Very interesting seeing the responses from people.
I'm curious if there is a trend here at all.
Local or people within say 2 hour drive of Disney being very against these new changes
People traveling into the area (flight or long drive) being either ok with this change or actually for the change
First, I think FastPass was a broken system. I think it worked well for years but finally reached a point where it was negatively affecting the parks (at least Disneyland and DCA). We all know Disney had capacity issues with specific rides and sometimes just in general. I don't like 100+ minute wait times for rides, and I'm sure others don't. I don't even have kids, I can't imagine if I did have kids and had to deal with wait times like that for a ride they just HAD to go on.
I think FastPass and MaxPass also encouraged more people to ride severely overcrowded (popular rides). There is very little "cost" in picking a popular attraction with those system. If you have a standby line there is a very real cost to people. You might only have 5 hours in the park and you have to spend 1 hour (20%) of your time waiting for a SINGLE ride. That's a high cost. Tap a button and do other things for four hours before returning to the ride is almost free in the sense of time and effort.
Disney needs to leave access to these attractions but also encourage guests to try other things.
They could do a couple things....
Leave Fastpass/MaxPass the same but allocate less seats to the FP/MP pool and more to the standby line. This devotes more ride capacity to the standby line and guests that really want to wait can, guests that put more value on their time elsewhere will skip the ride. The end goal is hopefully lower overall demand and thus lower wait times (more on this below).
Side effect: The FP/MP availability will disappear much faster. Get to the park an hour after opening, too bad, top rides don't have any more passes already. Paid for MP but showed up at 9:45 am, too bad, all return times are used up. Physical ticket areas for the passes now spend more time idle and might disappoint guests that trek from one end of the park to the other to pull a pass just to find out they're gone. MP may be purchased less because it's viewed as worthless unless you rope drop.
Making MaxPass more expensive wouldn't do much because that would just make it seem even weaker. If someone can snag a free pass 30 minutes before you get into the park and use up the same return windows as what you paid for, then why pay for it
Leave FastPass and MaxPass the same but increase the cost to enter the park. This absolutely could work because again it would deter people from the most popular attractions simply by having less people actually visit the park.
Side effect: Your lower utilized rides still go unridden because there just aren't as many guests in the park. Your food sales are lower because there aren't as many guests. Your merch sales are lower... etc etc etc. You get into this difficult area of staff standing around with very few guests on some rides, do you close those rides to reduce that staff? Not ideal.
The common trend in those options is
less guests wanting to ride the most popular rides, but using some different methods to get that result. Let the lines speak for themselves and force guests to realize the value of time for that ride or pay more and potentially not even get the guest into the park. I think this also plays into why the new Keys have way more weekends blocked out. Most leisure travel will take place over a weekend. I might start mid week or bleed into the next week, but most will include a weekend. Locals that don't need to travel could more easily visit during weekdays. If children are young enough a parent could just take a day off work, work four tens that day, or something else to get a midweek day to hit the parks. If kids are school aged, well the passes still could allow them to visit as often as they want after school lets out for the day. This is trying to remove the local annual pass people from being in line at the most popular attractions at the same time out of state travelers might be.
So we know what Disney wants to do. They want as many people in the parks as possible and to do that they need locals to visit on less leisure travel days (mid week) and Disney wants less people to just go for the most popular rides. What can you do to achieve high attendance but less demand on specific rides...
You leave ticket prices the same so you get out of state families visiting. You bring back APs but you restrict them a lot more in key areas (even one step below the max price has a lot of Saturdays blocked out. It's hard to make use of the weekend at all when that specific day is a blockout). You remove the free option of passively waiting for a popular ride because you want to bring the
value back to it. This ride
costs something now, it costs time and you have a limited amount. You train guests to see "value" in looking at the app, not just for wait times, but to
maximize their day. In doing so, all you really are doing is drawing their attention to the wait times (which have always been there) and hope they'll see the value in doing three rides with 20 minute wait times instead of one ride with a crushing line that's 60 minutes. With this combination you have guests traveling from far away to visit the parks (use the hotel, have breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the parks, and buy some merch to take home) but you also have locals that just drop in any old day for a few hours. You have locals shift more time to slower weekdays because that's when they can ride the popular attractions since they now have to
spend time waiting for them. You're running an optimized system.
BUT! What about those times it's just busy busy. It's summer, people ignore their better judgement and visit around a holiday or locals don't want to visit on Monday and instead go Friday because school is out. Now your hardest work to get people to decide if the long line is worth it goes out the window, but all lines are long. Well, mainly for the out of town guests that drop big money on the hotels and stuff, you have this little thing called
Genie+ (same old FastPass system, just now far less used [hopefully]). Pay some extra bucks and your $5,000 vacation won't be ruined because you'll get to do most the stuff you wanted to do, not over and over, but at least once. Going one step more, because Disney thinks the time of standing in line for high end attractions (RSR and Star Wars/Marvel) will be valued by guests to be MORE than $20, they're worried everyone will just buy Genie+ and the whole system grinds to a halt again like it did before. Well that's when pay per ride comes into play.
After thinking about this more and more, I honestly think this is Disney just trying to say "please don't go on this ride right now!" Locals still can hit the ride during mid week and really slow times by waiting standby for free and out of town guys won't leave crying that they spent thousands and couldn't get one the ride without waiting 100+ minutes...