I don't think Disney is just going to be comfortable handing the information necessary for your app idea over to random third-parties. There is a reason why they have Disney-affiliated travel agents.
I imagine the underpinnings of data like resort room inventory, guest capacity, etc. is either going to fall under "industry secrets" or "the guests' personal information".
And good grief Disney is working with legacy systems from the late 1990's!!!! They certainly are NOT going to choose to invest the IT overhaul that this project would require!
I get where you're coming from, but this is 2017, and travel agencies are becoming less and less necessary by the minute no matter how you slice it. I don't have anything against travel agencies, it's just a fact that as more tools become available on the web for DIY trip planning, they simply become more niche and less used/necessary. Also, their comfort is not my problem and is largely irrelevant to me, the consumer. Disney is a money-making machine, I'm sure they can keep up. It's also worth mentioning that WDWInfo, TouringPlans, RideMax, and plenty of others either pull data from Disney's site or collect data themselves while in the parks and generate trends while doing it.
HA! These are not industry secrets or the guest's personal information we're talking about. Rather, they are pieces of information made available over the public web to anyone with a web browser. You, me, some guy in Colorado, anyone, even a computer program written to fetch that information. In today's web, it's either build it or someone else will. The reality of this sort of tool though is that if built to run on a client's own device (from their local web browser), Disney doesn't really have much of a choice whether or not to hand over the data. Disney does require you to authenticate to their site before running pricing and getting a final total on the checkout page for obvious reasons. In short, if they want to allow people to book online, they have to live with the reality that this IS totally possible for someone else to scrape their websites for info. The fact that we had to live through ADR bots that did just this for a time and then resold those ADRs for a price is proof enough that I'm not totally wrong. Truly their only other option is to force people to call them, go through travel agencies (which would most likely have to call for you). Or go somewhere in person to book! Is that even still a thing? Disney is a publicly traded corporation whose sole purpose is to make money for its shareholders. Do you really think they would take down their website to prevent people from scraping it? I sense a shareholder munity would quickly be planned were that to happen.
Disney's web infrastructure is not using technology from the late 90's. In fact, that's quite far from the truth. Maybe their animatronics are dated back to that time (which I highly doubt all of them are that old), but their web infrastructure certainly is not. Just looking at the most basic elements of their site they are keeping pace with current technology trends. The problem is not that the technology is old/outdated, but in how they built it, and that they don't dedicate enough resources to serving pages more quickly. Why would they? The performance is probably acceptable for most users. Could it be improved and optimized? Certainly! But their web infrastructure is absolutely NOT running on legacy systems from the 1990s. This project also requires nothing from Disney in the way of "IT overhaul". The whole point is to use the data they already make public on their site and do so from the client's device.
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