In a couple of recent discussions, folks have speculated that the reasons why there aren't any busses between the theme parks and Downtown Disney is because many "frugal" off-site guests were parking at Downtown Disney and using the busses from there to get to the theme parks, in order to avoid paying the parking fee.
This got me thinking about all the things WDW has done, either in the design of their offerings or with regard to changes to them, that could perhaps be attributed to Disney trying to guard against loopholes or abuse of leniency. I thought it might be interesting to see a full list of all of these things.
I remember a few off the top of my head.
Disney started requiring a credit card for booking the Cinderella breakfast (this was before you had to pay a deposit at the time of booking), seemingly just to address the fact that some folks were horsetrading reservations there.
The finger scan for admission to parks was added, of course, to address folks who found ways around the handstamping that was intended to guard against two guests using the same admission on the same day.
Probably the biggest change was the extent to which CMs are empowered to perform Guest Recovery. Previously, it seemed like they had very wide latitude to do whatever was necessary to make a seemingly unsatisfied guest happy. Apparently, widespread publication of this policy and how to abuse it resulted in a situation where the abuse overwhelmed the rightful implementation of the policy, and since then CM empowerment has been curtailed substantially, to reduce the incentive for a guest to misrepresent the extent of their dissatisfaction.
There are some that were far more widespread than WDW. There was a time before which WDW restaurants didn't automatically charge a gratuity for large parties. Now, of course, as is the case with many restaurants nationwide, they do, in response to how often large parties stiffed servers, and how much negative impact that had on the servers.
This one is mostly speculation I think: There was a lot of speculation about why the Skyride at MK was taken down, but one of the more distressing possibilities was the fact that there was concern about misbehaving guests deciding to use it to drop things on people's heads. (That didn't seem very plausible to me.)
I bet there are more than a couple of these situations regarding FastPasses. One I can think of was the practice of shoving anything with a mag strip into the FastPass machine (admission ticket, of course, but also room key, for example, when they weren't the same card) to get extra FastPasses.
It is reasonable to believe that at least some of the reason for the mainstreaming of handicapped guests into the regular queues was due to the practice of some who would get a wheelchair allegedly solely due to the understanding that CMs would put them at the front of the queue, or at least let them skip most of the waiting time that they would normally have endured if they were in the regular queue.
I'm sure there are many others that folks can think of....
This got me thinking about all the things WDW has done, either in the design of their offerings or with regard to changes to them, that could perhaps be attributed to Disney trying to guard against loopholes or abuse of leniency. I thought it might be interesting to see a full list of all of these things.
I remember a few off the top of my head.
Disney started requiring a credit card for booking the Cinderella breakfast (this was before you had to pay a deposit at the time of booking), seemingly just to address the fact that some folks were horsetrading reservations there.
The finger scan for admission to parks was added, of course, to address folks who found ways around the handstamping that was intended to guard against two guests using the same admission on the same day.
Probably the biggest change was the extent to which CMs are empowered to perform Guest Recovery. Previously, it seemed like they had very wide latitude to do whatever was necessary to make a seemingly unsatisfied guest happy. Apparently, widespread publication of this policy and how to abuse it resulted in a situation where the abuse overwhelmed the rightful implementation of the policy, and since then CM empowerment has been curtailed substantially, to reduce the incentive for a guest to misrepresent the extent of their dissatisfaction.
There are some that were far more widespread than WDW. There was a time before which WDW restaurants didn't automatically charge a gratuity for large parties. Now, of course, as is the case with many restaurants nationwide, they do, in response to how often large parties stiffed servers, and how much negative impact that had on the servers.
This one is mostly speculation I think: There was a lot of speculation about why the Skyride at MK was taken down, but one of the more distressing possibilities was the fact that there was concern about misbehaving guests deciding to use it to drop things on people's heads. (That didn't seem very plausible to me.)
I bet there are more than a couple of these situations regarding FastPasses. One I can think of was the practice of shoving anything with a mag strip into the FastPass machine (admission ticket, of course, but also room key, for example, when they weren't the same card) to get extra FastPasses.
It is reasonable to believe that at least some of the reason for the mainstreaming of handicapped guests into the regular queues was due to the practice of some who would get a wheelchair allegedly solely due to the understanding that CMs would put them at the front of the queue, or at least let them skip most of the waiting time that they would normally have endured if they were in the regular queue.
I'm sure there are many others that folks can think of....
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