This week, we talk about this speech by Tom Staggs, Chairman of Walt Disney Parks and Resorts. He talks a lot about these “NextGen” efforts — most notably, announcing a ride and show reservation system that guests will be able to use before they even get to the parks.
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This episode has been brought to you by TouringPlans.com, the website that has that Crowd Calendar and those Touring Plans and this Lines App thing.
If Disney gets more guests, things will not be faster, they will be slower + if everyone has a mega fast pass, then the lines will be very slow and Disney will have to develop an ultra mega fast pass!
I think the biggest hurdle in the proposed system has so far gone quietly unnoticed. You almost picked it up between you, but I think got carried away with the excitement. (It’s been a couple of days since I listened). If guests are able to pre reserve seating in shows and fastpasses etc from their own homes. How on earth to you distribute a fixed daily capacity amongst the potential riders with any sense of fairness, there just isn’t enough to go round for a single attraction. It’s possible that by distributing people across attractions that you will have more people per hour on attractions and not in queues. The implication is that this will improve satisfaction, but if somebody was put on 3 lame ducks, instead of a headliner, would they necessarily be more satisfied ? I don’t want it to be pot luck which attractions I get on.
In allowing pre booking from home, you are by design ensuring people can book in advance of their trip, and this in turn will lead to people making multiple bookings to keep options open, unless it’s an eliteist system to keep the numbers down or you somehow have a penalty for not attending. For example you have a show in the Magic Kingdom with a capacity of x people per show and y shows per day. You somehow have to distribute that (x times y) fixed availability between not only the several tens of thousands of visitors that walk through the gates, but the many visitors that kept their options open with multiple reservations. Today we have a system where lines are self regulated by people refusing to join them due to length. Imaging the scrum for TSMM fastpasses if they were available online several weeks before. If you’ve got a (say, 180 day) booking window for TSMM, and it fills like the restaurants do, if you can’t get on the right attractions, why would you bother coming to WDW. You already pay a premuim because it’s Disney, if you ‘re given the impression that the top rides are so busy that you can’t ride without a ticket, you’d think twice about a trip. If they limited the available tickets to allow standby lines more movement, then they are limiting the number of people that pre book, and thus watering the promise down.
How would they also cope with breakdowns, do you bump people or do you disappoint them, it’s not as easy to just expect them to find something else if you’ve got prebooking for your other attractions as well.
Much as I like the sound of it, I simply can’t see it working.