Attendance At American Zoos

snowleopard said:
I received a comprehensive list of the average annual attendance at every single AZA-accredited American zoo, but then due to the fact that many of the numbers were outdated I painstakingly reseached zoo sites on the internet to come up with a list of every single zoo in the United States that currently averages a million or more visitors each year. The last 4 zoos on the list are just slightly shy of a million visitors, but I included them anyway because many major zoos have been having record years in 2008 and 2009.
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Seeing as the list on this thread is now three years old, would it be possible to put up a new list of attendance numbers to see if visitor numbers have increased and how zoos are doing now that we have passed through a major recession? The numbers at the start of this thread I assume were collected before the worst of the economic slump hit.

Another interesting thing is that Dallas Zoo was not in the top 35 attendance list that you posted. I wonder if the new Giants of the Savanna exhibit has driven a large attendance gain?
 
I'm not sure that I would like to invest the time to research all of the zoos again, but it is intriguing viewing this thread a couple of years down the road. I've now been to 33 out of the 35 zoos (the two that I'm missing are both in Tampa) and I think that for the most part all of the zoos have held fairly steady with attendance or even exhibited an increase. Woodland Park has gone up slightly to 1.2 million, Denver is hitting 2 million per year, Columbus soared up to 2.2 million, and I'm not sure if any of the zoos dropped significantly and many have had minor increases even with a deep recession striking the nation. The local zoo is a cheap alternative to an expensive family holiday!

As far as Dallas Zoo is concerned I know that attendance has definitely increased since the superb Giants of the Savanna addition, and the link below has a total of almost 800,000 for the fiscal year that ended in September of 2011:

Dallas Zoo attendance continues to surge | Dallas-Fort Worth Communities - News for Dallas, Texas - The Dallas Morning News

Dallas and Miami are in my opinion two of the best dozen zoos in all of North America, and yet neither reach 1 million visitors. Dallas broke their all-time record in 2008 with around 700,000 visitors, and the city's population size is impressive, yet for some reason their attendance is massively disappointing in comparison to the size and quality of the zoo. Fort Worth receives 1 million visitors each year and it is for the most part an average zoo with a solid range of popular mega-fauna. Also, Miami never hits 1 million visitors and the zoo is placed outside of the city, but that is a shame as it is also a terrific establishment that is one of the best of its kind.
 
Does anyone know the Bronx Zoo's most recent attendance? I feel like their attendance has declined slightly since 2009 with all of their budget cuts, and how they now charge admission for exhibits that were once free. With a city of over 8 million people not including suburbs, its shocking that such a fantastic zoo only attracts 2 million visitors a year. The Bronx is also not nearly as bad a neighborhood as it use to be, and the zoo is very near a subway station. The Dallas Zoo is another fantastic zoo, and I also find it shocking they do not receive more than a million visitors. I understand why Miami doesn't have so many, as that zoo is very difficult to get to from the core of Miami and Miami Beach. Although it is a great zoo, people do not usually think of Miami as a place known for an excellent zoological establishment. Bronx and Dallas are most puzzling to me.
 
There is one zoo that has been forgotten during this thread: Como Park Zoo & Conservatory in Minnesota. The small zoo is free and includes a botanical garden so I'm not sure if the zoo's numbers are ever separated from the rest of the attractions, but this article states that with the new Polar Bear Odyssey exhibit attendance surged upwards to 2.2 million annual visitors.

Philanthropy beat: Como Zoo wraps up $19M campaign | StarTribune.com
 
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