Euro Disney is laying off 5,000

WORRIES that the Euro Disney theme park outside Paris is turning into a pounds 2.2bn flop intensified yesterday after it confirmed it was laying off 5,000 workers at the end of the summer and closing one of its hotels for the winter.

An increasingly sceptical stock market wiped another 27p from Euro Disney shares yesterday. They closed at 935p, having traded as high as 1680p in the euphoric weeks before the grand opening of the park in April.

Euro Disney, an attempt to recreate Disneyland in Europe, has failed to meet visitor targets. The French in particular have been lukewarm. Last month it admitted it would make a loss in its first trading year.

A Euro Disney spokesman said yesterday the lay-offs were purely of seasonal workers who were taken on for the summer only. The company would continue to employ the core workforce of 12,500 people.

'You don't blame a ski resort when it makes redundancies at the end of the season,' he said.

One of the six on-site hotels, the Newport Bay, was being temporarily shut from October because it was least geared to winter visitors. 'Right now our hotels are running at almost 100 per cent occupancy.'

Derek Brock, leisure analyst with the stockbroker Nomura, said Euro Disney would have a challenge achieving its winter target of 20-30,000 visitors a day: 'That's a lot of people to get on a cold, wet, grey winter day.' Other outside attractions such as the nearby Asterix theme park close for the winter, he said.

Visitors to Euro Disney have been disappointed by the long queues for some attractions and the relatively high prices. Disney World, the sister park in Florida, is much cheaper.

Last week Airtours, one of Britain's biggest tour operators, said it was aborting its Euro Disney programme because of low bookings.