Can Disney admit that FP+ and MDE are a fail?

[Lisa loves Pooh]

No, because it is not a failure.

Agreed.

 

[jlm196]

It is hard to say it is an epic fail when they are technically still "testing". I can agree that right not it is not what we would like it to be and we can continue to hope that things will be added like the ability to hop or the ability to book more that 3 day of once you use your original 3 and many other options but until we are out of the testing phase and see the final product we don't really know if it is a failure or not.

 

[PeterPanic]

It's too early to tell. People have vacations planned for over a year, and most of those people don't have a clue what is going to happen to them. It will be interesting to see how next year looks after people get a taste of dealing with guest relations to fix a myriad of problems. Guest relations is a very popular place right now.

If it takes another year to iron out the bugs, what would two years of substantial problems do to their trips in the future?

There will be hundreds of thousand of off site guests show up for spring break and their ability to get FP will be hampered by on site guests booking up everything, dealing with kiosks, and tiers are going to be a rude awakening for on site and off site guests not in the know.

While a large percentage will love it, that doesn't help much- because they were going to love their trip anyway. It is the large group who was expecting to love their trip and walk away frustrated who dictate how successful this will be.

Even if FP+ is good for people! it isn't really something in itself that would attract new guests. Well, maybe after the magic band commercials start to hit the airwaves, but not right now.

The mine train will do much more to bring guests to the park than the silly bracelets.

Why would anyone think that the bands would bring people into the parks. It is a system the same as the turnstiles used to be in many ways. Like the turnstiles, the LET people into the parks, they didn't bring them in. The attractions, reputation or word of mouth brought them in. MM+ and the Bands are a system. Some think that they are cool, other just view them more as a simplification of the more manual system of turnstiles and point of sales transactions. With that they added a few things that connected with the Bands and that would be ADR's and FP+. Fastpass is a part of the whole program but not the whole program, just a part of it.

I started going to WDW long before any of that stuff was in place and long before over half of what is currently WDW even existed, yet, I found a reason to go back.

If the only thing that makes WDW enjoyable to someone is Fastpass then, in my opinion they are missing the whole point and instead of seeing an emersive upbeat experience, all they are seeing is an amusement park. Might as well save some money and find one somewhere.

 

[Brian Noble]

I suspect someone has posted this already, but Iger had a couple of interesting things to say about MM+/FP+ in the quarterly earnings call last week (emphasis mine):

Question: Okay. And then for Bob, you guys have talked about the cost of MyMagic+ this quarter. But can you give us some indications of how the rollout is going on, the revenue and customer behavior. Because per caps is really good this quarter, so what's going on with MyMagic+?

Answer: I can't quantify it from a financial perspective yet. It's still early, and we are still rolling out facets of it. What I can say is that what has been rolled out has been a real success, both for the guest and for us. So to give you a for instance, our Parks people in Walt Disney World believe during the peak holiday season that we were able to accommodate about 3,000 more additional guests in the Magic Kingdom per day, thanks to MyMagic+. One of the most attractive features and one that I think will have possibly the biggest benefit is the FastPass+, which is the ability to reserve three times on three attractions per day, either before you visited the park if you are a resort guest, or on the day that you enter the park if you are a same-day or a single-day ticket holder.

What we are seeing there is substantially higher utilization of that product among our guests than we saw with a traditional FastPass, by the way, by a wide margin. And since the goal of this was to make the guest experience better, enable the guest to experience more, to do so more efficiently, and essentially to be able to customize, we think that these are very, very good signs for us because clearly guest satisfaction is very, very important to the value equation for us, both how they spend their time when they are with us and a determining factor in terms of whether they come back.

So this is all very good. So I would say the biggest impact is, one, being able to accommodate more people, because it's just more efficient, and secondly, enabling guests to have a substantially better experience than they have had before because they are doing more.

I suppose you could assume that Iger is flat out lying to the analysts on the call, but that's the sort of thing that one does at one's peril.

But, if he's not lying, then it seems plausible that FP+ is anything but a failure. Furthermore, if a substantial number of guests are using FP+, the limits of 3/day and tiering are pretty much necessary so that as many guests as possible get a chance at some of the more in-demand headliners. It's just the way the math works out given the capacity of these few attractions vs. the average attendance of their respective parks.