Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
This is the key to it all. Wall Street may hate it, but theme parks with climbing attendance (or which want to encourage climbing attendance) need regular, even yearly, new attractions.They don't have enough capacity with their popular attractions.
To beat the dead horse yet again, this is their fault for failing to invest in expansion over what is now approaching the last 20 years while continuing to market heavily and push to increase year-round attendance.
It was a problem with FP+ that you could do the same things over and over when they may have had enough TOTAL capacity* but not enough capacity for the things people wanted to do.
I'm sure this part of the change with G+ is their attempt at "correcting" since they're almost impossibly behind now and have apparently lost their institutional knowledge on how to build appealing high-capacity attractions.
Yeah, it's galling that they put this guest limit on the new service they charge for when they didn't on the free service it replaces but isn't that pretty much in line with modern Disney's managements idea of the Disney Difference™ - pay more and get less?
*COP, I love you but most people don't pay $125 a day to sit in a musty smelling theater and watch a show with failing animatronics and a horribly outdated ending that needs to be retooled to represent the end of the 20th century with an optimistic look forward rather than pretending to be the near-term future it isn't. Don't act like this attraction that's gotten no love in 20 years (like CBJ) going 4/5 empty all the time somehow offsets the frequent modern waits for just about everything else in the park including other attractions just as old which have gotten real refurbishments and updates.
A tale of two resorts in the pandemic:
Disney looked at the pandemic as an opportunity to avoid opening rides. They dragged out construction of two major attractions announced in 2017, delayaing opening until 2022 at the earliest, in part to spread out costs even more and in part to avoid announcing and building new rides.
Universal saw the pandemic as a problem that disrupted their plan to open new rides every year or so that needed to be overcome. The crisis pushed back the opening of their massive new park and thus created a gap of one or two years with no new attractions at the resort, which management viewed as unacceptable. So a Potter ride planned for the new park was moved to Studios and fast tracked while another, long gestating stopgap attraction was green lit to replace Shrek. Rather then leave the new park one ride short, according to multiple reports they have greenlit and fast tracked another, more elaborate ride to be ready for the new park at or near opening.
One of these resorts has spent billions on crowd management systems to try and cover inadequate capacity.