Interesting read on 20 new things coming to WDW by 2017

[yitbos96bb]

Well the problem that will always blind heavy fans to the truth is that they place more faith in anecdotal like stories than any actual metrics or studies. The "you are adding enough and I'm not coming back crowd" may have a vocal soapbox on fan forums but they are such a tiny tiny aspect in the greater scheme that I'm willing to wager they have 0 impact on Disney's bottom line. We are not talking a million people... I have my doubt it reaches barely above 5 figures if that. Of course that's speculation and I have no quantitative evidence. Dis and other forums are such a tiny amount of annual Disney visitors... I think too many people put too much stock in a vocal group that makes up a nearly unmeasurable minority of the annual numbers...

Even on the dis I think that crowd is a tiny but vocal minority. But again just speculation.

Disney won't directly react to Universal until it negatively impacts the WDW parks. For 5 years now, people have been speculating about how USF would "hurt" WDW...claimed that Disney is losing their dollars because they are spending a few days at USF instead of all at WDW. And Disney has been berated for not investing in the parks as much as USF is.

Still, Disney attendance continues to grow.

If anything, there appears to be a synergistic relationship between the two. I suspect there are people visiting the WDW/USF combo who would have never travelled to central FL for one or the other.

Whatever business Disney is losing from the "you aren't adding enough so I'm not coming back" crowd is being made-up with new business. Disney's bread and butter has always been families with young children and there's always a fresh supply of those folks.

And to be clear, I'm not defending Disney's apparent lack of investment in WDW. Just pointing out that so far it hasn't come back to bite them.

I suspect things will continue to purr along until the next major disruption in the economy / tourism. DVC was hit very hard in '08-09 (a dramatic number of contracts were dumped on the resale market)...and it will be much worse next time around. And with room rates & ticket prices continuing to escalate, hard telling how much they'll have to discount in order to attract business when consumers are unwilling / unable to spend.

But I think Disney will gladly cash-in to the best of their abilities today and worry about discounting when the time comes.

 

[xie]

As long as people travel at the same relentless frequency...and do so while swallowing constantly increasing prices...

This will not end - it will intensify

It's about to bite them back.

I have two groups of relatives who have trekked to WDW in the last few months.

The first group was large, a couple of dozen people. They had a horrendously difficult experience at ASM and a number of bad times in restaurants and the parks. None of them plan to ever return - the consensus was "well, we saw it, it's one of those things you want to see, but never again".

The second group was a family with 4 and 5 year olds - PRIME disney target for repeat guests for the next 4-6 years, as long as they were pleased. And they weren't, they felt that the resort room was extremely overpriced for what it was. They tried the DDP and also felt their money was largely wasted. And so on. Their little kids want to go back sometime but the parents do not ever want to go back to Disney again. This family has a history of vacationing in many other places so I doubt they will return to WDW ever.

We have been hard-core repeat visitors (coming from out of state no less, it's not a little or inexpensive trip for us) and we just made our final visit last week. Our APs expire in May. Disney has crossed the "price is too high for the diminishing value" Rubicon for us.

 

[xie]

This is an important argument. It doesn't justify the lack of interest towards new additions to WDW, but what some people fail to see when comparing WDW to Universal, is that one of them actually spends time creating every single detail behind each attraction (most of them tangible and interactive), and the other is developing screen based attractions one after the other. Disney definitely has to step up their game for the following years, but I still think that a lot can be argued about this WDW vs Universal debate.

Well... this particular argument (animatronic scenes vs. screens) doesn't sell me. We are living through a huge change in society driven by technological innovation. Take a look around - anytime you are in public half the people around you will be doing something on a SCREEN. Whether it's a television or a Kindle reader or a Nintendo DS or a smartphone or a tablet, "playing on screens" is now absolutely America's favorite pasttime.

This generation of consumers isn't going to think a thing about getting on a screen-based ride vs. sitting in a slow moving boat watching animatronic dummies that move back and forth every few seconds on a beautifully dressed set.

I'm not saying Disney's ride art isn't lovely, because it absolutely is in many cases. But people aren't going to shun Universal for not replicating the same scene-based stuff. They will happily (and naturally, thanks to all the devices and screens they are plugged into all day every day) ride screen-based rides into eternity.

 

[xie]

I agree...Disney has got to be thinking "Those 3.3 million new guests could be ours." I'm sure that's why they are going ahead with Avatar in AK. But it's not enough...there needs be something big and new at DHS and EPCOT, too.

I actually think those 3.3 million "new" Uni guests ARE Disney guests. It isn't safe to assume that everyone who comes to Orlando only attends Uni or WDW but not both.

Disney isn't stupid. They probably aren't thrilled that Universal is adding new stuff, but they also recognize that regardless of which "main driver" gets a customer to Orlando, both park companies stand to profit because many people will attend both. A rising tide lifts all boats (at least until one of the boats becomes too expensive).

I think that when people used to come to Florida, they perhaps went ONLY to DisneyWorld, and only once (or perhaps never) to Universal. So Disney generally captured their attention/dollars for the entire duration of their trip (say, the average 8 day vacation).

When Uni opened HP in IoA, I believe a lot of those guests who formerly only visited Disney began adding 1-2 Universal days to their trips. This buffed Universal's attendance, but didn't necessarily visibly damage WDW's numbers, because they were probably selling length of stay passes to the same people via packages. Go to Uni in the morning, go to Illuminations in the evening. Etc. But the more Universal adds to their parks, the higher chance that WDW guests will stray for a longer part of their "vacation week".

Losing guests for part of the vacation week to Universal TOTALLY explains Magic Bands and FP+, and all of the trip planning tools in the app. They flat out said in their meetings that, and I paraphrase, "if we get the guest to plan far ahead and lock in their choices each day, they will stay on our property". Translation: let's have them pre-schedule "appointments" each day and they will have additional incentive not to cross the street to visit the other guy.

Disney's not scared that they are losing guests 100% to Universal. They're scared their going to lose 50% of that typical vacation week's spending.

 

[rteetz]

It's about to bite them back. I have two groups of relatives who have trekked to WDW in the last few months. The first group was large, a couple of dozen people. They had a horrendously difficult experience at ASM and a number of bad times in restaurants and the parks. None of them plan to ever return - the consensus was "well, we saw it, it's one of those things you want to see, but never again". The second group was a family with 4 and 5 year olds - PRIME disney target for repeat guests for the next 4-6 years, as long as they were pleased. And they weren't, they felt that the resort room was extremely overpriced for what it was. They tried the DDP and also felt their money was largely wasted. And so on. Their little kids want to go back sometime but the parents do not ever want to go back to Disney again. This family has a history of vacationing in many other places so I doubt they will return to WDW ever. We have been hard-core repeat visitors (coming from out of state no less, it's not a little or inexpensive trip for us) and we just made our final visit last week. Our APs expire in May. Disney has crossed the "price is too high for the diminishing value" Rubicon for us.

Well I could see how a group of a couple dozen people could turn into a bad situation. Now as for the second group was there any specific reason for them not wanting to go back?

Disney will continue to rise prices as long as people pay. People are still coming in droves and every day and disney continues to rack in record profits. As long as disney does this prices will continue to rise because people are still coming. For us instead of going every year or two we have spaced it out more to every four to five years.

 

[xie]

Well I could see how a group of a couple dozen people could turn into a bad situation. Now as for the second group was there any specific reason for them not wanting to go back?

Re: the couple of dozen people group - the thing is, they certainly paid as much as everyone else to be there. Why should their experience be worse because they happened to have a larger family? Rhetorical question and I don't expect an answer, there is none really except Disney has problems to solve.

As for the smaller family, as told to me - among the things they felt reflected poorly on Disney were a lengthy check-in process ("ridiculous", "almost an hour" were the words used), overpriced room, unhappy with the quality of the room, had trouble with DDP and table service, and felt they spent too many hours per day in lines (for pretty much everything) given the high cost of a week onsite. The DDP in particular they felt was a bad value, as they did the math and realized that unless they ordered the most expensive thing on every menu they were losing money. (That left a bad taste, no pun intended - they felt even more taken advantage of when they realized it.) We talked about it for a couple of hours and they had a lot of thoughts and opinions but overall, they ultimately felt it wasn't a good value, and have no plans to return.

 

[luisov]

Well... this particular argument (animatronic scenes vs. screens) doesn't sell me. We are living through a huge change in society driven by technological innovation. Take a look around - anytime you are in public half the people around you will be doing something on a SCREEN. Whether it's a television or a Kindle reader or a Nintendo DS or a smartphone or a tablet, "playing on screens" is now absolutely America's favorite pasttime.

This generation of consumers isn't going to think a thing about getting on a screen-based ride vs. sitting in a slow moving boat watching animatronic dummies that move back and forth every few seconds on a beautifully dressed set.

I'm not saying Disney's ride art isn't lovely, because it absolutely is in many cases. But people aren't going to shun Universal for not replicating the same scene-based stuff. They will happily (and naturally, thanks to all the devices and screens they are plugged into all day every day) ride screen-based rides into eternity.

I'm sure many people don't mind. I personally do. I'm one of those guys that watches a movie and thinks ''well, they could've done that in a real stage rather than creating a CGI environment''

I do enjoy a couple of screen based rides every now and then, but I don't like the idea of simulator/screen combo being the future of theme parks.

 

[rteetz]

Re: the couple of dozen people group - the thing is, they certainly paid as much as everyone else to be there. Why should their experience be worse because they happened to have a larger family? Rhetorical question and I don't expect an answer, there is none really except Disney has problems to solve. As for the smaller family, as told to me - among the things they felt reflected poorly on Disney were a lengthy check-in process ("ridiculous", "almost an hour" were the words used), overpriced room, unhappy with the quality of the room, had trouble with DDP and table service, and felt they spent too many hours per day in lines (for pretty much everything) given the high cost of a week onsite. The DDP in particular they felt was a bad value, as they did the math and realized that unless they ordered the most expensive thing on every menu they were losing money. (That left a bad taste, no pun intended - they felt even more taken advantage of when they realized it.) We talked about it for a couple of hours and they had a lot of thoughts and opinions but overall, they ultimately felt it wasn't a good value, and have no plans to return.

Well I've never had a extremely long check in so I can't say that always happens. Where did they stay value, moderate, or deluxe? DDP isn't for everyone thats why we have never done it we have looked into and for us it won't save us much money that why we don't do it. Did they know about FP? I feel when you go to a major theme park of any kind you should expect some wait in lines. We can only go in peak seasons and we wait in lines for practically everything we don't wait if its over an hour but we will wait for 45 minutes. I know everyone's situation is different but to me the smaller family may have avoided some problems with some more research. And I'm sure for every lost family disney gains at least one more.

 

[tjkraz]

It's about to bite them back.

I have two groups of relatives who have trekked to WDW in the last few months.

The first group was large, a couple of dozen people. They had a horrendously difficult experience at ASM and a number of bad times in restaurants and the parks. None of them plan to ever return - the consensus was "well, we saw it, it's one of those things you want to see, but never again".

The second group was a family with 4 and 5 year olds - PRIME disney target for repeat guests for the next 4-6 years, as long as they were pleased. And they weren't, they felt that the resort room was extremely overpriced for what it was. They tried the DDP and also felt their money was largely wasted. And so on. Their little kids want to go back sometime but the parents do not ever want to go back to Disney again. This family has a history of vacationing in many other places so I doubt they will return to WDW ever.

We have been hard-core repeat visitors (coming from out of state no less, it's not a little or inexpensive trip for us) and we just made our final visit last week. Our APs expire in May. Disney has crossed the "price is too high for the diminishing value" Rubicon for us.

100% customer satisfaction is an unobtainable goal. While your relatives' experience was unfortunate, it would take thousands--perhaps millions--of similar experiences to really move the needle.

Even during Walt's day, guests walked away disappointed in their Disneyland visits.

Well... this particular argument (animatronic scenes vs. screens) doesn't sell me. We are living through a huge change in society driven by technological innovation. Take a look around - anytime you are in public half the people around you will be doing something on a SCREEN. Whether it's a television or a Kindle reader or a Nintendo DS or a smartphone or a tablet, "playing on screens" is now absolutely America's favorite pasttime.

But doesn't that render a screen-based theme park experience rather mundane?

I can sit in front of screens at home, on the bus or in my hotel room. Why should I pay $100+ per day--for every member of my family--to do the same? I could buy an awful lot of tablets and Nintendo DS' for the cost of a few days at Universal.

Speaking solely for my family, my wife gets motion sickness from simulators. At Disney, the only ride she won't go on is Star Tours. (Even Toy Story Mania is less than ideal, but she'll brave that once per trip.)

At Universal, the no-ride list now includes Despicable Me, Simpsons, Spider Man, Transformers, Forbidden Journey and sounds like the new HP train will be in the same class. Too bad.

 

[Disneychick75]

Sure but even modest attendance increases combined with across-the-board price increases is driving record profits for the theme parks.



I'm not going to write 500 words comparing and contrasting the two. USF clearly made a very shrewd move investing in Harry Potter. Projects which return that value don't come along every day.

IOA's pathetic pre-Harry Potter attendance had as much bearing on the attendance increase as anything else. $250 million invested in any WDW park would not bring 3 million additional guests through the gates. Not even on Star Wars.



Average guest spending continues to rise, regardless of the specifics.

Average guest spending might be up because Disney's prices keep soaring.

I hate the Uni/Disney comparisons mainly because of the people who never been to Uni dogging it. Both resorts are great. We have leaned towards Uni the last several years but we're also DVC members. Now we have a grandson so our trips, while still including Uni/Ioa, might have us adding a day or two to Disney.
I don't care if Uni ever surpasses Disney in attendance. Disney's reaction would probably be to add another lame Nemo/Little Mermaid type ride.

 

[Son of Gadsden]

And...why isn't this ridiculous?

I mean...six flags throws up something every year...

And that USED to be apples and oranges.

My feeling is that wdw is now in its "post attractions" society period. It's just not looking to provide THAT type of product anymore. It's on autopilot now...lengthy schedules and periods of "development" that look distinctly similar to "inactivity"...

The thrill us GONE, baby

I would say it's similar to what Microsoft has done with the gaming industry. They absolutely utterly dominate the gaming industry, then throw it on autopilot and turn to entertainment like playing TV through your xbox while Sony is playing catch up.

I suppose it's only natural for a business to slow down and expand to more markets when they feel like they are at the top.

 

[mvk]

With all due respect...it is "growing" at a snails pace. EPCOT isn't even growing at all, and many think that the next annual release of attendance numbers will show a DIP at EPCOT.

IOA, on the other hand, is up 3.3 million visitors in 5 short years.

Also, Disney is promoting Resort discounts year-round now. Another sign that all is not well on other parts of WDW that isn't the MK.

That's really not the case, with IOA.

2008 - 5.3M
2009 - 4.6M
2010 - 5.9M
2011 - 7.7M
2012 - 7.9M

Yes, from 2009-2012 they added 3.3M, but that was coming off a 0.7M drop. It's about a 2.6M gain, with 1.8M coming from HP. IOA isn't going to be opening another area like that again soon, so they're looking to be back at about a quarter million gain per year or so. It would take 10 years for IOA to pass AK/DHS if those parks do not gain at all.

USF will probably bump up around 1.5M with the Diagon Alley thing. They've been adding about 100k otherwise, but will probably do a little better after the HP2 project opens, maybe 250k gains as well.

These parks both have a long ways to go to catch the bottom two Disney Parks in Orlando. And there isn't much room for growth/expansion there, so at some point they will stagnate due to capacity. Epcot has some room to grow. DHS has some room to grow, and AK has a ton of room to grow.

I guess this is the monthly bash Disney because they aren't building things thread, when in reality that is not the case at all.

 

[ChipnDale79]

I went through the list on friday, so with Iger and Disney's history, how many of those on the "rumor" list do you think they will chop? My personal belief is 70-80% will never see the light of day.

I've read some "rumors" about free dining coming back this fall because bookings are down...but those of course are rumors and I have no idea of any of them are true.

One last comment, and this one will be directed towards the Universal vs. WDW crowd, people seem to always get stuck on "well disney still grew in attendance last year". We have no idea how much they could have grown if they actually put some focus on WDW, just because you're park attendance doesn't drop, doesn't mean you aren't losing potential business. How much more growth could WDW achieve if they actually did some great things at WDW?

 

[mvk]

I went through the list on friday, so with Iger and Disney's history, how many of those on the "rumor" list do you think they will chop? My personal belief is 70-80% will never see the light of day.

I've read some "rumors" about free dining coming back this fall because bookings are down...but those of course are rumors and I have no idea of any of them are true.

One last comment, and this one will be directed towards the Universal vs. WDW crowd, people seem to always get stuck on "well disney still grew in attendance last year". We have no idea how much they could have grown if they actually put some focus on WDW, just because you're park attendance doesn't drop, doesn't mean you aren't losing potential business. How much more growth could WDW achieve if they actually did some great things at WDW?

Well, they are reporting record profits pretty much every single year.

 

[Donut23]

Perhaps off topic but let me try this tie in.

My best Dusney travel buddy (besides DH) returned recently from a visit to Toyko Disneyland and we were devouring the photos and videos. Next we peek at a snippet of the Forever-Delayed-Mine-Train....specifically the animatronics. People will go CRAZY when they see these adorable little guys with this groundbreaking technology.

Trouble is, WDW is so outdated, this is groundbreaking. In Toyko is just how the rides are there because they invest more in upgrading attractions. According to my friend the parks are much more clean ......(I love him dearly but clean is something he often misses. This place must be REALLY clean!)

Anyway....he is just a WDW nut but came back a little sad because WDW apparently did so poorly in comparison to Toyko Disneyland.

If Disney is not going to offer anything new, they could at least keep current attractions "at their best" and not be the poor step-child.

 

[mvk]

The Mine Train is not delayed at all. It was always slated to open Spring 2014.

 

[ChipnDale79]

Well, they are reporting record profits pretty much every single year.

How could they not be? Cut, cut, cut those cost and raise, raise, raise those prices; will of course increase your profits by leaps and bounds.

How much more record profits could they be generating if they took the parks seriously?

To me it appears they are taking a short term look at WDW, rake in the record profits now while they can, but at some point they ARE going to have spend massive amounts of money at WDW. I don't know if thats, 5, 10, or 20 years from now, but they can not continue operating the way they are.

 

[rteetz]

Perhaps off topic but let me try this tie in. My best Dusney travel buddy (besides DH) returned recently from a visit to Toyko Disneyland and we were devouring the photos and videos. Next we peek at a snippet of the Forever-Delayed-Mine-Train....specifically the animatronics. People will go CRAZY when they see these adorable little guys with this groundbreaking technology. Trouble is, WDW is so outdated, this is groundbreaking. In Toyko is just how the rides are there because they invest more in upgrading attractions. According to my friend the parks are much more clean ......(I love him dearly but clean is something he often misses. This place must be REALLY clean!) Anyway....he is just a WDW nut but came back a little sad because WDW apparently did so poorly in comparison to Toyko Disneyland. If Disney is not going to offer anything new, they could at least keep current attractions "at their best" and not be the poor step-child.

I don't think WDW is necessarily outdated but the comparison to Tokyo Disneyland is bad because Disney doesn't own Tokyo Disneyland. The oriental company leases the characters from Disney and does an amazing job with their two parks. The mine train isn't really forever delayed either, that area was originally supposed to be many other things than Disney realized we need another ride they put together the mine train and said spring 2014 when it opens this May that is spring 2014 it's not really delayed.

 

[rteetz]

How could they not be? Cut, cut, cut those cost and raise, raise, raise those prices will of course increase your profits by leaps and bounds. How much more record profits could they be generating if they took the parks seriously? To me it appears they are taking a short term look at WDW, rake in the record profits now while they can, but at some point they ARE going to have spend massive amounts of money at WDW. I don't know if thats, 5, 10, or 20 years from now, but they can not continue operating the way they are.

Well they are spending a lot on Disney springs and I'm interested to see what avatar will cost because James Cameron isn't going to let Disney take short cuts. But I do agree Disney is going to have to invest some big bucks in DHS and Epcot within the next 15-20 years. I would hope DHS would be in the next 5.

 

[ChipnDale79]

Well they are spending a lot on Disney springs and I'm interested to see what avatar will cost because James Cameron isn't going to let Disney take short cuts. But I do agree Disney is going to have to invest some big bucks in DHS and Epcot within the next 15-20 years. I would hope DHS would be in the next 5.

I think I'm one of the few that is really excited to see what they do with Avatarland, I think they are going to do an amazing job.

I'm still keeping my fingers crossed about Star Wars and DHS.......