MrPromey
Well-Known Member
Not sure where you get the idea Disney is sold out six months in advance. They currently have rooms open in many of their open resorts as little as a couple weeks out from today and are running a discount promotion right now for Florida residents to boost occupancy.
It's been this way with availability for a while now, despite Disney being slow to reopen all resorts for bookings.
Point about Universal and their access is that the vast majority of people using it aren't paying for it, directly. They're getting it for "free" with their rooms.
Universal's price point on the paid option is largely a marketing tactic to set the value on the "free" benefit for resort guests as in "with the four of us, the room was practically free when you factor in that we all got that perk!". (The value of which, Universal, conveniently, sets themselves - it's a marketing technique commonly referred to as "price anchoring". Feel free to Google the term if you think I'm off-base, here.)
All that aside, not sure what you mean about them having to do that to get people to stay at Universal at their price point. You make it sound like a bad deal when, much like the rest of the Orlando area, you can get a much nicer room for a much lower price than Disney...
Does Universal need to do this with the current draw their parks offer?
No. Wizards and dinos aside, plenty of people stay at Universal for the better rooms at lower prices and visit Disney - including active members in this forum so even without their parks, they're getting business.
Does this offering sell more rooms?
Obviously.
My only point to responding to your post though, was to address what Universal, specifically, was doing in comparison to Disney since they are the only local competition you mentioned and the point I was trying to make was that Universal's Express pass is far more intended for resort guests than guests specifically paying for it.
If you want to pay, they're not going to pass up free money but that's not why they're offering it the way they are and while talking about how invincible Disney is and how impossible to book a room it would be if they offered something for "free", let's not forget that back before the pandemic, back when, based on your argument above, Disney apparently did need to give their system away for free (not just for resort guests, but everyone), Universal's offering was a much better one than Disney's for onsite guests who with Disney, only got a 60 day window for three fastpases vs. the 30 everyone else buying a ticket to walk in got compared to unlimited "front of line".
Disney can't do for their resort guests what Universal does because Disney doesn't have enough attraction capacity to handle unlimited front-of-line access for the number of resort rooms they have without creating a customer service nightmare for offsite guests still paying top dollar to enter their gates.
That's not because they're so awesome, btw, It's because for almost 20 years, they've been more focused on manipulating crowd levels and pricing to increase profit margins than investing in painfully needed popular attraction capacity.
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