Tha Realest
Well-Known Member
I don’t think they’ve ever reached full staffing. I think Chapek and McCarthy were clear that they wanted to increase per guest spending and were capping attendance in some cases. Whether the reservations were used as a sluice to direct to DAK or EP is anyone’s guess, but I don’t think attendance has ever reached anywhere near the pre-Covid levels, and I think external and Disney’s own numbers reflect that.I'm unsure what you mean. Theme park crowds are back to normal, while Disney is offering pretty good hotel discounts this summer to increase hotel occupancy. Meanwhile, Park Reservation availability is excellent for regular theme park tickets and nearly all experiences are back to normal.
Certainly, there were serious staffing issues in 2021 and 2022 but, at least recently, Disney does not seem to be behaving as if those staffing issues still exist.
For this summer and beyond, Disney is behaving as if they want more people at the theme parks and hotels, not less.
What’s the old saying? You make the same money selling 100 widgets at $10 as you do selling 10 at $100 - something along those lines. I think they decided an operational sweet spot (given staffing issues) was to raise prices at various points across the board to extract as much (of not more) from the 60-70% of guests that would have normally been expected to show up, but haven’t (due to Covid or price increases).
I also don’t know that “it feels busy” or “wait times are comparable to 2019” help much because there’s different factors at play now (again, operational slow downs due to staffing issues, robust G+ and ILL, lack of entertainment options, reservation and park hopping restrictions in place).