Non-resort Guests are not the "lower priority/low spend guests". I'd call them middle priority. They spend a lot on their daily ticket and almost certainly a lot on food and souvenirs.
From his statement at last month's J.P. Morgan conference, it's clear who Chapek thinks (knows) who are low priority Guests:
We took the opportunity to revisit sort of our legacy operations to improve the yield because it is the ultimate in a capacity-constrained environment but also to improve our guest experience where we've had an opportunity to look at things like pricing and ticketing outside the constraint of an ongoing concern and ongoing business when we shut down for a year. So that really gave us the opportunity to say, when we emerge, how do we want to emerge and how does that fit our yielding strategy and our guest experience strategy? Things like annual pass. There's probably no better example here than annual pass, where it's a legacy system, and people keep signing up year after year after year, which may or may not play into your yield management strategy in an ideal way. So we had a chance to thoughtfully and thoroughly reconsider that.
Annual Pass Holders who do not stay onsite are in Chapek's crosshairs. Chapek is looking at these with a microscope.
With no blockout dates, a "high tier AP" just makes the parks more crowded on what should be Disney's most profitable days. Don't fool yourself into thinking that Chapek values an offsite Platinum APH anywhere near as much as he values an onsite Resort Guest who between hotel, ticket, and food, is spending hundreds of dollars per person
each day.
