How this theme-park fanatic makes a living by predicting future rides at Disney and Universal

• Alicia Stella is a lifelong theme-park fan and resident of Orlando, Florida.
• She makes a living snooping the internet for information on the newest attractions at major theme parks.

Alicia Stella, a lifelong theme park fan and resident of Orlando, Florida, makes a living scouring the internet for top-secret information on the newest attractions and experiences coming to area theme parks like Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando Resort. Stella often lets the cat out of the bag long before Disney or Universal make any official announcement.

Stella relies on permits, patents, and site plans — along with the ever-churning theme park rumor mill — to get a sneak peek at what's going on behind the scenes at Disney and Universal parks. Her uncanny ability to take what she learns from her sleuthing sessions to predict what's being developed for these parks that sets her apart from other theme-park aficionados, and it's allowed her to turn her passion into a career.

Originally from South Florida, Stella's fascination with theme parks took root during her family's annual visits to Orlando. Each time she visited, there would be slight changes.

Disney World's "Mission to Mars" attraction evolved into "ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter" and "If You Had Wings" eventually became "Delta Dreamflight."

"It was fascinating to me that the parks were always evolving," Stella told Insider. "It really sparked something in me that there were these slight changes whenever I would go back."

Her interest flourished when she moved to Central Florida in high school and was close enough to get annual passes and visit the parks more often. When Stella jumped into the world of blogging, she dabbled in various topics, but she always came back to the one thing she never tires of talking about: theme parks.

In 2017, she gave her theme park news stories a permanent home on her current site, Orlando ParkStop, and YouTube channel, Theme Park Stop. She wasn't necessarily planning on her talents becoming a full-time business, but she did notice that the theme park stories on her previous blog generated more Google ad revenue than anything else.

Today, Orlando ParkStop still generates income from Google ads, but YouTube ads are now a part of the mix. Stella also cohosts the ParkStop Podcast, sells merchandise, and has a Patreon page where fans can help to support her work.

As a thank you, the Patreon community often gets early access to videos and podcasts — as well as the occasional lesson on how to do the exact type of research Stella does to create her videos and articles.

"I recently put out a secret video just for Patreon subscribers that shows them how to look up permits," Stella said.

Stella shared a few of her secrets with us as well, and it turns out, the information isn't so secret after all.

"There are multiple websites that share permits for the state of Florida and, due to the Florida Freedom of Information Act, anyone can access these records," Stella said. These sites include the Orange County Comptroller, Orange County Planning & Development, and the South Florida Water Management District.

"Patents are also publicly available. You can search a company's name and see everything they've patented to find out what they are currently working on."

Finding these patents and permits is the easy part of Stella's job. The hard part is making sense of the information she finds.

"What I tend to find is a lot of tiny dribs and drabs of information that individually don't tell a story," Stella said. "But when you put all the disparate pieces together like you would a puzzle, you start to see the broader picture."

And that is where the rumor mill comes in. If a particular rumor comes up multiple times on the theme park forums Stella frequents, she'll start to take note of it.

"When I can match up rumors with evidence like a patent for some new technology or a permit, that adds some credence to the rumor and that's when the story starts to become clearer," Stella said.

Take, for example, the recently closed "Shrek 4-D" attraction at Universal Studios Florida. Rumors about the attraction's closure have been swirling for nearly four years and Stella has been keeping tabs on the project the entire time.

There have been plenty of theories on what will replace Shrek 4-D, but Stella's intuition tells her a Minions-based attraction will soon take its place. Based on her research, she's long theorized that the new attraction would find guests on a moving walkway, shooting blasters at targets along the way. The attraction would be themed to the Villain-Con seen in the first "Minions" movie.

Not only has Universal teased that the new attraction would in fact have a Minions theme, but a permit recently filed with the Orange County Comptroller confirms the moving walkway concept. Now, we wait (im)patiently for Universal to confirm what Stella already seems to know.

"At first, I thought there was no way they would have moving walkways on a ride," she said. "Now I believe it."

Another project on Stella's radar is the currently-under-construction Universal's Epic Universe, the first US theme park to be built during the digital age when we can follow such things so closely. Stella noticed in 2018 that Universal had been acquiring hundreds of acres of land in the Orlando area. In addition to trademarking the name "Epic Universe," Universal left a trail of breadcrumbs that led Stella to announce Universal's fourth gate months before Universal made the official announcement.

If you want to keep up with progress on Universal's Epic Universe, you can always sit around and wait for Universal to make an announcement. Or you can follow along with Stella's well-researched predictions and be one of the first to know.