A sequel? Nah, not this one

[RSoxNo1]

The Guardians ride at Epcot cost $450 million. I am not messing with you all.

I have also seen this number on multiple documents.

This is accurate, and it still boggles my mind having heard this a couple of years back. Would love to see a breakdown of exactly where that money went.

I did the math, and if you line 200 feet of wall that's 133 feet high (The height of the building) with new iPhones you still wouldn't reach that budget.

 

[RSoxNo1]

Yes. They are. From about 2016–2019, the most commonly-cited word in Disney’s official surveys was “overwhelming.” Somehow that leaked out at a shareholder meeting.

I assume this is in the context of all of the planning?

 

[brb1006]

I maintain that the lowest-low was when Disney released this art to announce the new Animatronic Dragon added to Disneyland's Fantasmic in 2009:

View attachment 495261

Yes, this was real and released without irony.


That said, I yearn desperately for the days of Herb Ryman, and Dorothea Redmond:

(John Hench too, but it won't let me attach the picture!)

View attachment 495263View attachment 495262

Here's more pieces of concept art for Fantasmic.

How did we go from this?


To This!

 

[Movielover]

How did we go from this?


To This!

Easy, since movies went from looking like this...

To this...

 

[HongKongFooy]

The Guardians ride at Epcot cost $450 million.

Seeing a figure like that excites me more than a silhouette of Jessica Rabbit.

 

[Dutch Inn '76]

I don't get the hand-wringing about park attendance. Y'all know about the pandemic, right?

I think it's overblown too, but all that negative hype has consequences. Parks, restaurants, movies, concerts, etc, aren't going to be back to normal for quite a while.

 

[SteamboatJoe]

I don't get the hand-wringing about park attendance. Y'all know about the pandemic, right?

This probably isn't fair but some of it just seems likes sour grapes from AP holders. As someone who lives hundreds of miles away and can only responsibly afford to go to WDW every few years, I have a hard time empathizing with them (and the DVC crowd).

 

[SteamboatJoe]

Not @pheneix but redesigning as we speak.

How are you feeling about the current direction of the re-design or is it too early to tell?

 

[PirateFrank]

My question - have Disney guest satisfaction surveys shown a downward decline over the past 10 years? If so, do they have concerns over the long term demand?

With respect, Disney guest satisfaction surveys haven't been actual surveys in over 10 years. The questions are targeted and the response choices are limited. They're designed to do nothing but feed a confirmation bias maintained by Disney management...nothing else.

Has anyone taken a guest satisfaction survey in the past 10 years where you have been able to express exactly why you have been satisfied or unsatisfied with something Disney Parks has done? Or did the survey feed you a very limited choice of answers? The answer will almost always be the later.

 

[CaptainAmerica]

With respect, Disney guest satisfaction surveys haven't been actual surveys in over 10 years. The questions are targeted and the response choices are limited. They're designed to do nothing but feed a confirmation bias maintained by Disney management...nothing else.

Has anyone taken a guest satisfaction survey in the past 10 years where you have been able to express exactly why you have been satisfied or unsatisfied with something Disney Parks has done? Or did the survey feed you a very limited choice of answers? The answer will almost always be the later.

That is not correct. What would Disney gain by spending significant time and money to generate surveys with artificially positive answers that mask how guests really feel?

No, you cannot express "exactly how you feel" but it's not some kind of tinfoil conspiracy. When you survey 1,000 different people and give them freedom to answer "exactly how they feel" you get 1,000 different responses. You need to narrow the choices so you can do some analysis with standardized data.

Everyone likes to say "Disney doesn't care about the guest experience," which is complete nonsense. No they don't care about the guest experience as such, but they absolutely care about the guest experience insofar as they want to to come back and spend more money with them and tell your friends what a great time you had so your friends will spend THEIR money with Disney too.

 

[The_Jobu]

What would Disney gain by spending significant time and money to generate surveys with artificially positive answers that mask how guests really feel?

My guess is so some mid-level executive can report better satisfaction numbers.

 

[PirateFrank]

That is not correct. What would Disney gain by spending significant time and money to generate surveys with artificially positive answers that mask how guests really feel?

No, you cannot express "exactly how you feel" but it's not some kind of tinfoil conspiracy. When you survey 1,000 different people and give them freedom to answer "exactly how they feel" you get 1,000 different responses. You need to narrow the choices so you can do some analysis with standardized data.

Everyone likes to say "Disney doesn't care about the guest experience," which is just about the most ignorant and incoherent thing you can say. No they don't care about the guest experience as such, but they absolutely care about the guest experience insofar as they want to to come back and spend more money with them and tell your friends what a great time you had so your friends will spend THEIR money with Disney too.

Responses in guest surveys have been restricted for as long as I've been taking them. That's a fact....and there have been plenty of scenarios where parks management does not want certain answers, so those answers are not provided as choices. We're talking about a company that has sabotaged a flagship attraction to provide justification for shuttering it (10kL). Some minor steering of guest surveys to justify management agendas doesn't even approach the territory of 'tinfoil' conspiracy.

 

[CaptainAmerica]

My guess is so some mid-level executive can report better satisfaction numbers.

That's not how it works. These surveys are normalized across time.

If you have a flawed survey that produces 80% favorability for Attraction XYZ and then a year later the same survey produces 85% favorability, you might be able to poke holes in the methodology that landed at precisely 80% or 85%, but at the very least you can conclude that things got better.

 

[PirateFrank]

My guess is so some mid-level executive can report better satisfaction numbers.

This! Management agendas drive survey steering. Like I said, it's been done for as long as I've been taking these surveys.

 

[lazyboy97o]

Just remember that guests “wanted” Pleasure Island shuttered without a plan for replacement.

 

[The_Jobu]

That's not how it works. These surveys are normalized across time.

If you have a flawed survey that produces 80% favorability for Attraction XYZ and then a year later the same survey produces 85% favorability, you might be able to poke holes in the methodology that landed at precisely 80% or 85%, but at the very least you can conclude that things got better.

Doesn't seem very far-fetched to me given how railroaded some of these surveys seem. Surveys can be very useful for showing you were "right".

 

[SteamboatJoe]

Responses in guest surveys have been restricted for as long as I've been taking them. That's a fact....and there have been plenty of scenarios where parks management does not want certain answers, so those answers are not provided as choices. We're talking about a company that has sabotaged a flagship attraction to provide justification for shuttering it (10kL). Some minor steering of guest surveys to justify management agendas doesn't even approach the territory of 'tinfoil' conspiracy.

Having a completely open ended survey where people can just rant on and on about something sort of defeats the point of the survey though. Every survey is bias but I have never taken a Disney one that struck me as being absurdly leading.

 

[CaptainAmerica]

Doesn't seem very far-fetched to me given how railroaded some of these surveys seem. Surveys can be very useful for showing you were "right".

The stakeholders don't get to write the surveys.

 

[_caleb]

That is not correct. What would Disney gain by spending significant time and money to generate surveys with artificially positive answers that mask how guests really feel?

No, you cannot express "exactly how you feel" but it's not some kind of tinfoil conspiracy. When you survey 1,000 different people and give them freedom to answer "exactly how they feel" you get 1,000 different responses. You need to narrow the choices so you can do some analysis with standardized data.

Everyone likes to say "Disney doesn't care about the guest experience," which is complete nonsense. No they don't care about the guest experience as such, but they absolutely care about the guest experience insofar as they want to to come back and spend more money with them and tell your friends what a great time you had so your friends will spend THEIR money with Disney too.

Nobody is saying it's a tinfoil conspiracy, just that it's a rigged survey. Surveys tend to fall into qualitative (more open-ended, "what do you think about x?"-type questions) or quantitative ("which of these three options do you agree with most?"). They are used to gain different types of insight. @PirateFrank is saying that Disney doesn't often ask the open-ended type of questions–the kind that should inform the multiple-choice-type questions they tend to ask.

"Disney" is not one unified group all working in tandem. The people asking survey questions have the goal of asking a certain number of people (probably certain numbers of certain types of people). On the whole, Disney wants to know what guests think. But some execs likely don't want to hear bad news ("The majority of guests didn't care for SW:GE") and want to hear good news ("38% of guests indicated that they are 'more likely' to tell their friends about Blue milk.")

Also, opening up the feedback options might reveal that certain parts of the company aren't doing their jobs well. So there's a bit of an incentive not to ask questions that might result in that sort of feedback.

 

[_caleb]

The stakeholders don't get to write the surveys.

Do you know who does write the surveys?