Disney would love it if we all shopped or visited restaurants while we waited for our FP window. If we all did this, the system would work as intended and lines would not be lengthed. But realistically, who does that?
Exactly.
To amplify on some of my prior comments, Fastpass appears to be a really interesting case study in how The Mouse House works. The initial rationale was that virtual queuing would allow guests to spend more money---that we were time-limited, not money-limited in our in-park spending. Disney rolled out FP on that assumption, and a few other park operators did the same thing. All of them expected higher guest spending to follow.
And, as near as I can tell, none of them actually saw it. It turned out guests were already spending as much as they comfortably could---they were money-limited in their spending, not time-limited. Instead, they used the extra time to hop in some other line, and so were enqueued twice.
In reaction to this, every other operator that had free virtual queuing (and there weren't that many) dropped it---it costs money to run (you need an extra staff member to manage the merge point, plus infrastructure) but didn't return on that investment. Cedar Fair never replaced it with anything at Cedar Point (the only park they tried it at). Universal just kept their pay-for-play versions. At the same time, Six Flags, Herschend, and Busch added or expanded their use of pay-for-play virtual queues.
Disney, however, has been the lone exception. Why? I think it's because the guests who use it and use it well,
like it a lot. Because, for them, wait time in lines goes down. The guests who don't use it (or use it poorly) don't realize that their average waits have gone up, and have complained surprisingly little about all these people "cutting in line."
Disney, more than any park operator, considers guest satisfaction a marketable asset. Most operators care only if depolying a new feature returns more in revenue than it costs to deploy. Disney actively supports spending money to make its guests happy---because happy guests are return guests, and often guests who come back and "step it up a notch" on their next trip. You know, go from Value to Moderate, or Moderate to Deluxe, etc.
So, with very strong guest satisfaction numbers, Fastpass continues despite the fact that, from a strictly financial standpoint, it's nothing but a money hole. But, as more and more operators demonstrate that guests are willing to live with paid virtual queueing without backlash, I suspect that (eventually) the financial side will win out over the guest satisfaction side in the Mouse House.
So, my guess it that Fastpass will never go away completely, but Disney will eventually find a way to directly monetize it. As far as I can tell, it's only a matter of time.
