Eh, maybe the Daily Mail is being a wee bit disingenous with those bullet points (gee, isn't that a surprise from the Daily Mail?) I've now read the interview excerpts in 8 different published stories, including the very detailed, quote-filled one in
Variety, and nowhere can I find a statement connecting the intent to grow profits with forgetting the fan base. In fact, I've seen no mention of the "fan base" at all, except that every writer said that Disney had been getting complaints from fans about recent price hikes in the parks, but that sentiment wasn't directly quoted from Iger.
Most of what he said about pricing was in regard to
Disney+, not the parks, and it was about pricing D+ too low, not too high. The big "admission" was that Disney had been spending unwisely on it's television streaming content, putting too much into marketing platforms, rather than the content on those platforms. It was spending a *lot* to acquire and/or create, but not sufficiently advertising actual programming, and content creators also started to leave as a result of poor viewership numbers. (D+ hasn't really lost a significant percentage of US streaming viewers, but subscriber growth here has slowed to a crawl; and viewers in India and Asia cancelled in droves this past year when prices increased.)
As to the parks, from
Variety:
"Meanwhile, Disney’s theme parks and products group saw revenue climb 21% to $8.7 billion and operating income rise 25% to $3.1 billion for the last three months of 2022 — the standout for the quarter. Iger said Disney’s parks are “a great business” that rebounded well post-pandemic, but he said “we may have been a little bit too aggressive about some of our pricing.” Disney has had to reduce crowding in its theme parks while still maintaining profitability — and also keeping its pricing “accessible” to consumers."
And from
Deadline,
"At theme parks, Iger made a move by January, lowering some prices and adding perks at Disneyland and Walt Disney World. That included, at WDE in Orlando, resuming complimentary self-parking at resort hotels, relaxing reservation requirements for annual passholders and offering free photo downloads with Genie+ service. At Disneyland in Anaheim, he expanded park-hopping hours and added more of the lowest-price day trip tickets, as well as the complimentary photos.
The shifts “have resonated extremely well with consumers, and we will not only continue to listen to consumers, but we will continue to adjust,” Iger said.
He noted the perpetual challenge of trying to improve the guest experience by reducing crowding. Moves to do that can “actually end up increasing the price, or putting features into your pricing that are viewed by consumers as being a little too aggressive.”
And from the
LA Times:
"
Park strategies, in particular, have come under the microscope. “One of the things that we had to do was we had to improve the guest experience by reducing crowding,” Iger said. “It’s tempting to let more and more people in, but if the guest satisfaction levels are going down because of crowding then that doesn’t work. We have to figure out how we reduce crowding but maintain our profitability. And we did that well.”
Notice that the word Iger uses to refer to visitors is "consumers", not "fans". Fans is a word that implies repeat visitors, and as we've all heard by now, repeat visitors don't spend as much per day as the folks who view the trip as a "once in a lifetime" experience. They are still going to be putting most of their travel marketing energy into attracting those once-in-a-lifetime folks; after all, there is a nearly endless supply of them, even if you're only looking at Americans. It also doesn't hurt that high incidentals pricing is something those folks don't encounter until the trip is already underway. If you price rooms and tickets low enough to attract them, but then soak them on Genie/Lightning, food and souvenirs once they arrive, the money still comes rolling in, because they are not going to just leave without actually going to the parks, which a passholder might do. Some of them will complain later, of course, but by that point Disney already has their money. And right now that's super-important to the overall profitability of the company at large, because the parks still make money, while D+, Hulu and ESPN are losing it in buckets.
I'm a shareholder and a WDW AP holder, so this topic definitely interests me, but that interview just wasn't quite the "we're SO sorry about the parks" scenario that the Daily Mail made it out to be. The key takeaway I got about the Florida parks was a bit of a hint that the company is considering building the Florida parks out to take advantage of empty land surrounding them, to further to spread out the crowds. That perception of more space can be done in a lot of ways, even with simple landscaping, not necessarily with new rides, so I'm not getting my hopes way up, but if it makes the guest experience more pleasant in return for the price hikes already imposed, I'm all for that.
FWIW, we still visit often, but we no longer stay onsite, which we always did before the pandemic. We are not early-morning people, and with the loss of included ground transfers from MCO and the loss of included evening Extra Magic hours, there's no longer any advantage to us in staying on-site. Along with that, we also eat breakfast and some dinners off-site now, which end up costing a lot less than comparable meals at WDW resorts. We do spend just a little more on in-park purchases, though, since we're spending less on lodging, but we don't pay for Genie+ or
Lightning Lane; we just do standby or virtual queue when we can. All in all I think they are making less money off our visits, even though we still buy extremely expensive full annual passes (we're out of state, but grandfathered in.)
