Saw an interesting article tonight on miceage.com, which began with the following quote from Disney's CFO:
We have known for a really long time that getting our visitors to Walt Disney World to make decisions about where they spend their time before they leave home is a powerful driver of visits per guest. When they get into the Orlando market and their time isnt yet planned, they can be subject to everything you see down there, which is a lot of in-city marketing for all the many products that people have put there to basically bleed off the feed that we fundamentally motivate. So if we can get people to plan their vacation before they leave home, we know that we get more time with them. We get a bigger share of their wallet. So thats one thing for you guys to think about.
And the second thing is, what happens to purchases when they become much more convenient and you dont spend time queuing up for a transaction, queuing up to get in the park and you actually have more time to enjoy the entertainment and subsequently spend more money doing things other than standing in line which, of course, you cant spend any money while youre doing that. - Disney CFO Jay Rasulo, on the 2013 2nd Quarter Earnings Call
From the article:
"Fastpass+ ... was not driven by guest demand it was driven by the desire to keep people on property. The belief is that if a guest has multiple ride reservations scheduled, that has value to the guest. From Disneys perspective, they believe the guest wont want to concede their reservations in favor of visiting another Orlando theme park....Fastpass+ is a ruse to sell guests on whats already there. Every component of it is designed to deceive guests into staying on property."
http://micechat.com/47066-leveraging-next-gen/