No the Magic isn’t gone but it’s at 25%

[wabbott]

Maybe mid-level managers have lost touch with the guests. Ya think?

Found this: Walt Disney: An American Individual by Bob Thomas, pg 263: Members of the park staff (Disneyland) urged him to build and administration building. "No," he replied, "there isn't going to be an administration building. The public isn't coming here to see an administration building. Besides, I don't want you guys sitting behind desks. I want you out in the park, watching what people are doing and finding out how you can make the place more enjoyable for them."

 

[SteveH]

@scrappinginontario I completely 100% agree with you. That change bothers me more then many of the other issues. While I can afford to go, it bothers me when I see something like Disney catering to the wealthy and not everyone. The problem is that Disney pushes it's IP to kids and families and many those kids don't know they can't afford a Disney vacation. I love the Swan & Dolphin, but the fact that S/D guests get the privilege to go to the Extended Evening hours but a guest from a moderate and "value" don't is just wrong on so many levels.

 

[2goofykiddos]

Not the PP, but we do something similar. For us, it depends on how long we're staying and where we're hopping. For example, if we have more than one day at EP, we'll RD one morning there, do as much as we can standby, and stack Genie+ for HS. If we're hopping to MK one day, we'll usually do 1-2 Genie+ at whatever park we started at, then start stacking for MK. MK is a good park to hop to because it usually has a lot of Genie+ availability.

So we are supposed to pay for park hoopers and Genie plus? I make a decent income but even a Disney cruise is looking better than this.

 

[NavyDad]

Happy to hear that you had a great vacation

Thanks!

I was telling my wife as we headed down there not to expect much and that we needed to prepare ourselves for the fact that this might be our last WDW trip for a long time - if ever again.

I think each day she teased me saying something like "boy this is really rough going on all of these rides and having so much fun" after all my doom and gloom warnings to her.

Our daughter was on a school trip so she had to follow their schedule which included tours and classes and their field trip tickets did not include the ability to add Genie Plus. She was a little jealous of all the rides we got to go on with zero wait time so we immediately starting planning a graduation trip for her and us next June. I guess I have another year of keeping up with the Genie Plus changes and trip planning ahead of me...

 

[john7994]

I agree.

I don't normally play the 'Walt' card but honestly, I don't believe his intent would ever have been that those with a lot of money be able to do more than the average person. I think of him sitting on that bench watching his girls on the merry-go-round and dreaming of being able to do those things with his girls, not watching them.

I truly believe (and this is just my opinion) is that Walt's dream was for all to be able to visit his parks on equal footing, not those with a lot of money be able to spend hundreds more a day than most guests can afford, to be given a better guest experience. Disney offers this quietly in the way of VIP tours but those are not in-your-face. Seeing lines where people are paying hundreds of dollars a day to access those lines, just is not my idea of Disney.

Again, just my opinion. Not asking anyone else to feel the same way.

Always get piqued on the WWWD now question ...

Its a whole new world ... to coin a phrase ... while I would love to know how he might have responded, the amount of change is staggering. The U.S. Population alone (much less internationally) has grown over 100M people (and skewed to the Southeast) since Walt's passing, so has the mobility of people through the evolution of interstate and air travel. In sheer numbers, if everyone got to go that wanted to go because cost wasn't artificially prohibitive - would there have been a park reservation system earlier

Not meant to be an argument, and there are clearly many other market variables at play as well.

 

[wabbott]

Window on Main Street: 35 Years of Creating Happiness at Disneyland Park by Van Arsdale France, pg 17

The Price

"Originally, the idea was to have free admission. Then, four months before opening, they decided to charge an admission price of 25 cents for adults and 15 cents for children, just to keep the undesirables out."

 

[dclDream2018]

Window on Main Street: 35 Years of Creating Happiness at Disneyland Park by Van Arsdale France, pg 17

The Price

"Originally, the idea was to have free admission. Then, four months before opening, they decided to charge an admission price of 25 cents for adults and 15 cents for children, just to keep the undesirables out."

Welp, if Genie+ is intended to keep undesirables away and I'm considered undersirable, it's working.

 

[wabbott]

Wife and I are scheduled for mid-October and we'll probably forgo trying to outsmart the Genie. But we ALWAYS do rope drop without fail.

 

[bakenatj]

Let's be honest, we all have memories that are "grander" in our memories than they probably were at the time. We all come here because we have special memories of moments we fell in love with for many years of going to WDW. It's not the same as the days of walking into Frontier Land in the morning and it felt like we were the only ones in the park. Change is inevitable in every part of our lives. My babies that were dressed up and having fun in WDW when they were little are now grown up, but we all still love to go. Nothing is like walking down Main Street on a return visit.

If I was CEO, I would do some things differently for sure, and I am not in love with everything, but I still love WDW.

 

[DisneyFive]

I said something similar last summer when everything was standby only, and no G+ existed. At least 25% of our value was gone. *Poof* That's saying a lot when we're spending $10k on a vacation.

We'll see how G+ works for us this summer. Despite the price, it HAS to be better than last year. Hopefully I don't eat those words.

Dan

 

[bakenatj]

I agree.

I don't normally play the 'Walt' card but honestly, I don't believe his intent would ever have been that those with a lot of money be able to do more than the average person. I think of him sitting on that bench watching his girls on the merry-go-round and dreaming of being able to do those things with his girls, not watching them.

I truly believe (and this is just my opinion) is that Walt's dream was for all to be able to visit his parks on equal footing, not those with a lot of money be able to spend hundreds more a day than most guests can afford, to be given a better guest experience. Disney offers this quietly in the way of VIP tours but those are not in-your-face. Seeing lines where people are paying hundreds of dollars a day to access those lines, just is not my idea of Disney.

Again, just my opinion. Not asking anyone else to feel the same way.

Well said. The problem I think we all get frustrated with is crowd levels. I don't have a good solution for that. The only one is to have more parks, but that costs lots of money, and they are a business. Disney is just too popular.

 

[meremac]

So we are supposed to pay for park hoopers and Genie plus? I make a decent income but even a Disney cruise is looking better than this.

No, not necessarily! I was just responding to the PP who asked how we stack when we do have Park Hoppers,

 

[OppR2nist]

Let's be honest, we all have memories that are "grander" in our memories than they probably were at the time. We all come here because we have special memories of moments we fell in love with for many years of going to WDW. It's not the same as the days of walking into Frontier Land in the morning and it felt like we were the only ones in the park. Change is inevitable in every part of our lives. My babies that were dressed up and having fun in WDW when they were little are now grown up, but we all still love to go. Nothing is like walking down Main Street on a return visit.

If I was CEO, I would do some things differently for sure, and I am not in love with everything, but I still love WDW.

I have to say the magic is always there. There's a reason we all went in the first place, and a reason we go back. If the magic ever stops happening, we won't return. Maybe I'm too granular, but it's the little moments that matter for me.

 

[MakiraMarlena]

I think Genie Plus seems to work great for those who take the time to figure out how to game it. Most vacationers don't want to game it. They want to walk up and get onto their preferred rides without waiting forever, and they don't want to spend the day thinking about how they are going to do that. That's the preference for fast pass, which you had to decide what to book 2 months out and then all you had to do was show up.

Paper fastpass was just like the Genie, except it gave you something tangible that told you what time to come back; the only game you had to play was how early you needed to get to the park to get that popular ride.

 

[meremac]

I think Genie Plus seems to work great for those who take the time to figure out how to game it. Most vacationers don't want to game it. They want to walk up and get onto their preferred rides without waiting forever, and they don't want to spend the day thinking about how they are going to do that. That's the preference for fast pass, which you had to decide what to book 2 months out and then all you had to do was show up.

Paper fastpass was just like the Genie, except it gave you something tangible that told you what time to come back; the only game you had to play was how early you needed to get to the park to get that popular ride.

There were ways to fully maximize the paper FastPass system too, though. And there were ways to maximize FastPass+. And there were ways to maximize your time when it was standby only. Now, don't get me wrong, there's no denying that there is quite a bit more uncertainty with Genie+. But if riding a ton of rides on your Disney vacation is a priority, that has always required some level of strategy IMO.

 

[gharter]

I said something similar last summer when everything was standby only, and no G+ existed. At least 25% of our value was gone.

Dan

Actually, we enjoyed the trip that didn't have Genie + and was standby only. The waits overall were shorter and the standby lines moved.
The hard part was when they social distanced the lines, so the lines looked much worse than they were.

 

[OppR2nist]

Actually, we enjoyed the trip that didn't have Genie + and was standby only. The waits overall were shorter and the standby lines moved.
The hard part was when they social distanced the lines, so the lines looked much worse than they were.

Yeah, on our trip last year, the line for Haunted Mansion extended all the way back to Country Bears, but we were only in line for 20 minutes.

 

[DisneyFive]

Actually, we enjoyed the trip that didn't have Genie + and was standby only. The waits overall were shorter and the standby lines moved.
The hard part was when they social distanced the lines, so the lines looked much worse than they were.

No way were the waits were shorter last summer than previous years. The lines were physically longer, but they were also longer in duration. We have gone almost annually since 2010 and never came close to waiting such long in lines as last summer. Not even close.

Keep in mind that we hardly ever stood in standby lines for the last decade because we knew how to make proper use of fastpass.

Dan

 

[bakenatj]

I have to say the magic is always there. There's a reason we all went in the first place, and a reason we go back. If the magic ever stops happening, we won't return. Maybe I'm too granular, but it's the little moments that matter for me.

No way were the waits were shorter last summer than previous years. The lines were physically longer, but they were also longer in duration. We have gone almost annually since 2010 and never came close to waiting such long in lines as last summer. Not even close.

Keep in mind that we hardly ever stood in standby lines for the last decade because we knew how to make proper use of fastpass.

Dan

I agree we were at WDW in August of 2021 and the standby lines were brutal! We have been going since 2008 and I had WDW down to a science and we always did whatever ride we wanted and went back to the resort and came back in the evenings. Last year we stood in line a lot.

 

[gharter]

No way were the waits were shorter last summer than previous years. The lines were physically longer, but they were also longer in duration. We have gone almost annually since 2010 and never came close to waiting such long in lines as last summer. Not even close.

Keep in mind that we hardly ever stood in standby lines for the last decade because we knew how to make proper use of fastpass.

Dan

We were there in April and October. The lines physically were longer, but without FP or Genie+, the wait was definitely shorter.
Standby vs FP line, no comparison, FP always wins.