The Spirited Sixth Sense ...

[rioriz]

It is much easier to rationalize the current and past state of WDW when you accept it for what it was created for...A profit machine that was intended and continues to be used to finance other areas of the Disney company.

 

[bhg469]

Room for a small land.

Imagine the meet and greets that would hold!!!

 

[flynnibus]

Not the guest or the reader. The system. Slow then OK then slow again. Entire system crashes periodically still for extended time. Was totally down a few days ago for several hours. A clue would be Disney is still calling it a test even in ads after15 months.

Do you just keep repeating old information you've read or are you basing this on your daily experience ? Because RECENT reports included much improved reader performance

 

[wogwog]

Imagine the meet and greets that would hold!!!

Meet and greet Phil H. Meet and greet George K. Meet and greet the Iger.

 

[GoofGoof]

First question. Can it be fixed as a publicly traded entity? Does WDW need to be spun off in order to get away from the quarterly profit growth cycle.

It could be done, but there might be short-tem stock price repercussions, to which I would say, who gives a ****. If WDPR is to survive, it must be changed out from top to bottom and the culture has to be replaced with a productive one.

IMHO it could be done without any short term negative stock impact if you had the right leadership in place. A strong CEO could sell the street on the long term benefit of spending money to fix the problems. I've seen companies spend large sums of money on much more risky propositions and the street eats it up. A charismatic and strong CEO could push through the change needed. It's just like a political campaign, you need the right PR spin.

 

[Chicagoshannon2]

Tomorrow land side? I'd say there is enough room for an attraction back there. I could see them shoehorning at least a theater there. Space* is not MK's problem and never has been.

*area not the ride, although the ride has problems

There used to be a nice open air theater there. They removed it to put in a parking lot.

 

[SirNim]

We just arrived here at the Hilton Tokyo Bay about 90 minutes ago, my good man! Thanks for asking.

Nothing like being able to stand in your skivvies at your hotel room window and watch Promethius erupt!! (Behave, you...)

8 days of park overdose and 5 days sightseeing in Tokyo. La vida es buena!

As Abe Vigoda once said, "Try the sushi. It's the best in the world."

 

[WDW1974]

I somehow missed this masterpiece of a post. It speaks volumes about WDW then vs. now and a business model that may look great now (it really doesn't ... Wall Street just has such a bulge for Bob Iger, largely aided by his positioning in the financial community and his media appearances -- REALLY!!!, that folks in business circles are actually saying that WDC stock is trading at an ''Iger premium'') but has no long term viability.

I don't want to just say read it again because that goes without saying ... so some comments ...

I don’t mind Disney making money.

I don’t mind Disney making lots of money.

I mind Disney being stupid about how they do it.

What’s been most disappointing about Parks & Resorts (P&R) leadership of late is that, at WDW, they’ve abandoned a strategy that made them successful for decades and have let the latest trends from lean manufacturing and cost accounting dominate their thinking. In doing so, they’ve extracted details that made WDW great, the cumulative effect of which has been to cheapen the product. They’ve stripped it down to the bare essentials, letting a bunch of self-serving “surveys” justify cost-cutting decisions they’ve already made.

Stripped my friend? I'd say strip-mined.

I was talking about them cutting into muscle and bones with their cuts a dozen years ago. Now, it's all about going into vital organs.

That is the essence of Walmarting.

They've also been able to take advantage of a less discerning customer base. Folks here don't really remember when WDW was damn near spotless, everything was maintained, everything was fresh, there was entertainment around every corner, food was priced at a premium but not an absurd one etc ... they don't actually recall when WDW was, believe it or not, classy.

Quite simply, the majority of WDW guests today are less worldly, less sophisticated and just plain more accepting of 'the new normal.'

If you visited in 1974, 1984, 1994 ... then to look at the crap you get in 2014 and largely were getting in 2004, you know things have changed.

Meanwhile, prices have exploded like never before, all in an attempt to get gross margins back up to levels P&R consistently achieved decade after decade.

WDW leadership broke something a few years ago and no one left has any idea how to fix it.

I'll go you one further: no one has any clue just what business they really are in and how they got where they are and how they've fallen.

They are just clueless.

If you think these folks are somehow wise beyond anyone here, then all I can say is you've never met any of them and tried to have a serious intellectual discussion with them. I have. Countless time.

In 1983, Disney had just opened a theme park at a cost greater than their annual revenue while simultaneously maintaining reasonable prices and an outstanding commitment to quality and service.

Despite this or perhaps even because of this, financial performance was better in 1983 than it is today, with Disney realizing a higher gross margin in its P&R segment; 19.1% in FY1983 vs. 15.8% in FY2013.

Back then, Disney had leadership that fully appreciated the theme park business and were committed to the ideas set forth by Walt Disney, not in using Walt’s name as an advertising slogan.

More recently, during what might be WDW’s peak era of financial performance, the years surrounding the 1998 opening of Disney’s Animal Kingdom when WDW expansion plateaued, P&R gross margin consistently ran around 23%.

Simple numbers, folks.

WDW built and built and built throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s and gross margins remained impressive. Yet in recent years with stagnating theme parks and declining quality at WDW, the P&R segment has performed at financial lows.

Today, P&R has a group of “leaders” with no passion for the theme parks and no vision of what to do with them. It’s a group more worried about the sizes of their annual compensation packages than in providing customers with outstanding experiences in order to grow business and earn those compensation packages. They are more worried about keeping their cushy jobs than in driving WDW towards both public praise and financial success.

Can I get a round of ''you should just go to UNI, so the lines will be shorter for me and my family who still believe in the power of the Disney MAGIC that you can get nowhere but WDW!!!''?

Scale up WDW’s and DL’s sixfold increase in prices since 1983 and P&R is up to $6B in annual revenue with operating income of $1.2B overwhelmingly from ticket, food, and merchandise sales from just three theme parks.

The folks running P&R now have revenue flowing in from 2 more WDW theme parks, 2 water parks, shopping districts, over a dozen timeshares, tens-of-thousands of additional hotel rooms, Hong Kong Disneyland, Disneyland Paris, and 4 cruise ships yet the best they can do is realize another $1B in operating income?

In Disney’s “horrible” year of 2002 when hotel occupancy was down to 76%, P&R gross margin was at 18.1%. Heck, it was at 16.5% as recently as 2008. P&R revenue is up 22.5% since 2008 driven overwhelmingly by higher prices while operating income is up only 17.0%.

Go back to 2008 and they had 1.0M empty hotel room nights domestically. In 2013, they had 2.2M.

They charge more for less yet still can’t achieve results from only a few years ago. They squeeze and squeeze and haven’t realized that “squeeze the customer” is not a long-term business strategy.

Those making the decisions impacting WDW today don’t understand how to make a theme park resort successful. All they know how to do is cut quality and raise prices. They pinch pennies rather than look for opportunities to realize sustainable growth. They play small ball instead of going for the big inning.

Oh, and offend J.K. Rowling so much that she took her product up the road where it was turned into the greatest theme park success story of the 21st Century.
They were handed a Golden Ticket to success and have squandered it on a rubber band.

That may be the quote of the year here, if not the decade!

But really why do you need the highest quality theme park product in the USA today when you can let people make reservations to ride the Tea Cups from their sofas?

Only those with their heads buried too far in their smart phones could have thought MagicBands represented the wave of the future. Only those clinging too tightly to their jobs would have failed to shout “Emperor’s New Clothes”.

Maybe they should examine their own corporate history and figure out what made WDW great in the first place.

Maybe, just maybe, they might realize that success was based on what was happening inside the theme parks.

There will not be true change (no, I don't care about Pandora or what they replace Wishes with or what they eventually announce for Star Tours) until Iger, Rasulo, Staggs, Crofton, Kalogridis, MacPhee, Franklin, Cockerell, Holmes and countless others are gone.

This company needs an enema more an impacted 88-year-old at the nursing home.

You need to clear all the (blank) out before you can attempt a clean slate, a new beginning and, at the same time, a return to what made most of us here who visited WDW regularly in its first quarter of a century know it was.

No, I am not at all optimistic that it will happen.

Thanks to technology and the Internet, you have BRAND advocates out there, countless Lifestylers who aid in an Orwellian scheme to make dissent either disappear or irrelevant.

Great post, my friend.

Truly.

 

[WDW1974]

I don't see the social networking as a reason for the decline in those sites EXCEPT in the aspect of 'stale technology'. Sites like LP.com were dinosaurs and the format just isn't tolerated by the next wave of users. vBulletin grew long in the teeth and didn't have the capabilities like great mobile apps, live notifications, etc that the new alternatives like twitter, FB, etc have. So the new alternatives had a technical edge that offered attractive things. That put the 'old' sites behind the eightball as the next wave of users came into being (every site has 'generations' of users that start and die...)

LP especially was antiquated... Micechat took the plunge with vB4.0, a move wdwmagic WISELY declined and instead pivoted with great success. Micechat has yet to abandon that dead duck... but I wonder if they care as much anymore because (IMO) the discussion forums really aren't their main focus anymore. They put all their chips on becoming this home of web articles instead of an online community. They put all their promotion and leads into their Wordpress site. They don't even post that their articles are available in the forums anymore! The core group RARELY posts in the forums. Everything for them now is the blog articles and comments. They've basically changed their focus to becoming a site... much more like a insidethemagic. Trying to create a steady stream of content to attract EYEBALLS and less concerned with building a community.

The other reason these people retreat to places like twitter, etc is because they don't have to operate under scrutiny of a site owner or mods, they don't have to face critics of their content, they can basically blow their horn as much as they want and selectively decide what responses they want to listen to. It promotes the building of cliques and selective acknowledgement.

So what I'm trying to say is... I don't agree with your theory that social media (and Disney's engagement) is necessarily behind the demise of those classic communities... but more about missing the necessity of keeping current with user's expectations of technology holding them back, pivots in focus, and the 'freedom' from oversight that the new platforms give people.

Think about how big these twitter circles you are focusing on really are... a few dozen people each? Sure there are multiple circles of people that overlap.. but they really don't converge into one single community. Contrast that with something like Micechat who at their peak could pull 100+ people together for a MICECHAT thing.. not even specifically Disney. Disney twits are just people who all use twitter to talk about Disney... they aren't a online community like Micechat, LP, or wdwmagic.

For micechat in particular (IMO).. the idea of a 'popular website with news' verse 'a popular hangout to share ideas and conversation' was a business decision they will look back on years from now and realize that was the turning point. Not when they had to acknowledge Al was no longer a factor.. but when they abandoned being a social exchange and instead tried to be a content provider.

As usual, I agree with far more than I disagree. ... But we just have a fundamental disagreement on technology, which to be fair is the business you are in.

I think the world was better without the iPhone. I am sure 97% of the people here disagree with me. All they see is convenience and none of the truly scary aspects of it.

So ... you certainly can point to tech issues with other forums being more antiquated. But ultimately, I do not view that as what killed those communities. The ability to chat with only like-minded folks and get enabled if you are ... well, nuts ... is a more important factor IMHO.

That's a huge part of it... they feel they are in control vs playing in someone else's house.

That is true, no doubt at all. ... I don't have to be in control, which is why I can post on this forum. But I never like it when someone messes with my words. Ever.

 

[WDW1974]

I will say this as someone that didn't avidly watch Fallon at 12:30, that has never seen his 11:30 show and wasn't a fan of Leno... It's hard to bet against Lorne Michaels. I suspect Fallon will be given a much longer leash than Conan.

NBC has to give him as long a leash as he needs.

There simply is no 'Plan B' if Fallon bombs. It's like the 2008 bank bailout or NGE ... too big to fail.

 

[WDW1974]

I always thought your style would be best suited to an internet column that might occasionally get picked up by other media when worthy. You just need to find someone to host your content. Your ideas are better expressed in essay form rather than chopped up in a forum or by flame wars.

Thanks, Frank! I appreciate the vote of confidence. And I do not disagree. Finding that perfect platform is what I'd like to do. It just can't be work, unless I am paid.

I'd suggest you work with people like merf (photo essays) and EE (good cop to your bad cop) and maybe even someone like Eddie Sotto. You just need to find a site to host you. Project might even be the "intervention" you think EE needs. I even think it could make a profit.

I know few absolutes in life. I do know that I could and would never work with Merf or EE, as we are on different levels in what we are trying to accomplish. And Eddie is more interested in design and his next gig (I often wonder whether his head would explode if he knew my family has paid him in the past ... nah, better to keep that just between us!)

I only offer this sound advice because I know you have me on ignore and will never see it. Heh.

I might even read from time to time.

Go Duke!

Why would you think I have you on ignore? I don't use that feature. I think it's a childish tech feature. If I choose to ignore someone, I am quite capable of skipping right by their posts.

And Duke? How about those Florida Gators? 18-0 in the SEC? And you'd barely know it here in SoFla because sports media in FL has just been decimated by technology. Let's get our news from Twitter!!!

 

[RSoxNo1]

Quite simply, the majority of WDW guests today are less worldly, less sophisticated and just plain more accepting of 'the new normal.'

This is a reflection of current society in general.

 

[RSoxNo1]

NBC has to give him as long a leash as he needs.

There simply is no 'Plan B' if Fallon bombs. It's like the 2008 bank bailout or NGE ... too big to fail.

The other problem with all this is that ABC was very smart in putting Kimmell in place at 11:30 more than a year before Fallon.

 

[Buried20KLeague]

As Abe Vigoda once said, "Try the sushi. It's the best in the world."

Tsukiji fish market is on the list for early Friday AM!!

 

[lazyboy97o]

So ... you certainly can point to tech issues with other forums being more antiquated. But ultimately, I do not view that as what killed those communities. The ability to chat with only like-minded folks and get enabled if you are ... well, nuts ... is a more important factor IMHO.

Forums have long had features to ban and ignore people, so speaking only to like-minded people is not a new development on the internet.

 

[the.dreamfinder]

Forums have long had features to ban and ignore people, so speaking only to like-minded people is not a new development on the internet.

But that's opting out rather than opting in to only folks you agree with.

 

[alphac2005]

(I find) The problem with Fallon is his show hasn't changed at all since moving from 1230. My dad used to watch Leno but I doubt he's watching The Tonight Show anymore. I'm in my early thirties but even I know that you can't come back from every commercial break with hip hop. And I like hip hop. Stuff like that going to sit well with a lot of the tonite show crowd. I used to really like Fallons show but at 12:30. His show just feels off for 11:30. IMO he's got to tweak his show some more for his new audience or his ratings are going to suffer.

That's not a bad thing. NBC had Conan gut his program and he was a shell of what his Late Night show was. It was Conan neutered. Lorne Michaels now owns NBC late night for 6 of 7 nights and I'd bet it all by saying that one of the stipulations were to leave Fallon alone. We have to get away from the myth of what an 11:30 broadcast (10:30 central) net show should be. NBC will take lower ratings than Leno although Fallon remains up for now because they are desperate to pull that age demo down on 'Tonight' as Leno's audience was above 58 years old. The irony is that in dumping Conan, they dumped the lowest age demo. I believe to this day that had they not messed Conan's format it would have worked out in the end.

NBC has plans to eventually monetize Fallon's 'Tonight Show' online as that's where he's been huge in online viewing with 'Late Night' and one of the early examples of why you'll see paid sponsors in the actual show.

It's not the Johnny Carson days anymore and our family used to hear a hell of a lot about Johnny and see lots of pictures of dear Johnny when I was a kid. There's a book out there by a certain someone that delves into Johnny that was published recently and is worth the read. I seemed to have heard those stories personally from someone's mom and aunt long ago... and see all too many pictures of Johnny in tiny shorts playing tennis.

 

[flynnibus]

As usual, I agree with far more than I disagree. ... But we just have a fundamental disagreement on technology, which to be fair is the business you are in.

You should consider... the reason I am in this business predates me being in the business

I think the world was better without the iPhone. I am sure 97% of the people here disagree with me. All they see is convenience and none of the truly scary aspects of it.

As with many advances, there can be a dark side to them. It falls upon the shoulders of humanity and society to apply the potentials properly and minimize or compartmentalize the dark sides. Be it fire, oil, trade, tech, television, whatever. Few things are 'all good, even when driven by idiots'

So ... you certainly can point to tech issues with other forums being more antiquated. But ultimately, I do not view that as what killed those communities. The ability to chat with only like-minded folks and get enabled if you are ... well, nuts ... is a more important factor IMHO.

With all of these formats.. there is a certain degree of overhead one must accept to initially connect and then stay engaged. These new formats are far easier to stay engaged with.. and were integrated better with tools and 'locations' users already are. Effectively lowering the overhead.. making them preferable. Disney as a topic has the built-in interest that brings people to seek the topic out.. be it for help or like interests. New users are going to be attracted to the areas that give them quick bang for buck with minimal 'investment'. Formats like twitter and FB offer that in small doses easily... vs say.. being overloaded with hundreds of posts in which the noob is trying to find their singular topic. These formats are much better for the people looking for small doses vs. those looking to get heavily engaged. Think of them as 'lightweight'.

That is true, no doubt at all. ... I don't have to be in control, which is why I can post on this forum. But I never like it when someone messes with my words. Ever.

the ones who seek control are the ones who normally can't face the opposing view or can't handle criticism. Sometimes the site's control is out of hand (say.. DIS) which drives off independent thought. But we don't have that problem here at wdwmagic. @wdwmagic does an amazing job of allowing expression without trying to explicitly guide or disallow various viewpoints.

 

[Animaniac93-98]

While I wouldn't encourage broad use of the ignore feature, I find it helpful for avoiding members who make posts, but don't want to engage in, or contribute much to discussions.

 

[GoofGoof]

While I wouldn't encourage broad use of the ignore feature, I find it helpful for avoiding members who make posts, but don't want to engage in, or contribute much to discussions.

I agree. I only have 1 person on ignore and it was only after they sent me a threatening PM because I didn't agree with something they posted. I am not ignoring them because I don't want to hear their point of view on things, but I don't want to forget and disagree with them again resulting in a similar situation. There are many posters who I have become familiar with over time, but I can't remember everybody so best to be safe and ignore.