Unfortunately, Universal had to hire a lot of brand new team members to fill the need at Epic, and it shows. They’re not good and information and implementation of procedures is a mess.
That said, guest service is still an area where Disney absolutely beats Universal. The average Disney CM is pleasant. The average Universal TM is apathetic and rude. There are of course bad Disney CMs and great Universal TMs, but on average, you are more likely to have positive interactions with Disney CMs.
Definitely felt the inexperience with many of TMs at Epic. Did our best to keep our cool and those thoughts to ourselves and on here, though. Nothing we could've said would have improved our situation anyways given that we were leaving in a day. Didn't feel like tossing any kind of bad karma out there.
With as many issues as I have with some of the creative decisions being made over at Disney these days, there's no denying that their operations and CMs are (most of the time), the best. Sometimes it's easy to take for granted little things like the grouper position they have, which many other parks do not.
No joke, we had at least 5 memorable interactions with CMs across 3 totally separate locations within a span of 24 hours when it came to Disney. First was our conversation with Yeeha Bob (who in fairness is always a delight). But the next came at Animal Kingdom when my wife and I (totally doing something we knew we weren't supposed to), hopped under some DINOSAUR ropes to snap some photos of the statues in the extended queue that wasn't being utilized. A CM was waiting for us as we left and told us we needed to come with her. While we initially thought we were gonna have to break out the ol' "Thank goodness you're here, we got lost", it instead turned out that she was taking us to the front of the line because she could tell my wife and I were big fans of the attraction and could tell just by lookin' at us that we were here to experience it for the last time. We even got one of those fun little Carnotaurus trading cards they normally give to the kiddos out of it, too.
Next was a Disney College Program CM who noticed us taking all kinds of photos in Restaurant-osaurus. She shared her story with us, about how she was majoring in theme parks/tourism and how big of a Joe Rhode fan she was before escorting us around the restaurant and pointing out all sorts of little hidden details and secrets for us to make sure we had photos of, along with sharing some stories about them. To some she was just a janitor but for us, she transcended her role into something wonderful and memorable.
Finally, we had the Photopass gal who snapped our photos outside of Muppet*Vision 3D who you could just tell loved her job and taking photos of Guests in the area, as well as our server at the Sci-Fi Dine In who was absolutely hilarious and turned a simple meal into even better experience for us and everyone else in our "car".
Needless to say, every single one of them was sure to get a Guest compliment from us. Meanwhile over at Epic, we only ever even had
one TM over the course of our two days there bother to ask how we were doing and it was the fellow checking our restraints just before getting onto Monsters Unchained. Shout out to them wherever they're at because something that small is something I actually remember given how rough our time was there. As a former CM myself, I understand that much of what goes wrong is out of their control. Still, at least one "I'm sorry" or "I understand how you feel" would have made a world of difference to us. Still, that never happened even once.
