GhostHost1000
Premium Member
They keep raising prices and reducing quality they might be able to shut down some resorts
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Labor cost cutting measures begin at Walt Disney World as the company enters Q1
- Thread starter wdwmagic
- Start date
CaptainAmerica
Well-Known Member
I'm sorry but this is just silly.
Rat
Rise
Railway
Falcon
FoP
NRJ
Night safari
Tron
Guardians
Journey of Water
LMRA
KiteTails
Harmonious
Enchantment
Mine Train
Festival of Fantasy
Happily Ever After
Under the Sea
Enchanted Tales
Epcot Forever
Awesome Planet
Beauty and the Beast Sing-Along
Canada Far and Wide
Wondrous China
Play!
Frozen Sing-Along
DHS Fireworks (various)
Disney Junior show (multiple)
Wilderness Explorers
Rivers of Light (RIP)
That's 30 things off the top of my head in 10 years, not counting refurbs, character experiences, or entertainment changes. They haven't all been home runs obviously, but "lack of investment in the parks" is absurd.
el_super
Well-Known Member
But what happens if the ride with the shorter line actually has greater capacity?
Another factor to this that often gets ignored, is thinking that all capacity is the same. Or even that all attractions are the same. That they are interchangeable. It goes to reason that if you have a long line for the bathroom, you can build more bathrooms to relieve the stress, because generally bathrooms are interchangeable.
That isn't true with attractions. Building Pirates didn't make the line for Haunted Mansion go down. Building the Mine Train didn't make the line for Space Mountain shrink. Building something new doesn't make the demand for the existing attraction roster decrease across the board. Instead it pulls people out of those middle of the road experiences and causes them to wait in line, for something else. Attractions with high demand stay high, and the ones with lower demand decrease further.
And just to stay grounded, opening up a new attraction like Mine Train, which could routinely pull in a 120+ minute wait, just perpetuates the same complaints of long lines and overcrowding. Instead of complaining the wait for Space Mountain is too long, now you have people complaining the wait for Mine Train is too long.
Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
That’s 13 attractions (10 if we don’t count movies, which apparently aren’t actually attractions.) 2 of those attractions aren’t open. All of this is after a decade of neglect in which even less opened. So no, that is not good for a 4-park resort with absurd ticket and room prices over more than a decade (Tron and LM are unlikely to open within 10 years of each other.)
Look at it this way - what is the state of each park? MGM is fairly solid - it needs new shows and a couple more non-Es, but it’s not in bad shape. MK needs more capacity badly. AK is absurdly underbuilt and needs a large range of rides, both Es and otherwise. EPCOT is an amazing mess with no headliners, no direction, and a gaping wound at its center. So no, any company that is trotting out AK (as pretty as it is) and EPCOT as full-price parks has underinvested.
CaptainAmerica
Well-Known Member
Animal Kingdom is the finest park in Central Florida and I'll die on that hill.
hopemax
Well-Known Member
For a MK 8-10 operating day, that would mean the attraction can only handle 570 riders per hour. Disney has made some poor ride capacity decisions, but they aren't that bad. Working the other way, the MK needs a ride that serves somewhere between 2000-2500pph, and Universal has been able to build HP rides that fit the bill, so it's possible. Let's call it 2200, and a 14 hr operating day. That's about 30,000 new ride seats per day.
Looking at your other number, 12,000 new people a day would translate into an increase of 4.3 million guests per year. What is the historical precedent for something like that happening with a new Disney ride? I assume you weren't trying to be specific, but the potential benefit lies in the specifics. The delta between a solid capacity ride and realistic daily increase in guest count is meaningful. If the MK has 20 million guests, a 5% YTY increase is 1 million guests. Or an average daily increase of 2740 people. Significantly below the additional 30,000 daily ride slots. Assuming all the new people ride, that leaves 27,000 spots for the guests that are already there. 90% of the new attraction's capacity is to the benefit of people already in the park. So essentially half of MK daily guests get the opportunity to add +1 to their ride count for that day. Disney pegs that guest satisfaction metric at like 8-9 rides a day, right, (I know everyone on WDWMagic needs a far greater number), so a +1 is not nothing for how a guest feels about their day, especially if it's a really good experience (unlike the New Fantasyland stuff Mermaid / SDMT hassle which leaves people wanting so the +1 didn't feel like a +1). And a 5% increase is still probably too much of a bump in this day and age, so that would lead to more than half of guests getting the +1, and some guests don't care and don't need it, but all the shifting as people make different choices may lead to a better situation for some existing experience they do care about. But you need a *real* capacity increase, not just closing something else to avoid operational cost increases, because that brings down the delta.
The problem is if a ride costs half a billion dollars, and you're only going to bump guest counts by 1 million people a year or less, that's a long repayment schedule without making people pay for that new ride directly, like say, with some sort of line-skip option.
el_super
Well-Known Member
OK what do you do with the capacity that is going unused then? Time to remove Hall of Presidents? Tiki Room? Country Bears? Carousel of Progress?
OK let's flip the script a bit. If the parks have been experiencing this massive underinvestment for 10+ years, why hasn't the attendance gone down appropriately?
CaptainAmerica
Well-Known Member
That's what kills me. People are using the *global pandemic* to proof their point about "lack of investment in the parks."
They've been ringing the same doomsday bell since New Fantasyland, and now that we're in a worse-than-9/11 suppression of global tourism demand, they say "aha! you see!?"
Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
I agree, at least aesthetically. It’s certainly the best looking of Disney’s parks. It’s my favorite (although MGM is resurgent).
BUT it is still woefully lacking in rides and attractions (and restaurants). It needs a lot of additions to realize the potential of its theming.
Gotta plan that merchandise location at the ride exit to extract more cash out of guests.
CaptainAmerica
Well-Known Member
Doesn't Tiffin's have walkup availability pretty much every night? Alas, Animal Kingdom's strengths are also its downfall in that respect. It's too damn hot in there. I think there's a real psychological effect of being in that humidity that basically takes a meaningful TS F&B business off the table. People just don't have the stamina to make it to dinner time.
Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
Why… why would I want to REMOVE capacity when I’m advocating ADDING capacity? You need people-eaters that don’t always run full.
OK what do you do with the capacity that is going unused then? Time to remove Hall of Presidents? Tiki Room? Country Bears? Carousel of Progress?
OK let's flip the script a bit. If the parks have been experiencing this massive underinvestment for 10+ years, why hasn't the attendance gone down appropriately?
Popularity has nothing to do with quality - Venom 2 is not the best film of the last 2 years. If you want a full sociological study of why attendance has remained strong, it’s going to include ideas like brand loyalty, conspicuous consumption, and habit and discuss things like DVC. It’s a question with a book length answer.
Yeah it’s something like this.
The best park if.
That’s how I would describe it.
Casper Gutman
Well-Known Member
Tiffins is not a restaurant with mass appeal, however good it may be. Yak and Yeti seems to fill up.
And people just don’t have a reason to make it to dinner time.
I mean, we can do two full days at AK easily.
If people can't fill up their days and need more things to do, then they aren't truly taking in every aspect of that beautiful, intricately detailed and themed park. I'm willing to bet not many people are spending time looking at the details (which themselves are "entertainment"), and I don't just mean the Tree of Life.
And to miss AK after dark (if open) is just sad.
My opinion of course.
(wait a minute, I don't even know what thread I'm in...
)
If people can't fill up their days and need more things to do, then they aren't truly taking in every aspect of that beautiful, intricately detailed and themed park. I'm willing to bet not many people are spending time looking at the details (which themselves are "entertainment"), and I don't just mean the Tree of Life.
And to miss AK after dark (if open) is just sad.
My opinion of course.
(wait a minute, I don't even know what thread I'm in...
)
hopemax
Well-Known Member
Because of 80's & 90s kids who have spent the last 25+ years dreaming of bringing their kids to WDW to experience what they did and Boomers paying to bring the grandkids for the same reason. Those kids have kids that are now old enough, and they are being paid adequately enough to pull the trigger. It would take a huge change in public perception or a catastrophic event to get them to change course and remove WDW from their child's life experience entirely. Even if they have a horrible time, many were likely to come only once anyway. Their dissatisfaction can't translate into a lower attendance in the future. Future attendance is driven by someone else whose kids just aged into Disney and Mom/Dad have been counting on their bonus/overtime check to pay for it. What Disney does or doesn't do, is to a degree, irrelevant because the choice to go was made 25 years ago, and everyone has just been in a holding pattern.
Islands of Adventure would like a word with you. 5 coasters (3 of which are world class,) 3 world class water rides, 3 hybrid thrill screen/dark rides, 1 traditional dark ride, 1 Cable car (I mean train,) 1 peoplemover, 3 spinners, a drop ride and 3 kids play areas.
I would still argue MK still beats both these two, but that’s due to nostalgia.
Not even close to AK.
Does it have more rides? Sure. But that's it. There's no true immersion in a story like there is at AK.
Harry Potter would be it.
Why? Jurassic Park, Hogesmeade, Lost Continent, Suess Landing and Port of Entry are perfectly themed areas that stand in with the best of AK’s theming, while Toon Lagoon and Marvel Super Hero Island are getting dated, they are still well themed and miles above Dinoland USA. AK has the best zoological attraction in the world, a phenomenal theme park show, the best screen ride in existence but then the quality drops quickly. IOA delivers a much more consistent ride line holdup of quality.
We experience Animal Kingdom quite differently and we'll have to leave it at that.