This is a guest post by Gillian Armstrong, a fearless Betamouse listener from Northern Ireland. Got an idea for a killer guest post? email us.
After listening to the first episode of Betamouse on “feature requests for disneyworld.com”, I couldn’t help but think of the frustrations I had when planning my last trip with using disneyworld.com. So naturally I thought I would use the traditional method of venting - write about it on the internet.
In many respects, I had been spoiled by all the super resources out there already – so many great podcasts, websites and of course the good book itself (what would I do without the unofficial guide!). Without the information I had already learned from them, I may never have realised that I was geographically disadvantaged disneyworld.com-wise.
The first frustration I found was that since I live outside of the US (in Northern Ireland) if I tried to go to any page on disneyworld.com, I was automatically redirected to the UK home page http://disneyworld.disney.go.com/wdwi/en_GB/. And I mean any page – it can get very annoying if you are trying to follow links from other sites to continually find yourself pinged back to the home page. Of course you can “work around” this by adding /?forceDomestic=true on the end of any disneyworld.com URL to ensure you get straight to the page you want.
Although the redirection was a bit annoying, I did understand it. It does make sense for companies to provide “localised” versions of their sites. However, I found that the UK site wasn’t just the US site with some UK specific information and prices in £ rather than $, the whole layout, information and services provided were completely different.
US version - Akershus Royal Banquet Hall
UK version - Akershus Royal Banquet Hall
For instance, when I went to try out online dining reservations I found no mention of it on the UK site. To get this option you would need to switch to the US site (an option on the top left hand corner of the site) and navigate through to the Dining section there. Although you can see all the restaurants on the UK site with descriptions of each, the page is a lot less “pretty”, with the US site being a much more visually pleasing modular design, and including pictures on the summary page. In fact the whole layout of the UK site is vastly inferior to the US version – with solid color backgrounds and confusing navigation (I realise there is plenty to say about the layout of the US version too, but by comparison it is a thing of beauty).
There is also a distinct lack of information about many things on the UK version of the site. One example I found was that a search for “Segway” on the UK site yields no results at all, but the same search on the US site gives me the results I would expect (showing all the available Segway Tours). If I was just a “regular tourist” from the UK and not a Disney geek, I would have no idea that Segway Tours were even possible at Disney World; let alone amazing things like online dining reservations and online check in for your resort (also missing from the UK site).
I should point out that Disney did not restrict me because of my geographical disadvantage. Once I switched to the US site I was able to do things like reserve online dining, or check in online. However, I don’t think many people would expect to get such a difference in information between the versions of the site. So I have to wonder, is this just an oversight, or are they “targeting” different things at different countries? Is the layout deliberate, or have they just “not got around to” updating it yet? Are they attempting to limit the online services to mostly US visitors by keeping them solely available from the US site? Will we ever really know….?
