Not much time today, but when people ask why Disney is looking to remove this beloved (only by some, to be fair) attraction ... we need to talk semantics a bit.
While we consider the Tiki Room to be an 'attraction' (please, don't call it a ride ... even by mistake, you look so stupid when you talk about riding a theater show. I hear it with CBJ, HoP, AA etc and it is just wrong) and it certainly was for most of its existence, it isn't now. That's right, Disney does NOT consider Jose and Fritz and Claude etc to be an attraction.
They consider it to be a distraction.
Very big and significant difference all born about from the NGE/MM+ multi-billion dollar reinventing the theme park going experience fiasco.
As explained to me by a friend who was working for Disney when NGE began, but no longer is, attractions were things like Space Mountain, Little Mermaid, Meet Mickey, Wishes, Pirates, Peter Pan etc etc. Anything that had FP+ was defined by TDO to be an 'attraction'. Things like Tiki Room, CBJ, HoP and Peoplemover (some of those which were E-Ticket attractions in the past) were viewed as 'distractions' ... You see, TDO and Nick Franklin and Tom Staggs and Jay Rasulo and George Kalogridis and, oh yeah, Bob Iger too wanted you to take all of that 'extra time' (ask Guests if they feel like they have that today! Go ahead ... ask people in the parks, I'd love to hear what you find out!) and use it to spend more on food and beverage and merchandise. They were 'distractions' to make you not realize that while you weren't standing in a queue for 85 minutes to ride Splash Mountain, you were stuck in Frontierland with two hours before your FP window opened, so you were in fact waiting ... just doing so sans standing in a queue.
Of course, it didn't work out that way. Just like the original FP didn't cause revenue and profits to rise. Disney still doesn't get that with few exceptions, if people have $500 to spend in a day, they won't spend $723 just because they've made all the lines longer in the park and a reservation to do something as simple at get your princess a photo with a Disney one.
But that's another tale ... the thing to focus on is if something at WDW doesn't have FP+ on it, then Disney doesn't consider it (with a very few exceptions) to really have value. They are simply the distractions for you to keep busy while still waiting hours to get on favorite attractions.
Disney has no problem closing attractions or replacing or changing them. Why would you expect them to feel differently about distractions?
