Disney's ride down time higher then it's ever been

[DLgal]

Low money to pay bills is better than no money to pay bills. Still gotta eat and live somewhere.
There is something deeper to people not working than just not wanting low wages. If you get laid off from your $70K a year job, you don't just sit at home and do nothing if a $35K a year job is all you can find.

Maybe you do sit at home if you aren't the sole income source. Maybe your child care was costing $3k/month and working for $35k a year doesn't even cover that. For a lot of people, they won't work if the pay doesn't make it "worth it."

I stopped working when my first child was born for that exact reason.

 

[BrightMorningStar]

Maybe you do sit at home if you aren't the sole income source. Maybe your child care was costing $3k/month and working for $35k a year doesn't even cover that. For a lot of people, they won't work if the pay doesn't make it "worth it."

I stopped working when my first child was born for that exact reason.

Yeah, I get the point about child care. It is crazy expensive.

 

[New Mouse]

Low money to pay bills is better than no money to pay bills. Still gotta eat and live somewhere.
There is something deeper to people not working than just not wanting low wages. If you get laid off from your $70K a year job, you don't just sit at home and do nothing if a $35K a year job is all you can find.

Except it's not hard to find work these days.

 

[Da Bird is Da Word]

I paid for Lightning Lanes to do Seven Dwarves Mine Train at 10 o’clock last Saturday and the ride was down when it was time for us to get on. I got a refund effortlessly by talking with a cast member on the MDE app, still a bit of a disappointment. In 2019 Splash Mountain got stuck while we were going up the hill for the final drop. But I don’t complain about that, because we got free passes out of it and a maybe once-in-a-lifetime behind the scenes look at the ride and the backstage area while they were evacuating us haha.

 

[Kennywood]

Not yet, anyway......

 

[cakiesmom]

I love Disney ... for the resorts..and the nostalgia... for the community.. however, I am in the camp of.. if I pay for a premium experience- tickets and LL etc, I expect that things will generally work. The prices are very high and hard for many to afford. Disney has an obligation IMHO to make sure the rides and parks are maintained appropriately. I bought DVC as things started opening up ( yes, I know how fortunate I am) so I've been able to go to the parks 4 times in the last 18 months for short trips. Every single time..I've been caught on broken rides. Sometimes 2 in a day. Epcot 'Spaceship Earth'. ( it was a 45-minute loss of waiting and walking off and then holding us to give us tickets that weren't worth anything as there was no line for the things they offered.). Then 'Living with the Land.' on the same day. And then On Haunted Mansion last October during the After Hours event. ( not as much fun as one might think) My son was stuck on another ride. I was stuck on 'Splash' in December. ( our mother/son visit before he left for college). No one expects perfection for sure. but I feel Disney is not accepting enough responsibility for the loss of time and experience for all of these broken rides. I work very hard to come to visit. I fly there with family or friends. Am I alone in generally expecting that we should be getting what we paid for? A nice experience that we can actually enjoy instead of being stuck, in a clean and well-maintained park? So many people in our community work so hard to go to Disney. Any thoughts?

 

[DLgal]

This problem has improved significantly at Disneyland Resort in the last month or so. Rides are coming back up MUCH more quickly than they had been and rides are not going down as often. Maintenance workers can frequently be seen walking around the parks.

 

[_19disnA]

What I find more annoying is that most of the articles online these days are behind paywalls and clearly I am not joining every site that pops up just to read an article. The OP's article is from the WSJ and if you don't pay a membership fee you can't read the article. Can't comment on the article's content without being able to read it..............LOL.

A lot of Disney rides involve a great deal of complicated technology that I assume takes skilled people to repair. Even before covid, we have been at Disney when various rides were down for 'maintenance'. Whether the downtime is higher now then in the past I have no way to know.

 

[Cfabar1]

I’m glad they don’t run the rides when there are issues with them. Ho weaver, in our recent visits, rides stopping frequently was a problem. It wasn’t just one ride, it would be multiple rides - many of the older ones. It made us wonder what maintenance is being deferred. Guests like feeling the magic, rides breaking down brings you right back to the problems of earth…. Not to mention it makes me at lest think of the horror stories of people dying at county fairs due to substandard safety.

 

[xipotec]

I do believe Iger is more apt to hear complaints and act on them. I also know there just seems to be a shortage of workers. Paying engineers and maintenance more will certainly help, but sometimes the people just aren't there to hire. I'm a teacher so I see that reality every day.

This is just plain wrong.

I am in medical. We are seeing shortages because people are fed up with being paid the lowest wage possible, and having to endure crazy work schedules, demands and environments.

This is a fixable problem across the country, but not with our current leadership, who value their own stock portfolios over paying people who actually make the world run, a fair wage.

Most of these folks do not own massive amounts of stock either.

You pay teachers 70-100k a year and you will have zero vacancies.

 

[teachmedis]

This is just plain wrong.

I am in medical. We are seeing shortages because people are fed up with being paid the lowest wage possible, and having to endure crazy work schedules, demands and environments.

This is a fixable problem across the country, but not with our current leadership, who value their own stock portfolios over paying people who actually make the world run, a fair wage.

Most of these folks do not own massive amounts of stock either.

You pay teachers 70-100k a year and you will have zero vacancies.

Well, that is what we make in NY, and yet there are, indeed, vacancies. We also have fantastic benefits and pensions (I am only speaking for NY here, I know in many states this is not the case for teachers). I think the difficulty of working in the medical field and teaching field is more of what's keeping people away. I absolutely agree that minimum wage needs to be raised, and I'm sure Disney needs to pay workers more. But the pandemic occurred as many boomers were retiring or encouraged to retire and it created a perfect to storm to cause a shortage of workers. In other avenues like fast food, that was often carried by teenagers, and parents aren't necessarily encouraging their teens to work as much as they used to. Kids' schedules are packed full. My point is there are a lot of reasons why positions are left open. Throwing money at it can't hurt, but there's going to need to be more than one solution because there's more than one problem.

 

[Yankee626]

We were at Hollywood studios on 1/12 at rope drop to Maximize the amount of rides we could go on in the AM. We successfully rode Slinkey Dog then went over to Mickey Mouse Runaway Railway. It went down while we were in line. AT the same time Tower of Terror , Rockin Roller Coaster and Rise of the Resistance went down. ( They were all down for about 90 min.) So we went over to the Millinium Falcon . said 30 min wait. we were on line for about a half hour and it went down for 90 min. Ridiculous. Just about the whole park was down for 90 min . It was a beautiful sunny morning. Still enjoyed the morning just walking around and drinking a coffee. When everything went back up there was about a 2 hour wait for everything. Just wound up leaving. If i didnt have an AP I would have asked for a refund.

 

[Chuck96]

Over the past few years, I've anecdotally observed this trend. Down time is a function of insufficient preventative maintenance and lack of available restoration care when there is a problem. That's skilled labor and thoughtful scheduling on both ends. It's the same problem on the wait times. Insufficient staff and training.

I've long wished for a simple and elegant solution. Affect the bottom line. Each ride can have 5% downtime during park hours for free. For every 15 minutes over that, ticketholders will be refunded a proportional percentage of their entry fee. More rides in the park, a smaller proportion of course. But if ToT, Rise, RnR, and MMRR were down 90 minutes each - that would add up, especially over every ticket sold. Incentivize a quality product.

I know that, technically, that's the customers responsibility. We vote by buying tickets. But it's nice to dream.

 

[jecarnl]

I'm sure Disney is facing the same issues that most companies are facing when it comes to maintenance.
1. Maintenance cost money.
2. Finding and retaining quality maintenance cast members. If they are good at troubleshooting and aren't just part changers, they can write their own check at better jobs than Disney.
3. Executives that don't understand the necessity of a proper maintenance program.
4. Executives facing low earnings usually cost maintenance or operational cost first.

 

[New Mouse]

I'm sure Disney is facing the same issues that most companies are facing when it comes to maintenance.
1. Maintenance cost money.
2. Finding and retaining quality maintenance cast members. If they are good at troubleshooting and aren't just part changers, they can write their own check at better jobs than Disney.
3. Executives that don't understand the necessity of a proper maintenance program.
4. Executives facing low earnings usually cost maintenance or operational cost first.

With the prices they charge there is literally 0 reason to skimp on maintenance. They literally have the highest ticket price in the industry and in many cases, smaller parks or less rides than many others in the industry.

 

[Jrb1979]

I'm sure Disney is facing the same issues that most companies are facing when it comes to maintenance.
1. Maintenance cost money.
2. Finding and retaining quality maintenance cast members. If they are good at troubleshooting and aren't just part changers, they can write their own check at better jobs than Disney.
3. Executives that don't understand the necessity of a proper maintenance program.
4. Executives facing low earnings usually cost maintenance or operational cost first.

Disagree. I visited many different parks last summer. Yes those parks had their downtime but nothing as bad as Disney has had.