I have to throw my two on this because of my experience doing billing at WDW...
The scupper is right that this could be a HUGE issue...and no, i have no faith in any easy fixes at WDW - at least not internally.
The "cast" make tens if not hundreds of thousand charge errors there a year. it is and has always been a major problem since they went to the resort charge system. And rectifying disputes is time consuming, inconvenient, and they have never devoted enough staffing, training time, or (frankly) concern to quality control when it comes to dealing with electronic charging/money.
Its a little dirty secret.
Now, I am 10 years past my "prime" when it comes to these things...so i can only hope that they have newer, better, more efficient ways of dealing with these things.
But just to give you a bit of techno history:
the resort system was DOS based until 2004 - i believe. DOS base systems were essentially eliminated on the front lines around 1995.
The resort reader system - Vingvision 2 - had been in practice for 5 years in major hotel chains before WDW adopted it. They have at least recently gone to the touch pads - but those are pretty simple devices these days.
The "windows" system that they use now...is probably very similar to the somewhat rudimentary one they implemented back in the last decade.
And remember - since almost all transactions are electronic now - there is no way or need to balance the registers - by and large - so mistakes go largely undetected at first and then are only noticed later and cause the need for more attention, fact gathering, credit adjustment later. That is not a staffing priority.
Think of one place on Earth where you can say that they care less about who you are when you charge and do it at such volume...all the while doing it in massively crowded areas surrounded by people from 200 different countries.
You probably won't find one. Credit fraud/ error is rampant - intentional and unintentional.
And don't forget training had gone (under my direct experience) from what was almost "months" to "a few days" in a very short amount of time. Hiring standards - due to lack of qualified, willing, or skilled candidates - fell with the training levels proportionally.
So could this be a huge problem - even if its counter intuitive?
You bet your rat's....
well...you get it.
The original poster doesn't tend to post these things lightly - i would give the benefit of the doubt that this has been thought out and is valid.
And some of the more experienced posters who offered the "quick fix" and "they'll figure it out"....who are you thinking of, exactly?
WDW is a large property - it has NEVER been a technologically competent property since perhaps EPCOT went on line. Everything put into place takes more time, costs a fortune, and often is poorly maintained or the victim of massive operator error.
Fast pass - worked - but it took forever to tweak
Dining system - worked - but they took forever to put it into e-form - and they bagged it in its best form (priority seating)
gps bus routing still doesn't work right - and its been 15 years in the making.
heck, now that i think about it - how long AFTER you could book a room online at marriot or holiday inn did it take for you to be able to get one at WDW?
5? 10 years?
Their own PRIVATE timeshare club has had that ability for a big fat 1-2 years...that's pretty pathetic.
My point is that don't assume that since this thing cost a fortune and certainly LOOKS cool ( i for one would volunteer to test it with any of its features wired to my swiss bank account (more like Canadian) at any moment - because this could ultimately lead to less staffing requirements that will allow more expansion/ offerings to the clientele) - doesn't mean that it wont have big flaws and problems that could take years to hash out.
And a final note on the "the employees will be reprimanded or fired if they screw up" sentiment...
That WDW is LONG gone...it was gone 20 years+ ago. The eisner expansion of the property never took into account how hard it would be to maintain a huge work force and keep the competent ones happy...it never assumed massive health care skyrockets - it never assumed that it would have to increase wages to keep quality people - so they abandoned that long ago.
WDW staff is just a staff - it is not "elite" by any stretch.
They could build an elite, comparatively low cost staff with the glut of young kids coming out of school with no professional job prospects these days - but they've yet to see how it could be done.
Until then, trust all warning about potential problems in the system - they aren't just random musings.
