So...they were implemented in 2013, and effectively, FP+ was turned off at the start of 2020.
So we'll say 7 years.
Is it even possible that the $2 billion spent on that system has been made back over and above what the yearly revenue would have been anyways?
ETA: And even further...could it possibly have generated more than the $2 billion it cost over and above what the revenue would have been?
EDIT 2: Bear in mind...the revenue from WDW is the only revenue that can be considered...because this system was designed for and implemented at WDW.
This is going to be a long and winding post. I apologize in advance for those who feel like reading it.
It's a question of value, as you'd have to sum up all the direct spending as well as the data mining. So there is the direct purchase of magic bands, in which they certainly made money over the minute cost of them. I will consider that amount negligible. The things that are much harder to sum up are the increases in Dining plan usage, and increases in guest spending per capita relative to the before times.
It's a different kind of bubble economy for Disney. They built a bubble an convinced us it was better to just stay in it. While in the bubble we paid for everything with a tap of the wrist instead of pulling out cards or cash for every expenditure. For a while you didn't have to figure out gratuities and could just overspend on dining plans when you normally wouldn't order appetizers and multiple snacks a day.
This is all real money, and a lot of it, but I can't give a number without spending weeks going through financial discloures and park attendance estimates to still be guessing.
As for the next thing, IMO the biggest value is information they were able to use on guest behavior across the parks, hotels, and DS. Fastpass letting in the vast majority of riders gives much more accurate data on ride waits and capacity/distribution than checking the number on the turnstiles every now and then. Linking guest behavior based on food/beverage purchases. Adding extra hour events to the morning and night and figuring out which guests would purchase them, based on various attributes stored on file (AP, DVC, state/region, Annual Salary, etc). They mix together your activity with the voluntary survey data and they know better what you'll be willing to pay for than you do before you get there. And then you get emails about the events you might want to pay for weeks ahead of your visit!
EMH used to be free, but suddenly you have EMM and DAH doubling your park ticket price when you already paid. Not double for AP since they are fixed cost, but those people used to be only worth food/bev/merch money in the parks and now you can hit them for another $100+ per trip to get on attractions at a time the park used to be open anyway.
If anybody has stats on what they pull in for DAH and EMM annually I'd count all of that. The parties existed before so I'll leave them alone, but they used all that survey and purchase data to figure out how many people they could jam in before people would blow it up on social media.
I think that data would be invaluable to the company in the long term and possibly worth the full cost of MyMagic/FP. But let us not forget how it allowed them to push people into attractions that previously had low waits so they didn't have to invest in more headline attractions. They've underinvested in attractions to the tune of at least a billion dollars since 2013, right?
So again it's how do you value each piece of the puzzle. They had to spend the money anyway, and pitched it as people spending more on food and merch. I think people did, but certainly not to the tune of 2 billion dollars. That was never the real purpose anyway though. I believe as many do that it was short sighted not to just suck up the cost of the data mining operation and keep building, but if the goal was to keep pushing up the stock price until the CEO retired, then the goal was met.
