What has disney cut to be exactly?????????????????? After 80 posts lets get down to the nitty gritty..... Please list becuase we are returning in August and I would like to brace myself ??? ( MY DH wants to know )
The biggest thing Disney has cut is staff. We'll have to see how this will affect the paying customer's overall experience in the theme parks. Those that know exactly how many jobs were cut, which positions they included, how the company has been (and will be) restructured and reorganized, etc. can probably venture the best guess as to how much of an impact these cuts will have on the average park guest's experience. But I can't imagine there won't be an impact.
I can only go by others' trip reports, since my only recent WDW experience was a quick one-day trip to Epcot to partake in an annual Beers Around the World excursion, but the biggest red flag to me in the realm of whether "guests are receiving the level of service and entertainment they are paying for" was the park closing multiple days in a row (to at least some guests) the week preceding Easter Sunday.
As reported by wdwmagic.com (more than a week BEFORE the MK was forced to close to some guests), Disney expected to break their all-time MK weekly attendance record that week. In other words, they didn't only KNOW this was going to happen, they PLANNED it to happen. They rolled out aggressive promotions at a time when they knew park attendance would already be high (Spring Break & Easter Week) knowing that they would have to temporarily shut down a park if they actually hit the attendance numbers they were gunning for. Certainly, it was a financial decision, and presumably a very necessary one (financially), but no matter how you slice it, it was a decision that was made at the expense of customer service to at least a few of their paying customers.
I understand & appreciate the flipside of that argument - that if Disney doesn't make these financial decisions in the short-term, it could affect the success of the company in the long-term. So I'm not saying Disney did the right or wrong thing. But I can completely understand why anyone who was shut out of the parks those days would be extremely dissatisfied with their Disney experience. And they would certainly have the right to complain about it.
As several posters have pointed out, at the end of the day Disney is a business - one that must succeed financially in order to exist. Having said that, like any other business, Disney has to satisfy its customers by providing the goods & services it promises. Disney has no one but itself to blame for its customers' high expectations - they purposely market themselves to be held to those expectations, and price their product accordingly.
I guess what I'm saying is, nobody is right or wrong here - since we're all individuals with our own opinions of value, we each, individually, have to decide whether WDW is offering the level of service and entertainment that we expect from them. And since we're individuals with different expectations, perspectives, tastes, attitudes, etc., those opinions are always going to run the full spectrum.
*Interesting side-note - during our most recent Beers Around the World session, we came across a gentleman serving beer in the UK who was American. Now, in our 9 years of Beers Around the World, we have never encountered an individual serving beer at one of the World Showcase pavilions who wasn't from that country. Naturally, my response was "Hey - you're not from the UK!" He laughed and said he was helping out. That's when it struck me - I said "are you a manager?" He said yes. So I asked him if he was "helping out" because they didn't have the necessary staff available to keep up with that day's crowds (admittedly a rhetorical question). He just smiled at me and nodded. So a small sign of how things can be affected - I still received excellent service, but after 9 years of experiencing Beers around the World, an American serving beer in the UK stuck out like a sore thumb to me.
The nature of the "entertainment business" is to entertain the masses....especially when the masses are paying $$$$$$ for it.
I guess I got bigger things to worry about like keeping the roof over our heads and feeding my children.....wish all I had to complain about is things like it's not fair they cut the amount of shows back or something else so small.
See?
