What is going on with Disney parks?

[jkh36619]

I read somewhere that National Park and State Park numbers were up nationwide. Maybe people are rediscovering the outdoors more. It's much cheaper that's for sure.

 

[snappy]

We were at Canyonlands and Arches National parks as well as a state park high in the Le Sal outside of Moab in early September, and the roads were surprisingly busy in the national parks, even with 104 degree highs. Breathtaking scenery. The rangers are so helpful no matter what you ask. We traveled far and visiting the parks and rafting the Colorado River was a special vacation.

 

[Tink-osophy]

...Increased Prices, Decreased Services
People don't like paying more for less and everyone has a breaking point. The prices are going up on absolutely everything and they're cutting everything. When people pay significantly more, they expect more. Instead, they're getting less. That's a major turn off.

Exactly! I had to quote this - it bears repeating and repeating! (Until the balance of priorities changes.)

This next quote, too: -

...Disney has lost its identity. It cares more about shareholders than guests. Ironically, guest experiences will feed the shareholder profits.

P.S. And,this: -

... DHS used to be about movies (removing the Great Movie Ride was a dubious decision to say the least), and now it is 45% SW and 45% Toy Story. It's not that I don't like SW and TS - it's just that the park, along with Disney in general, has lost its identity as well.

...They didn't have to remove the GMR and the Backlot Tour etc. etc.. Surely, they just had to invest in some imagineering and maintenance, to retain, but update, the identity, Then, it would make sense still to call it "Hollywood Studios".

 

[Heather07438]

Nobody goes to WDW anymore, it's too crowded. ~Yogi Berra

 

[old lady]

It will hit Disney before the other parks.

 

[TiggerBouncy]

One thing I'm always super curious about is.. who are these people paying $800-$1000 a night to stay in the deluxe resorts? As an example, I picked a random Tuesday night in early March 2020. Not near any holidays (to my knowledge) and not a weekend, and probably before the Spring Break rush. The cheapest room at the Grand Floridian was $1,000 excluding tax for a one-night stay. And lots of other Deluxe hotels were only slightly cheaper, but when you add in tax and tickets . . . where do all these people get their money from to spend on extravagant holidays?

Maybe it's because I've never stayed in one of these nice and fancy rooms, but can they really be worth it?

If you want to try out a deluxe resort, rent DVC points. It's significantly cheaper than the rack rate rooms.

 

[OSUZorba]

It seems like this thread went from super insightful posts to venting about planning, quality of food, etc. Nothing wrong with that lol but having to plan in advance is not why the parks are struggling.

Disney has lost its identity. It cares more about shareholders than guests. Ironically, guest experiences will feed the shareholder profits.

Price increases alone are not the issue here. It's the quote above - the erosion of benefits as someone else stated. Another poster said they could afford the increases, but it was just OFFENSIVE to them at this point and that is why they are done. I believe these are the root issues. Don't increase prices across the board to these levels and THEN understaff rides during less crowded times, decrease park hours, decrease or eliminate the beloved street performers that make Disney uniquely Disney. To me this is why attendance is going south.

I will add a mini-vent of my own - the oversaturation of SW (and IPs) is another form of Disney's greed - it's basically marketing their brands and most of us know it. DHS used to be about movies (removing the Great Movie Ride was a dubious decision to say the least), and now it is 45% SW and 45% Toy Story. It's not that I don't like SW and TS - it's just that the park, along with Disney in general, has lost its identity as well.

I'm in the camp of I can afford the increases but I personally take the rate of increase plus the massive and obvious cut backs as a middle finger. Or really I take it as a "We can do whatever we want and you'll still come. And if you don't, we have Star wars so we don't need you."

To me the photoboxes are a prime example of this attitude. "You mean my AP has gone up $400 in less than 2 years, but now I can't even get a decent family photo with Mickey Mouse?"

I agree with you about the IPs as well. I really have no interest in yet another Disney's greatest hits night time shows, especially at Epcot.

 

[Baduist]

Disney is just dealing with its own success. It may just need a correction period.

If crowds are too much, guests dont feel like they are getting value- and complain and stop coming.

if crowds are too low, Disney isnt getting the revenue expected from all the extras (Dessert parties, souvenirs, food sales, etc.), so they make cuts ore leave things to neglect.

So Disney needs to find a balance between offerings and price and crowd levels.

Yup.

I think people are maybe taking this personally, which makes sense with a brand like Disney.

But overall - last year Disney had a simple problem:

No matter how much they raise prices, the parks were too crowded.

They finally hit the spot where prices are too high, and they are starting to roll back, slowly.

They will soon find the right balance. Demand is there (and rising), loyalty is still there...

It’s just a matter of allowing the people who want to come to afford it, and giving them the best experience (which Disney is the best at, despite ups and downs in the several decades they were in this business).

 

[acebatonfan]

Might as well throw in my two cents. I'm only seven pages in, but I recently joined DVC and purchased an AP for the first time. It made sense for me financially, and I've already am saving a decent amount from the AP (free memory maker, the 10% food and merchandise discounts have saved me at least $400 this trip). I would not have purchased it without the DVC discount though. With how expensive the rooms are getting, it also made sense for me to purchase DVC now than in a few years (my DVC membership is about as much as my school loans, so they're not super unreasonable. Do it now while I'm living at home and have a decent disposable income). I want to assume good faith with Disney and am hoping a lot of this hot mess stuff is them preparing for the 50th anniversary.


I have to admit I'm not too thrilled with how Disney is approaching some things. I've noticed way fewer Photopass photographers this trip than five years ago, let alone all the photo boxes. Epcot is an absolute hot mess (TBH even more than DHS at this point). Toy Story land looked too much like DinoLand (but at least there is a backstory). SWGE was empty when I was there and didn't have that advertised "immersive experience". What really ticked off me and my sister was paying for the HEA dessert party AND THEN having a Photopass photographer come in five minutes before the fireworks started and blocked our Plaza view, even when we were sitting there for a good 45 minutes before the fireworks. We felt cramped in so many of the restaurants, especially when we were pretty much seated in a cramped corner at BOG (definitely not worth 2 credits for that experience). We also had to cancel our MNSSHP tickets t the last minute (cold from hell, fever... not risking getting other people sick), and I spent a solid two hours on the phone trying to get our tickets refunded because CMs kept redirecting me to the wrong number. It feels like Disney is trying to make too many changes at once without sorting out the kinks of their older changes first (like the monorail resorts needing to go through security 2x to get to Epcot, Innoventions plazas being empty rooms, bringing back Wonders of Life... )

I'm planning a trip for next year and bringing some family who haven't been in 5-6 years. I'm keeping my fingers crossed some of the kinks going on will have been sorted out.

 

[EllieBride]

So I thought this was interesting... today was my ADR reservation day for our spring break trip (the week leading into the spring break black-out dates). I went into it unsure if there was anything specific that I wanted to book, since I'm not sure if we will be buying park tickets or not. Well, I had my choice of any dinner reservation I could have possibly wanted, on any day that I wanted, at any time that I wanted. This included Ohana, Victoria & Albert's, Storybook Dining, Topolino's, Be Our Guest, Oga's, etc. I can't remember the last time that I've had my choice of Ohana reservations for every day of our trip.

 

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

I'm in the camp of I can afford the increases but I personally take the rate of increase plus the massive and obvious cut backs as a middle finger. Or really I take it as a "We can do whatever we want and you'll still come. And if you don't, we have Star wars so we don't need you."

To me the photoboxes are a prime example of this attitude. "You mean my AP has gone up $400 in less than 2 years, but now I can't even get a decent family photo with Mickey Mouse?"

I agree with you about the IPs as well. I really have no interest in yet another Disney's greatest hits night time shows, especially at Epcot.

I'm really fine with IP's. Disney Parks have had IP presence since their resepctive inception. I wish EPCOT wasn't changing it's direction (I'm fine with a Ratatouille Ride, not so much Guardians), but it's not going to change. So that I'll accept. And tbh, that's fine. It's one of the areas I'm willing to accept cost cutting because it's probably cheaper to make a new attraction based on existing IP than come up with something brand new and original. Would I prefer original? Yes. But I'd also like to see more from one of my favorite Disney movies than fancy bathrooms (that I don't have to travel across the world to see).

Where I will agree with you are cost cutting items like the cameraboxes which are somehow supposed to be "better" than a human but a)can't account for variables or candid shots and b)take up to 48 hours when human photopass photos takes a couple hours at most. These cost cutting ideas are going to get them into more trouble then they realize and I'm not sure how much brand loyalty they'll have left if this continues

Yup.

I think people are maybe taking this personally, which makes sense with a brand like Disney.

But overall - last year Disney had a simple problem:

No matter how much they raise prices, the parks were too crowded.

They finally hit the spot where prices are too high, and they are starting to roll back, slowly.

They will soon find the right balance. Demand is there (and rising), loyalty is still there...

It’s just a matter of allowing the people who want to come to afford it, and giving them the best experience (which Disney is the best at, despite ups and downs in the several decades they were in this business).

I would argue it's a problem of price increase vs value. If price increases were there to accommodate the perceived value Disney has offered in the past, I don't think you would see the complaints. The complaints are coming from cutting costs, which reduce the services guests get for that value and as a result are paying more but getting less in return. You could say "crowds" were Disney's problem, but Bob Chapek himself said regarding SWGE that "crowding is a good problem to have" (paraphrase). The reason they kept getting crowds was because the value in the service they received in getting that intangible, magical experience at a Disney Park outweighed that cost. Everyone understands Disney is a business but forgetting where the value lies in the parks is the exact thing that's going to put them behind the 8 ball. The ship is not going to correct itself soon and I think we're going to see a major shift in crowds in the next year. I'm not even sure they'll have the crowds they're expecting for the 50th if this number crunching penny pinching continues.

So I thought this was interesting... today was my ADR reservation day for our spring break trip (the week leading into the spring break black-out dates). I went into it unsure if there was anything specific that I wanted to book, since I'm not sure if we will be buying park tickets or not. Well, I had my choice of any dinner reservation I could have possibly wanted, on any day that I wanted, at any time that I wanted. This included Ohana, Victoria & Albert's, Storybook Dining, Topolino's, Be Our Guest, Oga's, etc. I can't remember the last time that I've had my choice of Ohana reservations for every day of our trip.

That's interesting as I made my trip plans post-WDW SWGE announcement for the first week of December. So sometime in June was when I made my 180-day ADR's. Now, thing is I made sure to calculate my 180 day mark. But MDE was showing me off by one day - a day earlier than I calculated. I was confused but I figured just in case, I'll call to make my reservations. So I called Disney Dining and they also said my day was the next day (same day I had thought it was). However, they decided to try and I got all of my reservations with 0 issues. I had a run of the times I wanted. I chalked up the early day to being a glitch. Now I'm wondering if other people were also able to reserve a day early and if this could have been to inflate ADR numbers.

 

[Tink-osophy]

Yup.

I think people are maybe taking this personally, which makes sense with a brand like Disney.

But overall - last year Disney had a simple problem:

No matter how much they raise prices, the parks were too crowded.

They finally hit the spot where prices are too high, and they are starting to roll back, slowly.

They will soon find the right balance. Demand is there (and rising), loyalty is still there...

It’s just a matter of allowing the people who want to come to afford it, and giving them the best experience (which Disney is the best at, despite ups and downs in the several decades they were in this business).

I wonder if this is how Disney are choosing to view it. ...I'm not saying you're wrong. I just think that, if it's true, their responses are very short-term and the long-term will be when the cracks affect the foundation - not because of the prices, but because of all the cuts in service and product quality and variety.

It might be hard to find the right balance price-wise since, while raising the prices, they've also been reducing the long-established experience (that has a history of selling itself) and introducing new things that have not proven as popular or efficient as they might have hoped.

 

[DGsAtBLT]

I’m not convinced Disney is attempting to lower crowds with price increases. I think they’re just pushing until they get too big of a pushback.

In recent years it has seemed very much like their strategy is pack people in at the highest price the market will pay, charge more for events and pack those, staff as little as possible and operate things at the lowest capacity they can get away with to cut costs. I have not gotten the impression they’re interested in finding the balance to keep crowds at a reasonable level.

 

[Tink-osophy]

...These cost cutting ideas are going to get them into more trouble then they realize and I'm not sure how much brand loyalty they'll have left if this continues.

I would argue it's a problem of price increase vs value. If price increases were there to accommodate the perceived value Disney has offered in the past, I don't think you would see the complaints. The complaints are coming from cutting costs, which reduce the services guests get for that value and as a result are paying more but getting less in return. You could say "crowds" were Disney's problem, but Bob Chapek himself said regarding SWGE that "crowding is a good problem to have" (paraphrase). The reason they kept getting crowds was because the value in the service they received in getting that intangible, magical experience at a Disney Park outweighed that cost. Everyone understands Disney is a business but forgetting where the value lies in the parks is the exact thing that's going to put them behind the 8 ball. The ship is not going to correct itself soon and I think we're going to see a major shift in crowds in the next year. I'm not even sure they'll have the crowds they're expecting for the 50th if this number crunching penny pinching continues.

It's as if they have underestimated the value of old and are overestimating the new. ...Which doesn't mean no updates, changes or new additions, but it does mean making them within the context of what has long drawn people in - and back, over and over again! -things like exceptional quality and attention to detail ETA: By that I mean the quality and attention to detail of the actual guest experience. (It used to be Guest with a capital G!)

 

[Searc]

Another price increase ~ resort mugs have gone up a dollar to $19.99 plus tax for length of stay.

 

[HuskieJohn]

One thing I'm always super curious about is.. who are these people paying $800-$1000 a night to stay in the deluxe resorts? As an example, I picked a random Tuesday night in early March 2020. Not near any holidays (to my knowledge) and not a weekend, and probably before the Spring Break rush. The cheapest room at the Grand Floridian was $1,000 excluding tax for a one-night stay. And lots of other Deluxe hotels were only slightly cheaper, but when you add in tax and tickets . . . where do all these people get their money from to spend on extravagant holidays?

Maybe it's because I've never stayed in one of these nice and fancy rooms, but can they really be worth it?

People making say $150k+ who are near retirement and want to take a trip with their grandkids a second and one last time and going all out (my trips situation)
or
People who make much lower who realistically are going into debt to take the trip to stay in the bubble
or
More unlikely but they are super budget savers and even though they dont make as much they do have the cash to splurge.

 

[snappy]

I am old school but lower income people saving money for a rainy day is great, saving money to go to Disney, not so much.

 

[umichigan10]

Exactly! I had to quote this - it bears repeating and repeating! (Until the balance of priorities changes.)

This next quote, too: -





P.S. And,this: -



...They didn't have to remove the GMR and the Backlot Tour etc. etc.. Surely, they just had to invest in some imagineering and maintenance, to retain, but update, the identity, Then, it would make sense still to call it "Hollywood Studios".

Im bummed the great movie ride got taken out, as I think an update and maybe switch to Disney IPs could’ve been preferable to totally fitting it. But the whole backlot tour imo was a waste of space. You were basically going through the hollowed out husks of soundstages that hadnt filmed anything of substance for 20 years. I haven’t agreed with all the changes, and loved some but you have to admit a pivot in the idea of the park had to happen at some point

 

[Searc]

In addition, a bunch of food prices were also increased resort-wide.

 

[Heather07438]

They always increase prices before major crowd seasons. It's just so expensive already.