"One of those nights" at MK yesterday, would hate to be a CM

[Klayfish]

We were in MK last night, and it seemed to be one of those rare nights where nothing was going right for them. I would not like to have been a CM last night, or even today.

Got there around 4:00pm. Had FP+ for Peter Pan. Down. Our MDE automatically updated our FP+ to give us other choices. Fine. Head over to Pooh. Down. Forget it. Waited in line for Small World, about 20ish minutes, not bad. As we're walking around after that, we see them evacuating PeopleMover.

Around 6:30ish, we head for our FP+ at SM. Must have been down earlier, because the FP+ line was literally all the way out the ride and past the Briar Patch. Never mind, we don't have 45+ minutes to wait for FP+.

Do a few other things, then head back to Peter Pan to try FP+ again. In line, and down it goes. Wait 10 minutes for them to try to restart it. No dice. Leave, and as we're walking past PeopleMover, guess what...see it at a dead stop again.

Get a spot at 8:30pm for parade, right by Hall of Presidents. Announcement at 8:55pm that parade is "delayed". Doesn't start until about 9:25pm.

This is one of the times we were very thankful to be AP holders and have spent a lot of time in MK, so we took it all in stride and knew other things to do. I will also say that in our experience, with all of the days we've spent at WDW, this was the first time we've seen things THAT bad. This is very rare. But ugh...I'd hate to have been a CM last night. Even this morning won't be fun, as I'm sure they'll have a lot of very angry people. We're on our way to MK right now, we'll see what it's like... If it's not super crowded at Guest Relations, we'll see if we can at least get one FP+ to make up for the several we missed yesterday.

 

[MariMama]

We were in MK last night, and it seemed to be one of those rare nights where nothing was going right for them. I would not like to have been a CM last night, or even today.

Got there around 4:00pm. Had FP+ for Peter Pan. Down. Our MDE automatically updated our FP+ to give us other choices. Fine. Head over to Pooh. Down. Forget it. Waited in line for Small World, about 20ish minutes, not bad. As we're walking around after that, we see them evacuating PeopleMover.

Around 6:30ish, we head for our FP+ at SM. Must have been down earlier, because the FP+ line was literally all the way out the ride and past the Briar Patch. Never mind, we don't have 45+ minutes to wait for FP+.

Do a few other things, then head back to Peter Pan to try FP+ again. In line, and down it goes. Wait 10 minutes for them to try to restart it. No dice. Leave, and as we're walking past PeopleMover, guess what...see it at a dead stop again.

Get a spot at 8:30pm for parade, right by Hall of Presidents. Announcement at 8:55pm that parade is "delayed". Doesn't start until about 9:25pm.

This is one of the times we were very thankful to be AP holders and have spent a lot of time in MK, so we took it all in stride and knew other things to do. I will also say that in our experience, with all of the days we've spent at WDW, this was the first time we've seen things THAT bad. This is very rare. But ugh...I'd hate to have been a CM last night. Even this morning won't be fun, as I'm sure they'll have a lot of very angry people. We're on our way to MK right now, we'll see what it's like... If it's not super crowded at Guest Relations, we'll see if we can at least get one FP+ to make up for the several we missed yesterday.

I've had days like that at MK. We finally gave up and went back to our resort and used the heck out of our refillable mugs while enjoying the pool.

 

[britterbell]

We were in MK last night, and it seemed to be one of those rare nights where nothing was going right for them. I would not like to have been a CM last night, or even today.

Got there around 4:00pm. Had FP+ for Peter Pan. Down. Our MDE automatically updated our FP+ to give us other choices. Fine. Head over to Pooh. Down. Forget it. Waited in line for Small World, about 20ish minutes, not bad. As we're walking around after that, we see them evacuating PeopleMover.

Around 6:30ish, we head for our FP+ at SM. Must have been down earlier, because the FP+ line was literally all the way out the ride and past the Briar Patch. Never mind, we don't have 45+ minutes to wait for FP+.

Do a few other things, then head back to Peter Pan to try FP+ again. In line, and down it goes. Wait 10 minutes for them to try to restart it. No dice. Leave, and as we're walking past PeopleMover, guess what...see it at a dead stop again.

Get a spot at 8:30pm for parade, right by Hall of Presidents. Announcement at 8:55pm that parade is "delayed". Doesn't start until about 9:25pm.

This is one of the times we were very thankful to be AP holders and have spent a lot of time in MK, so we took it all in stride and knew other things to do. I will also say that in our experience, with all of the days we've spent at WDW, this was the first time we've seen things THAT bad. This is very rare. But ugh...I'd hate to have been a CM last night. Even this morning won't be fun, as I'm sure they'll have a lot of very angry people. We're on our way to MK right now, we'll see what it's like... If it's not super crowded at Guest Relations, we'll see if we can at least get one FP+ to make up for the several we missed yesterday.

I've had days like that at MK. We finally gave up and went back to our resort and used the heck out of our refillable mugs while enjoying the pool.

As have we! We went on a Wednesday last August and couldn't find anything with a wait less than 25 minutes (and that was for smaller rides like IASW). Not to mention, the walkways were super crowded as well. I follow a CM on Twitter who had actually mentioned something about last night!

 

[GotLabradors]

Can you just imagine homw many times those CMs heard 'I paid X amount of money for this trip and nothing works!'. I do get that it is a reasonable expectation for the rides to work, but let's face it, the front line CMs aren't the maintenance people or the operations managers that make maintenance decisions. Those front line CMs take quite a bit of abuse that should be directed further up the line.

 

[11290]

The parade actually was only delayed about 10 minutes due to an issue with the Tinker Bell unit and only was about that amount of time later in Liberty Sq. than it would have been, which is normally about 9:18 to 9:20 anyway so no real problems with guests about that. Parade had cleared Liberty Bridge aound 9:30 ish and before the CTM announcements.

Monday night it was delayed about 20 minutes with CTM and Wishes being delayed also but that was due to a medical situation near the Empoium that required transport.

Some guests wer complaining about "crowds" but it was really a fairly "high moderate" in-park level for he first parade.

 

[loves to dive]

I agree I bet it was a bad day at work for them and it's not their fault. Like OP I'm an AP holder so don't get upset about those kinds of things, we just move on to another park. My co-worker just got back from Anaheim where there was some sort of UTube convention her daughter just HAD to attend so they did one day at DL/CA. She said there were a number of rides down at DL and even though they only had one day at the parks they weren't upset. Oh, she also said CA wasn't crowded at all, DL was sort of but they didn't FP anything. They are WDW people, don't go but about every 3 or 4 years but are familiar with it and were amazed at how small DL/CA was but enjoyed it.

 

[DisneyFive]

What a cluster. Bummer.

Dan

 

[Micca]

Can you just imagine homw many times those CMs heard 'I paid X amount of money for this trip and nothing works!'. I do get that it is a reasonable expectation for the rides to work, but let's face it, the front line CMs aren't the maintenance people or the operations managers that make maintenance decisions. Those front line CMs take quite a bit of abuse that should be directed further up the line.

I ran into a family like that a couple of weeks ago. We were waiting for Wishes just across from Crystal Palace, and the CMs were asking some people to move to another area as they were trying to keep an open passage way between Adventureland and Main St. A woman gave her complaint #382B--"We paid $7.000 and have been here 5 days and still haven't seen the fireworks."*
I Felt bad for the CM who gets $8 and change per hour and has to take that kind of comment with a smile on their face. I know not every CM is perfect, but many of them are saints.

** Cynical Micca thinks to himself: Well, there are 50,000 people here right now watching fireworks. What do you suppose they did that you haven't been able to figure out?

 

[SaintsManiac]

Another great reason to have hoppers

 

[pigletgirl]

Wow, that's a bummer. Glad it didn't get you guys too down. Sometimes it pays to be a seasoned visitor!

 

[epcotty]

I don't know what the deal is with Peoplemover. I think it had to be evacuated 4 days ago too, was stopped a really long time. I don't remember it ever being so unreliable. We ended up skipping it but we've done that before enough. We're still debating about APs ourselves, makes everything not so crucial

 

[js]

Can you just imagine homw many times those CMs heard 'I paid X amount of money for this trip and nothing works!'. I do get that it is a reasonable expectation for the rides to work, but let's face it, the front line CMs aren't the maintenance people or the operations managers that make maintenance decisions. Those front line CMs take quite a bit of abuse that should be directed further up the line.

I work in a private expensive college and we hear the same thing..."you know how much we paid....."
Doesn't mean you still shouldn't be nice on the phone.

 

[ajwolfe]

We had a day very similar to this in May. Having been there several times we weren't that upset about it even though it was annoying. But the family with us was there on their first trip and was starting to get a bit annoyed.
Honestly I can get how people can get the attitude of I paid X to get here and nothing works because you do have a reasonable expectation that MOST of the stuff will be operating at all points in the day but I would never express that to a CM. I know at one point we literally got bounced from our Splash FP+ and our Space FP+ back to back due to issues and tried like 3 other rides around the same time that shut down while we were in line or on our way there. That is beyond a reasonable amount IMO.

 

[Accident]

i'd have to see how much was broken or how much still had standby but this sounds like a legit refund me or let me park hop so I can go to a park that is working situation....

I almost went to MK last night too, looks like I did the right thing and went to HS on a popcorn bucket mission and found a mostly walk on park

 

[Minnesota!]

We had a day at MK like that last week. EVERYTHING was malfunctioning. People were not happy. Those poor CM's were getting the shaft from people, that's for sure!

I've had days like that at MK. We finally gave up and went back to our resort and used the heck out of our refillable mugs while enjoying the pool.

Which is why we have vowed to now only do resort-only. The pool is RARELY down, and the ice cold beverages don't require lines

 

[Klayfish]

The parade actually was only delayed about 10 minutes due to an issue with the Tinker Bell unit and only was about that amount of time later in Liberty Sq. than it would have been, which is normally about 9:18 to 9:20 anyway so no real problems with guests about that. Parade had cleared Liberty Bridge aound 9:30 ish and before the CTM announcements.

Monday night it was delayed about 20 minutes with CTM and Wishes being delayed also but that was due to a medical situation near the Empoium that required transport.

Some guests wer complaining about "crowds" but it was really a fairly "high moderate" in-park level for he first parade.

I assume you're a CM. Cool to know what the actual delay was for the parade start...my kids were guessing. Some of their random guesses were quite hilarious...let's just say they're into potty humor.

Yeah, the rest of it was an unwelcome surprise, but it happens. There are so many things to do in MK that while we're certainly disappointed we didn't get to do what we planned, we can find other things to do. We walked into City Hall this morning, I calmly explained what happened. CM was very pleasant and gave us 2 FP+ for the ones we missed yesterday. Quick and easy, no fuss. Things went much smoother today, but you can definitely see the holiday crowd starting to build.

 

[Minnesota!]

I don't know what the deal is with Peoplemover. I think it had to be evacuated 4 days ago too, was stopped a really long time. I don't remember it ever being so unreliable. We ended up skipping it but we've done that before enough. We're still debating about APs ourselves, makes everything not so crucial

Peoplemover, from the brief snippet I saw/experienced, was down 4 times on our day, and I saw it evacuated 2 of those times. It's my favorite park of MK...so relaxing. I hope they fix it and don't scrap it.

 

[Mambo Junkie]

I've had days like that at MK. We finally gave up and went back to our resort and used the heck out of our refillable mugs while enjoying the pool.

We did the same thing in May when at least 5 rides went down on us, including 2 I had fps for. We split around 3 after a wonderful, restful lunch at Skippers.

 

[Mambo Junkie]

The number of and frequency of the break downs is concerning to me. Do you suppose at due to higher volume of people using them, i.e. more people in the parks?
Our MK day we ha 7DMT, Space Mtn. Barnstormer, Pooh and the train (those are he ones I knew of) then on our Epcot day TT was down some and Figment broke down on us. Every day I see on Lines that several are down daily.

 

[GotLabradors]

The number of and frequency of the break downs is concerning to me. Do you suppose at due to higher volume of people using them, i.e. more people in the parks?
Our MK day we ha 7DMT, Space Mtn. Barnstormer, Pooh and the train (those are he ones I knew of) then on our Epcot day TT was down some and Figment broke down on us. Every day I see on Lines that several are down daily.

Also, with no true off season anymore, does Disney really have the adequate time to take rides offline to really do the needed maintenance wihtout disappointing thousands of guests?