I think your train of thought is off. This is not about masking price increases. This is about monetizing demand. These are generating new revenue streams by monetizing things that previously we got for free.
It is a very different mindset verse shifting where dollars show up… this is considered new money, not revenue from price increases.
Yes, the net effect to a customer really isn’t different… especially if the attach rate is high… but the assignment of motivation is very different from what you elude to.
This is ‘a way to drive revenue’ not ‘a way to increase prices in deceptive ways’. Impact to totsl spend prople fo is viewed differently. These new streams for things like ILL are very much considered new money… mondy thag is tracked on its own because it requires conversion/buy in.
Motivation is same… drive revenue, but i think it’s a mischaractoration to phrase it like hiding increases. The motivation id no deceit- but generating nee revenue by monetizing things.
I get your point but free FP was a tool that allowed them to push more people into the parks while not increasing desirable attraction capacity disguised as a benefit until for many people, it became a necessity due to the standby situation created by the line skip option and them taking a decade off from doing the expansion they needed to in order to keep up with increasing attendance.
Just a reminder: how awful so many people remember the parks feeling in 2019 with crowding was entirely of management's making and they were profiting off it hand-over-fist. There is zero chance they could have introduced Lighting Lane and called it "found money" in
that environment, though.
COVID was the reset.
You can say deceit isn't the intent (and I concede, I don't think it's 100% the goal) but taking away value in place of increasing prices (or doing both) is a pretty common practice. As you very well know, a cereal box staying as tall but getting thinner and that bubble at the bottom of the peanut jar becoming more pronounced with ounces going down while prices slightly inch up and the product at a glance, doesn't
appear any different isn't
accidentally deceptive - companies know what they're doing and I think it would be
really generous to suggest Disney is any different.
When you hear their leaders talk about continued investment and the value they continue to provide to counter ticket price increase complaints in interviews, they conveniently leave off the loss of benefit part. Why is that? Are you suggesting they somehow aren't aware?
... or would they prefer guests not think about that? It doesn't take Dr. Evil villainy for any company, including Disney, to act this way and I'm not trying to suggest otherwise. I don't think anyone in a meeting is going "how can we stick it to our customers without them realizing?" but I do think they were likely saying things along the lines of "how can we increase spend with the majority of customers without major investment and without putting a 20% price increase directly on tickets all at once that no customer will be okay with?"
People always seem to forget this huge pricing shift when comparing current ticket pricing to historical (like the one used to compare today's prices adjusted for inflation to those of 2012 a few pages back where Disney still doesn't come out of it looking that good).
Call me cynical but I don't think that's a happy accident for Disney.
Maybe I'm totally wrong but LL and especially ILL look to me to be one of Disney's versions of shrinkflation, just like their attempt at resort fees
kind of was - although that was more blatantly scummy* since it was an unavoidable cost so not quite the same.
Perhaps it's semantics but an
honest new revenue stream to me is adding value and charging for it - not taking away value and charging people extra to get it back.
That's just my opinion, though.
If Regal increases the price of their nachos and then starts charging $2 extra for the cheese, I'll be shaking my fist at that "new revenue stream" like a crazy person, too.
*Disney's excuse was something like "aligning with industry standards" which is a nice way of saying "everyone else has been getting away with it so we want to, too". Yes, I called it scummy. I think it's just as scummy when the other places do it and I feel like at some point when this started popping up everywhere, Disney management thought it was, too... Or at least they already knew what kind of a good thing they had with their room rates and didn't want to upset the cart. Obviously, there was a Bob who wasn't concerned and tried but apparently the magic wasn't strong enough to pass that under the guest radar. Should have called it something else and started it off cheap and then just aggressively raised the price of it year over year like they have LL - probably would have gotten away with it.
