It's really not that bad to go through security, it takes us less than a few minutes usually even in early morning. By the time you'd be park hopping, the lines are usually really low. The bigger win for the backstage transport was not having to wait for buses and long walks to them. Ultimately the service was doomed to fail, it wasn't enough of a perk to justify the price, and if they priced it too much lower then it would have been overcrowded and defeated the purpose. I'd rather see the company invest in the parks then in trying to double the needed buses for those parkhopping vs not.
I'd rather them invest in the parks rather than double the needed buses, too, which is why I'm suggesting nothing like that, at all. I may have been a little unclear in my original post, though.
I'm not talking about adding transportation, just making it so you don't have to go through security a second time if you've already passed through it to enter another park and are staying within secured areas. So if you take the monorail from Ticket and Transportation to Epcot, you've already done security. Why have to do it again other than Disney logistics, (which shouldn't be the guest's problem) Same with park-to-park buses.
In the case of the Epcot monorail line, swapping the entrance and exit at the Monorail station would be one easy way to fix that. A slightly more involved way would be redoing the exit to finally eliminate that runway which was only put there there as the preview area for Epcot while it was still under construction when all you could really do was take the monorail out, look around there and then go back. The extra hike to go out and then come back at the bottom has been a waste of steps for decades, adding nothing to the guest experience.
I'm glad you've had mostly fast and easy times with security. That has not always been the case for me, traveling with young children with strollers and older family members that have mobility devices and the various accoutrements and supplies that come with them all.
Maybe I'm just bitter because I know by myself, I could just breeze through the no-bag entrance but my pack mule minded family aren't just an annoyance to me, they, and many others like them, are also a problem for everyone behind us in a security line.
Basically it comes down to this: Lines and waiting are what most of my day at Disney is. Lines to get into a parking lot, lines to get to a parking space, waiting for a tram, lines to go through security, lines to buy tickets/passes (okay, this one's only once a year for my pass), lines to get on a monorail or ferry or bus, lines to get into a park, lines to do just about anything in a park (even with fastpass), lines to eat quick-service food, lines to leave a park, lines to get on a tram back to a car, lines to get out of a parking lot at the end of the night... If I thought about it, I could probably give even more examples but I think you get my point.
Honestly, I spend more of my time in lines or waiting than doing anything else when I go there, these days and by an
overwhelminly large margin as new attraction times seem to be getting shorter and shorter. As prices and waits
both continue to go up with no apparent ceiling in sight for either, it becomes less and less of an enjoyable experience. I'd consider eliminating
any of those lines or waits a win and this feels like it would be an
easy win.
Until it maybe/eventually gets over-run and has its own problems, I love mobile ordering for this reason. Did they need to add that? No but I'm glad they did and I don't think we missed out on an e-ticket to get that space established at the counters or the mobile ordering functionality created for the app.
First-world problems? Perhaps but everything related to a Disney vacation that isn't ideal is, don't you think?
I don't think resolving this park-to-park transportation quirk would be a (relatively) expensive issue for Disney since it's just about entrances and exits for specific transportation routes that already exist, especially at a time that entrances are already being reconfigured, anyway.
Getting
anyone out of a line makes things better for
everyone in the line so I don't see who would be the losers in all this.
For the record, I'm not overly-passionate about this single issue and I realize there are plenty of other things more pressing for Disney to address but it's still something I'd like to see them address, at some point, anyway, none-the-less.
