I'm also against this stupid petition, it's been blown way out of proportion and I think a lot of the 5,000 who have signed it probably are not regular visitors or they are the guests who nit pick at everything. I will not be signing it.
This petition is one of many actions carried out by individuals in the wake of some "uprising" (sorry for the strong word) on DisneyCentralPlaza (DCP) a French board about DisneylandParis which is run and maintained by a few CMs, including some working in Public Relations. If you want an order of magnitude for that board, it's about the same magnitude as DIBB for UK guests towards WDW, and the same order of magnitude as DIS (USA) towards WDW
There is a very fair chance that, most of those who signed that petition are regulars, locals, AP or shareholders.
But as stated above this is ONE among many other actions. Don't limit the action to a single petition just because a tabloid talked about it several months after the facts.
this is the reason for smoking being allowed to carry on as it is. The official line we were given was because they simply do not have the staff to reinforce the rule....
This official line is crap. I'll tell you why.
It doesn't require elite personnel to tell someone "put out that cigarette, no smoking please". It doesn't require more staff. There are supposed to be CMs at rides, lines, and inside the parks. CMS, Operators, Guest Flows, Security, and so on.
If they don't have the staff to enforce the rules, it simply means that there is not enough staff inside the park to ensure the safety of guests ...
I hope that you understand what that official line would mean if it were true.
but the most disturbing thing about what you tell here is that it shows (among so many other examples) how easily guests are being lied to (even when they go complain at City Hall ..
I will tell you the true reason :
while some CMs actually do their best to enforce the rules, a vast quantity of CMs consider that they don't get paid enough to risk a frontal confrontation with a guest (a "guest situation" in disney speech) and that's why the rules are not enforced.
Telling you that there is not enough staff is an understatement, the sentence was "truncated" by the CM who told you this; the real sentence should have been "there is not enough staff willing to enforce the rules".
and this is what's sad about DLP.
.even though there is a smoking ban in France people do not adhere to it.
most of us (the French) do. There is a quantity of people who don't, but the issue goes beyond the simple fact of smoking when it's banned.
There are rude people, and rude people will not stop at smoking where prohibited.
And once again, should I add that there is a fair amount of smoking guests in DLP who speak english or spanish. So we just need to be careful not to make blanket statements .
City Hall is the place to go to complain about anything, no matter how vial you think it is or if it's really bothered you to the point you can't let it go, make it known.
If you knew how complaints were handled (after you leave) at City Hall, you'd probably change your mind about this. Enough said ...
As for training, Statewide training wouldn't work here. The culture is too different for a happy clappy "have a nice day" CM. The Europeans wouldn't appreciate it in the way they to in WDW or DLR, though I do think if the park was in the UK the style of CM would be completely different.
I don't see how European guests would appreciate more the Disney "have a nice day" in the UK than in France, those would be the same guests, wouldn't they ?
No there is another issue here. If the european guests would not appreciate the way it's done in the US, which is the way it was intended and made for by Mr Walt Disney, then it probably means that Europe is unworthy of having a Disney Park, or that the Disney Way cannot be imported in Europe at all.
Or at least that's what implied by your statement, IF we consider that a Disney Park has to be true to its Disney origins.
Trouble is, there are also a few that just see it as a job.
trouble is that there are incentives for companies to hire long time unemployed, or young people who have been in "trouble" before. What I will next say will sound rather harsh, but you can't do a good Disney CM with a youth who just don't care about anything. Who'd rather be selling drugs on the street corner than wear a goofy costume, and who is there only because it's this or jail (This is a caricature, but you get the picture, and you need to know that there are incentives, and the State even gives money to companies to hire those no company in their right minds would hire)
Of course not all CMs are like this, there are very good CMs, but when in your team there are a few elements who do not follow, it begins to drag the team down. And there are jobs protection laws here which make it almost impossible to lay someone off, even if this person does nothing on the job
and we have the unions, who constantly tell the staff that they get paid so little a wage that they should slow down.
It is a multi-facetted problem. And you can't fight this, because France has an employment policy that would (and that does) scare off foreign companies.
But to be honest, I actually think the CM's are great,
yes they are, for a vast majority of them. But those who don't do their jobs hardly can be laid off, so in turn, those who do their jobs end up being discouraged, they quit, and by a pure mathematical mechanism, in the long run the number of those who are no good gets higher and higher. You can't change that system and that trend unless France dramatically changes its employment policy, and our unions won't let that happen, just see the strikes that will be coming, like clockwork in the weeks and months to come.
and things like the toilets, are not solely down to them. I put more money on the guest that throws the paper towel on the floor instead of the bin, or the guest that doesn't flush (c'mon you just wave at the thing) and the guest that leaves a sanitary or nappy on the floor because why should they care? They don't have to clean it or pick it up.
Noone can really argue that they lack staff at DLP. They have over 12.000 direct employees. There are no shows, very few characters, stores are sometimes closed .... where on earth are those CMs ?
But the most important thing is that it's not DLP who operates the cleaning operations. It's a contractor (I think it's Elior, a very large service company in France, even operates the kitchen in my kid's school)
So this is a contractor, and the issue is not that guests are filthy and ill-mannered, it's the fact that the contractor doesn't do its jobs.
when you enter the toilets at the arboretum on an EMH day, and you're visibly the first guest to enter that place, and it looks like there's been a riot in there, you can't blame the guests, you need to blame the company that was supposed to clean that mess up and failed.
Now there is another side to this story. It's that when you enter a spotlessly clean toilet, you automatically pay more attention, and if you make a mess, most of the time you clean up yourself. But when you enter a toilet booth that looks like a warzone, even if you make a mess of things (this can happen, especially with kids) then you won't clean up, because that would mean also cleaning other people's mess.
So here, you can trace the problem back to the contractor, who does not check and clean the toilets as often as they should (I remember a day where the toilets near "chalet de la marionette" were not visited once, not once...) I also remember days where at opening time, the toilets had not been cleaned up.
If you go to a US park, you'll notice that there will be, most of the time, a "caution wet floor" sign at the entrance, because the cleaning ladies have been busy doing what they get paid for.
Can you see the same in DLP ? answer is no.
On that issue, there is a failure from the contractor to correctly do what they are supposed to do
and most of all, there is a failure from DLP to REQUIRE that the contractor did their job like stated in their contract.
sorry for that long post.
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