Dining with characters is done

Javier Antonio Nisa Avila

Javier Antonio Nisa Avila

Active Member
I think it would be possible to keep the character dining rooms when they reopen on July 11th. Maintaining the social distance between tables and explaining that photos can be taken but cannot sign the characters I enough.

In the other hand, The decision to eliminate the dining plan is not only absurd but it scares away customers who have reservations.
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila said:
In the other hand, The decision to eliminate the dining plan is not only absurd but it scares away customers who have reservations.
Click to expand...

It's not absurd. It's what they had to do since their restaurants are now at 50% capacity.

Scaring away customers is OK with Disney. They didn't want to open this early anyway. And they usually have an overcrowding problem. And it's a better PR deal for them for customers to voluntarily say they don't want to go than be told, "Sorry, we're all booked."
 
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila

Javier Antonio Nisa Avila

Active Member
MisterPenguin said:
It's not absurd. It's what they had to do since their restaurants are now at 50% capacity.

Scaring away customers is OK with Disney. They didn't want to open this early anyway. And they usually have an overcrowding problem. And it's a better PR deal for them for customers to voluntarily say they don't want to go than be told, "Sorry, we're all booked."
Click to expand...

I think that with a good computerized system and explaining the rules to customers, everything is possible. Citizen education is a possibility that any company should exercise.
In the same way that they now are going to require a reservation to enter the park, for restaurants they can demand prior reservation with a minimum of 48 hours until new 100% of the remaining capacity.
 
donsullivan

donsullivan

Premium Member
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila said:
........
In the other hand, The decision to eliminate the dining plan is not only absurd but it scares away customers who have reservations.
Click to expand...
The dining plan was removed because they do not know what their dining capacity will be on any given day in the future. And with that in mind, you cannot presell seats at tables if you do not know how many seats you'll have available to deliver on a given future date. The only practical option to manage the unknown future capacity was removal of the dining plan.
 
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila

Javier Antonio Nisa Avila

Active Member
donsullivan said:
The dining plan was removed because they do not know what their dining capacity will be on any given day in the future. And with that in mind, you cannot presell seats at tables if you do not know how many seats you'll have available to deliver on a given future date. The only practical option to manage the unknown future capacity was removal of the dining plan.
Click to expand...

The capacity is calculated based on the social distance distributed in square meters and the maximum number of guests based on the social distance. Restaurants are the easiest to manage, the problem are open spaces, but not a restaurant.
 
J

jinx8402

Well-Known Member
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila said:
The capacity is calculated based on the social distance distributed in square meters and the maximum number of guests based on the social distance. Restaurants are the easiest to manage, the problem are open spaces, but not a restaurant.
Click to expand...

But the problem is, if they can only handle 10,000* people a day at sit down restaurants, but there are 20,000* people on the dining plan with TS entitlements, then you are going to have a lot of angry people who cannot use their DDP.

*made up, hypothetical numbers
 
donsullivan

donsullivan

Premium Member
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila said:
The capacity is calculated based on the social distance distributed in square meters and the maximum number of guests based on the social distance. Restaurants are the easiest to manage, the problem are open spaces, but not a restaurant.
Click to expand...
You're missing the point. Because they do not know how many people will be allowed into the parks and what percentage of occupation in restaurants will be allowed on any given future date, they cannot presell those seats. They have no idea for example if Be Our Guest will be running with 25% capacity on SEP 1 or 50% on SEP 1 and if something happens, it might go down to 15% at another future date. They have decided they do not want to presell seats to those restaurants in advance (that is all the dining plan is) since they don't know how many seats they have to sell. They also do not want to restrict the dining plan and say "only you special people can have it, the rest can not" to manage the demand. No matter what scenario they choose, they lose because someone feels disenfranchised. The only practical option is to do away with it completely until things return to some new normal, and every guest is on a level playing field.
 
TeriofTerror

TeriofTerror

Well-Known Member
Javier Antonio Nisa Avila said:
I think that with a good computerized system and explaining the rules to customers, everything is possible. Citizen education is a possibility that any company should exercise.
In the same way that they now are going to require a reservation to enter the park, for restaurants they can demand prior reservation with a minimum of 48 hours until new 100% of the remaining capacity.
Click to expand...
Have you met the average Disney guest? Many seem to check their brains at ther front gate. Good luck and may the Force be with you on educating them about anything.
 
K

KenHutch

New Member
Listening to people talk about its the end amuses me to no end. Did you stay awake in history class at all? About 100 years ago while we were going thru a nasty pandemic people were saying its the end of cities. Well the didn't end and by next year almost everything should be back to normal except for the recession this will probably trigger.
 
MisterPenguin

MisterPenguin

President of Animal Kingdom
Premium Member
drizgirl said:
I'm pretty sure Disney didn't see it that way. It has always been within their control to limit whatever they were so inclined to limit.
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They did.

Guest satisfaction goes down when the park is overcrowded.

Disney has done a lot of things to reduce overcrowding:
  • MDE and FP+ (helped and hurt at the same time)
  • Big increases in pricing but with discounts in the off peak (to make people move to off peak)
  • Selling the park twice (holiday nights, early/late hours)
  • bringing their two underutilized half-day parks to full day (DAK & DHS)
  • Surge pricing (costs more for certain times of the year, costs more for an 'anytime' ticket)

So, WDW has done a lot to deal with the overcrowding (and by that, we mean at MK which is getting twice the number of people it was built for). The last thing that they could do (as you point out) is the nuclear option: Cap attendance to be lower. But that means turning people away at the gate who have APs or anytime tickets in favor of those who bought the time-limited tickets. It also means limiting the amount of time-limited tickets and making people declare what day they'll be at the MK (which is what they'll be doing on this re-start-up). And so, part of that nuclear option is dealing with people who are only free for vacation on one specific week of the year, but all the tickets for the MK are sold out for that week.

Other then enacting the nuclear option, look for prices to continue to climb and for the beefing up of the three under-utilized parks.
 
D

drizgirl

Well-Known Member
MisterPenguin said:
They did.

Guest satisfaction goes down when the park is overcrowded.

Disney has done a lot of things to reduce overcrowding:
  • MDE and FP+ (helped and hurt at the same time)
  • Big increases in pricing but with discounts in the off peak (to make people move to off peak)
  • Selling the park twice (holiday nights, early/late hours)
  • bringing their two underutilized half-day parks to full day (DAK & DHS)
  • Surge pricing (costs more for certain times of the year, costs more for an 'anytime' ticket)

So, WDW has done a lot to deal with the overcrowding (and by that, we mean at MK which is getting twice the number of people it was built for). The last thing that they could do (as you point out) is the nuclear option: Cap attendance to be lower. But that means turning people away at the gate who have APs or anytime tickets in favor of those who bought the time-limited tickets. It also means limiting the amount of time-limited tickets and making people declare what day they'll be at the MK (which is what they'll be doing on this re-start-up). And so, part of that nuclear option is dealing with people who are only free for vacation on one specific week of the year, but all the tickets for the MK are sold out for that week.

Other then enacting the nuclear option, look for prices to continue to climb and for the beefing up of the three under-utilized parks.
Click to expand...
MDE/FP+ wasn't to fix overcrowding. It was done to optimize usage of current park attractions.

The rest I don't believe was done to "fix" overcrowding. It was all done to allow them to make the most money on the most people they could possibly squeeze into the parks on any given day. None of that says they were trying to alleviate overcrowding. If they really wanted fewer people in the parks they wouldn't have offered any discounts when bookings were down.
 

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