I guess my problem with this logic is that people have been making these assertions for years now. The first time that Disney foot traffic drops, people jump right on this. Just saying something over and over until a piece of data that finally justifies your thought process is not critically thinking.
I personally know many people that have stopped going as often as they used to, and the reasoning almost all of the time, is the pricing.
Its clear you dont agree that some people have stopped going because of that, but i can tell you from first hand experience, there are a lot of people that have stopped going all together, or changed the way they go to disney because of the price increases of the past 5-10 years.
It doesnt effect you, and that's great, but I wish you would be accepting to the fact that some people have changed the way they vacation because disney has increased the pricing a lot over the past few years.
I personally dont think the model that disney was using was sustainable for forever, but then again, i'm not in their meetings and see their numbers. I just know that for my family, it was a strategy that forced us to take a look at how we vacation, and decrease the amount of time we spend at disney.
We purchased an RV last year instead of DVC, one of the main reasons was because of the price hikes and experience changes. DVC was always in the cards for us, but we changed our minds.
We’re a family that has gone to Disney every year but twice since my wife and I honeymooned at Disney in 2008. We’ve held Annual Passes for 2 of those years, and traveled from NC 4-5 times each of those years.
We’ve moved to an every other year (well we attempted too lol) plan with Disney because of the pricing. We weren’t supposed to go this year, but unfortunately we all 4 contracted covid on day 5 of an 8 day trip last year. Luckily for us Disney allowed us to use the remaining tickets this year, and refunded 2 nights of our hotel. So we’re going to the fort with our RV in October for a long weekend to finish out last years trip.
We’re supposed to go back next year for a full week, but we’ll see, I have one kid that doesn’t want to go back, and one that does.
I'll be honest, i get excited when we start planning these trips, i start to remember all the fun we used to have and the freedom the parks offered, then we get there, and everything is so planned out, and the meals arent nearly as good as they used to be, and i get annoyed.