, May 23rd. (ICON Park has yet to submit a date for approval.)

Read more details about these Orlando attractions’ reopening proposals here!

These three smaller theme parks along with several other Orlando-based attractions have already submitted a letter to Mayor Demings requesting to reopen in Phase Two. Florida is still only in Phase One of the state’s reopening, with neither the parameters nor a timeline revealed yet for Phase Two.

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At the meeting, Chuck Whittall with Unicorp National Development requested all of Orlando’s smaller theme parks to submit one standardized list of guidelines for Mayor Demings to review (which we also learned is currently in the works). This would include a proposed 2-Step Approach — with smaller attractions having to follow a main set of safety procedures which can then be tailored to suit the individual needs of each park.

The Tourism group hopes to deliver these standardized guidelines to May Demings by this Thursday when the Full Task Force will be meeting again. We’ll continue to follow this developing story.