It did set them apart. I'm not so sure they are that much better than anyone else now.
It may have been a rash decision but it was hardly peanuts. The cost of that bus service was a lot more than most of you can even imagine. You tend to think of it as the same as driving a car to and from the airport. It is not. It involves running buses all day long back and forth between the resort and the airport. And not just one bus, but at least 3 (probably more) along with pay for the drivers, fuel, insurance, maintenance and repairs. They were paying a third party to supply all that stuff, the buses and the rest of the expense and that third party has to make a profit on top of that. It is millions/millions of dollars per year, just for the buses alone. It was to keep people on the site but with the addition of Uber and Lyft it no longer was working to their advantage to make the cost worth the return. People got to the parks for 30+ years before the Magic Bus existed, they can do it again.
The profit was always at the expense of the guest, otherwise admission would be free. It's just that Disney got unusually greedy and they will eventually pay for that greed, if they aren't already.
I can imagine. In the grand scheme of things the cost was surely worth the positive energy it sent towards the guests.
It was built into the room rate, and when it was ended the room rates didn’t go down. This was a pure money grab, we paid for the service before via our room rates and we’re still paying for it now (since the rates didn’t adjust), we’re just getting nothing for that money now.
Disney didn’t pay for the “costs”…they paid Mears for a service
If you look at it from that angle…yes…that is correct
It's only positive, now a negative, for those that had used it before. New people were not exposed to it and are reeking in positive energy just going there. At some point, probably when the excessive charges hits their wallets, the positivity starts to decline. The cost to ride a bus is a whole lot less than the cost of operating one or a cab or a rental. I firmly believe that if there is, indeed, a decrease in attendance it is because of the cost of entry and the cost of Genie/Lightning, food, and the incredible complication of visiting, (AKA reservations and other restrictions)
Welcome to the Wonderful World of Disney pricing systems. Pay more and more, get less and less. And that is just one example of what they think of their guests resort wide.
What's the difference? They saved nothing the cost for the service included all the costs that were incurred. Every nut and bolt and on top of that they had to cover Mears profit needs. They probably got a deal, but Mears would be out of business by know if Disney wasn't paying costs plus profit.
The whole point of the compound is to get you there to buy high profit stuff…not to sell rooms and tickets. That’s the overhead.
Why do you think you’re the only one that understands that Disney paid Mears money to operate the bus? We all know that.
If it wasn’t needed, we wouldn’t see giant yellow Mears busses all over the property lol.
There is certainly a huge need…the Orlando airport isn’t one of the busiest in the country because no one’s flying
We'll have to agree to disagree about that. They did start it to get people there, but more to keep people there where they had to pay the higher prices because escape was costly and more complicated.
#1 Because more than one person was seeming to think that it was a drop in the bucket, you included. And I know better so I felt the need to spell it out. If you already knew you could just skip over it.
The standard Mears bus is yellow. Before magical express this is what they operated, and now it’s what they operate again. All Disney branding has been removed.
Yes, greed is a huge part of it, but it had other reasons. The first was that it started not very long after 9/11 and it was to try and encourage people to go to the parks again. I think it would have stopped shortly after but then 2008 came along and that recession hit the parks pretty hard and it kept going. After that it was hard to find a good reason, guest wise, to stop it and then the Pandemic hit and gave them a real excuse to end the service.