This is kinda the long and short of these debates.
Most of us exist in a bubble of our own making. Most of what we see and hear in regard to the parks is coming from a fandom. Fandoms are entities that thrive off of complaint and negativity, and we all participate in it.
For some, the complaints and negativity are about the company, the parks, and leadership decisions. For others, it’s complaints and negativity about those other people’s complaints and negativity.
But outside of our bubble, in the real world, little if anything has really changed about the way your average person feels about the prospect of going to Disney, and little if anything has changed about how the average person who ends up going feels about the experience. It’s as varied as it always was. There was never a singular defining winner of a position to either of those questions.
We can point to how we feel personally as proof of whatever we want to prove, or point to whatever other people in the fandom say as proof of whatever we want to prove, but the reality is that none of us really has our ear the ground on the subject of whether or not most of the people clicking into a park enjoyed it.
Anyone who claims to see this with any degree of objectivity on either side of the discussion is delusional at best, a liar at worst. It simply isn’t possible for us. We are deep inside of an echo chamber. For goodness sake, we’re on a Disney Parks forum arguing about attendance. If that isn’t proof that we’re not exactly in the company of the average guest visiting Disney, I don’t know what is.
We can post as many articles about Disney’s price increases as we want, or comb through as many numbers as we want, but they will not reveal anything to us. They will simply confirm in our minds what we independently already decided to be true.
At the end of the day, whether attendance is up, down, or flat, Disney is operating 5 of the most visited theme parks in the US, and 8 in the world. That to me says something very clear: the vast majority of folks who’re interested in going to Disney or have gone to Disney are not sitting on social media or online to discuss it. The conversations we see in our spaces are not your average guest, and trying to extrapolate what they say outward to represent the voice of a majority is a fool’s errand.
The story is not in table service restaurant availability or in ride wait times. The story is in do people want to go, do they go, and how is it for them when they get there?
And that is a story that will NEVER be told to us, no matter how much any one of us wants to claim we’ve got it all figured out.
