The Rant to End ALL Rants

[sshaw10060]

You go Kevin! I couldn't agree more about D23. It is time Disney realizes who their loyal customers are and what they really want.

 

[wilde_oscar]

I gotta believe that the people at disney are not that stupid... and they have pretty sharp marketing folks. maybe this is not aimed at the high affinity park going folks? But you get so little for you money on this, I do not see the value... from what I see the only thing the D23 login will get you is access to the shopping... the rest of the articles on the history are available to anyone.

There should be more (some) attention paid for the AP holders that renew year after year... but what portion of the population that goes to the resorts and parks are made up of the hard core fans? Millions of people a year are in the parks, of those how many are on this site, how many are active, how many are active that visit the parks yearly, how many are active that visit the parks yearly enough to justify an annual pass?

florida locals by and large avoid the parks, or know someone that can get them free tickets for those one or two days a year they do go. While D23 is a dud... how big is the marketing group that Pete's rant is aiming at that do multiple stays in the resorts a year? I can't imagine that is a very large group.

 

[aspen37]

I gotta believe that the people at disney are not that stupid... and they have pretty sharp marketing folks. maybe this is not aimed at the high affinity park going folks? But you get so little for you money on this, I do not see the value... from what I see the only thing the D23 login will get you is access to the shopping... the rest of the articles on the history are available to anyone.

There should be more (some) attention paid for the AP holders that renew year after year... but what portion of the population that goes to the resorts and parks are made up of the hard core fans? Millions of people a year are in the parks, of those how many are on this site, how many are active, how many are active that visit the parks yearly, how many are active that visit the parks yearly enough to justify an annual pass?

florida locals by and large avoid the parks, or know someone that can get them free tickets for those one or two days a year they do go. While D23 is a dud... how big is the marketing group that Pete's rant is aiming at that do multiple stays in the resorts a year? I can't imagine that is a very large group.

I guess if they add more stuff to D23 than it is more people than Disney thought.

The last time I was at DWD I only talked to a couple of people who were there for the first time. Most people were there on their second trip. If they want people to keep coming back they need to do something for the 'Loyal" customer. If it is a small part of the business then it won't cost much to have some kinda points system for the hotels.
I think that it is ridicules to say that because it is a small group of people that we don't matter. We do matter and they should care. We are the people who spend a lot of money year after year to go to WDW. You would think that they would want to keep us coming.

 

[wilde_oscar]

I completely agree they should do something for the loyal and faithful... but I wonder if this is a smaller group than we believe it to be? if it is a fraction of a percent, I can see why they don't "cater" to that group. though all it takes is one loud squeeky wheel to influence lots of others. Often cheaper to make the squeek happy then to be "right".

Sometimes I think we give ourselves too much credit for how large a group we are when it comes to impacting Disney's bottom line at the parks.

 

[aspen37]

I completely agree they should do something for the loyal and faithful... but I wonder if this is a smaller group than we believe it to be? if it is a fraction of a percent, I can see why they don't "cater" to that group. though all it takes is one loud squeeky wheel to influence lots of others. Often cheaper to make the squeek happy then to be "right".

Sometimes I think we give ourselves too much credit for how large a group we are when it comes to impacting Disney's bottom line at the parks.

I'm sure were are a small minority but if the economy doesn't start getting better we may be the people that will help them through the rough patches.

I wish they would just give a crap. We should not have to dog on them as much as we do. I have been a loyal Carnival cruiser for years. Well, this past January was my last cruise on Carnival.
The Vice President retired last year. The guy who took over is a number cruncher. The service has gone down hill. They are over working their staff to the point people are getting hurt and having to take leave. Carnival has a lot of one time cruisers, like Disney has one time guests, they also don't care if they piss off their loyal customers. I wish these big companies would get a clue and take care of the loyal customers.

 

[aspen37]

I wonder why they can't run WDW like DCL? Everyone I have talked to loves DCL more than any other cruise line. Just a thought.

 

[FireDancer]

Sometimes I think we give ourselves too much credit for how large a group we are when it comes to impacting Disney's bottom line at the parks.

I think we do have a tendency to over-estimate our numbers. Not that we aren't the highest affinity group, because we are. But, as a percentage of visitors to the park goes I suspect we are pretty small. From the boards main page it would appear that there are 211,696 registered users. If we go by the often stated number of annual visitors to WDW (25 million), that makes this boards percentage <1%. There are other communities out there as passionate as ours but of those 211,696, how many are avid fans? I don't know. When you look at dollars spent I would not have any way to really gauge our percentage. This is where you would need access to a lot of data that just isn't available.

Also keep in mind that the VAST majority of WDW visitors fall into the once every six years category that has been talked about on other media sites. They don't pay close enough attention to what is going on to know every change in minutia like we do. They probably wouldn't notcie characters added to IASM or changes made to HM because they don't do the research and don't remember the old one from 6 or more years ago.

I think what happened with the RU 23 promo is they didn't go after the 1 or 2% that we are and maybe went after the most loyal 10% of fans. When you expand out what would make a Disney fan loyal enough to fall into the 10% category as opposed to the 1% category you probably don't need to hit the same targets. I am only looking at this from the corporate level point of view and don't have all the data because I don't have a fancy oaken desk in Burbank to gain access to them.

I agree whole heartedly that a frequent visitor type promotion is what I was looking forward to but maybe that would be too targeted of a reward, I don't know.

Of course a tiered RU23 campaign would solve all of this.

 

[bidnow5]

Magic Kingdom Club was great I spent a lot more money in WDW when I was a member. The problem was it was mostly a corporate thing most people got them from employers I used to buy mine. It had real benefits discounts on dinning and shopping plus other things. I feel this is an insult to those that truly support WDW