Theme parks are big business in Orlando. Orlando’s tourism agency, Visit Orlando, counted 75 million visitors to the city last year. According to quarterly financial statements, those tourists brought in billions of dollars to the theme park operators. And as the number of visitors to the region increases, so does competition for their money.

The major players in the Orlando theme park world, Disney, Universal, and SeaWorld, all have plans to open new rides in the coming year to attract guests. They also compete by trying to improve customer satisfaction. But what can the parks be doing better to lure in guests?

Researchers from the University of Central Florida investigated the main drivers of outrage and delight in theme park goers from around the country. Mining the popular review site TripAdvisor for data on consumer feelings, the authors of the study scanned posts for words and phrases that expressed how visitors felt about their experiences, such as “joy”, “exhilaration”, “enraged” and “awful”. These terms were used to identify the theme of the post, which were correlated with guests’ feelings of delight and outrage about their visit.

The findings of the study may not surprise you. What outrages park goers are the usual suspects. Wait times, expensive tickets, poor customer service, and ride maintenance issues draw ire from theme park visitors. What causes the most outrage is poor pricing and value. Visitors are more willing to let a poor experience slide when they feel the ticket price is in line with its value. If visitors feel they spent too much money on their tickets, they are more likely to be outraged by their day at the park.

Relatedly, crowds and long lines are second on the list of things that incite outrage. As one reviewer stated, “How can a family nowadays afford to pay $600 (with gas, food, parking, etc.) and go on 3 rides and say it was a successful day?” Making park goers feel like they are paying money to wait in lines is one sure way to anger them. Poor customer service comes in third for driving outrage. Visitors want to feel cared for by park staff.

So what can the parks do to delight guests? An overwhelming majority of the reviews want the theme parks to simply make good rides. When reviewers report having a good ride experience, they are more likely to express overall delight at their visit. A thrilling experience on a ride brings almost twice as much delight to visitors as the second thing on the list, which is having a good set of tips to follow to make the day more enjoyable. Reviewers that mentioned following advice for having a good experience, like using the single rider queues or avoiding visits on hot days, were more likely to be delighted by their theme park trip. This demonstrates how powerful review sites and social media can be in shaping consumer experiences. It may explain why the major theme parks have dedicated teams to respond to online comments (see here and here for examples).

Interestingly, factors like having a good fireworks display, meeting characters, or providing guests with feelings of happiness on the trip, although still sources of delight, were low on the list. Also low on the list was making guests feel like they are reliving magical childhood experiences. This suggests theme parks need to focus on setting new standards for having a good time rather than living up to older expectations.

Given that theme park attendance and ticket prices in Orlando are higher than ever, theme parks may not have to pay too much attention to the study’s findings at the moment. But theme parks offer experiences, and with so many factors at play, it’s hard to provide reliably delightful experiences. Failing to do so could prove costly for the park in the future. While finding the right way to market an experience can be difficult, this study suggests there are ways parks can delight their guests, or at least avoid outraging them.