PortAventura
Spain
 Park News - (4/3/2025) A little bad news if you were planning a visit to PortAventura in the near future. According to this news article the park staff have announced that they will go on strike on April 19th, in time with the busy Easter Holiday weekend, after they have been unable to renew their work agreement with the park’s owners that actually expired back on Dec. 31st, 2024.
The worker’s union are asking for decent salary increases, mentioning that currently 65% of the staff are only paid minimum wage.
2025 - Nothing is known at this time...
PortAventura May Be For Sale - (9/17/2023) According to a few news articles from Spain, the two investment companies behind the PortAventura theme park resort (KKR and Investindustrial) are now looking to sell off the popular attraction. According to the article the sale of the PortAventura resort could generate a price around 1 billion Euros. PortAventura has had a long history of shared ownership, starting off as a shared attraction between the Tussauds Group (40.01%), La Caixa (33.19%) and Anheuser-Busch (19.9%) and FECSA (6.7%) when it first opened in 1995. In 1998 the Tussauds group sold their shares to Universal, and the attraction was rebranded for a time as Universal’s Port Aventura, and adopted Woody Woodpecker as the official mascot.
Over the years the park’s group ownership has essentially be a non-stop revolving door of owners, with Anheuser-Busch and Universal having dropped out long ago. Through a series of mergers and buy-outs it sounds like the park has narrowed the ownership down to just two investment companies: Investindustrial (50.1%) and KKR (49.9%), both of which appear to be in agreement that the time is right to sell the attraction now that it is turning a profit and expected to end the 2023 season with higher attendance than it had in 2019 (5.2 million). To these efforts the groups are already working with JP Morgan to work out the details of a possible sale.
So the real question is who might be interested in the opportunity to buy the entire property once and for all? The site itself is home to several hotels, a waterpark, the PortAventura theme park as well as a second gate micro-park experience, Ferrari Land. Disney had their chance once with this property, as the site was actually in the running in the 90’s to become home to “EuroDisney” before the Paris location won out.
Universal comes to mind as a possible bidder, as they once had parietal ownership and managed the park for many years under the eyes of a previous owner of Universal. Comcast is calling the shots these days, and they’ve been very gung-ho with investing in the Universal parks brand, having finalized buyout to completely own the Universal park in Japan, build a brand new park in China, and are currently building a 3rd major theme park in Florida. Being able to take advantage of the option for a 100% buyout of PortAventura for complete control of the resort, and the bragging rights for being able to plant the Universal flag firmly in Europe once and for all may be a temptation Comcast just won't be able to resist.
Keep in mind that cash may not be an issue for Comcast either, as Comcast still owns 33% of HULU and under the 2019 agreement where Disney absorbed FOX’s 33% to mix with their own 33% ownership, Comcast was said to be able to trigger a buyout offer from Disney as early as January 2024 for a minimum of $27.5 billion. However a press release from Comcast on Sept. 6th mentions that Comcast and Disney have agreed to moved up the date for the HULU deal to Sept. 30th, and that they expect to settle for more than the minimum price as the value of HULU has “increased dramatically” since that 2019 agreement was drafted. So with Comcast soon to be flush with cash, the chance to add PortAventura to their attractions portfolio is something of a no-brainer in my opinion.
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