This "system upgrade" is starting to tick me off

[JimboJones123]

Hey, I'm just glad the kids like swimming. A lot. That kept them busy.

 

[jenseib]

Five hours invested - an hour on refunds with a CM and now -- I'm shortchanged points because of the reservation change.

They cannot add the points back because I haven't used enough yet -- try again tomorrow when I use enough points.

Guhhh!

Oh, in reaponse to them just giving us something free, they offered a free invitation to wait again in line to get points. My family is really starting to miss me this trip.

What do you mean by points? There isn't a point system for the dining plan, it's credits?

I have to say that if it was me, I too would tell Disney too bad and leave the restuarant. I pad for my meals ahead of time for a reason, and it's NOT my problem their system isn't working during my vacation. Would it be acceptable to go to an All Inclusive resort and then have them tell you that you have to pay for the first few days? No it would not. And those who get the dining plan are looking at an all inclusive type package. It may not incluse ALL, but they have made plans on what meals they were using it for long before they arrive. And some never buy another bit of food OOP while on the plan.
I know years back, I was a single mom of 2 at the time. I took my kids on a WDW vacation, and had everything budgeted out. At that time there was no dining plan (or if there was we weren't aware, and we stayed off site anyways), but if I had paid for a plan, I would've known then that I didn't have to pay for food. If I had gotten there and told, "no, you have to pay out of pocket", I would've cried. We would've not had enough money to eat the whole time. I had worked hard to get there, and what I paid for it was what I could afford. I didn't do credit cards then, and I didn't have alot of cash either. If that happened today, we would survive, but many families wouldn't. They only go becuase free dining is all they can afford. They have saved for a long time and sacrificed other things to make the trip possible.
Disney needs to make vouchers, it's not the customers fault, it's Disney's.

 

[brifraz]

We checked in yesterday (19th of Nov) and have had absolutely no problems, so the situation is not system wide. Now, last night at dinner, the family next to us was telling me about the chaos at their resort with room bookings (not DDP specifically), so obviously the problems are hit or miss. And those are usually the most difficult problems to remedy. When everything doesn't work right you can usually find the root cause. When only some things don't work and those things are not consistent it becomes very hard to find and solve the problems.


I hope for the OPs and others having problems that things are figured out and up and running soon. Having been on many vacations where things didn't work out according to plans or even hopes or even backup plans, I can empathize. Good luck and try your best to have a magical day!

 

[MysticOrient]

Woah, woah, woah..... that's way too reasonable a response. :lookaroun

If you're in the most magical place on earth, chill out. Disney is the company that will go head over heals to give free stuff away to complaining guests. Relax and enjoy the vacation. Perhaps if one goes on vacation knowing that a major system upgrade is going to take place (who's effects have been felt in the past), maybe they should have a contingency plan. Hakuna Matata.

That's not exactly easy to do when most of us plan our vacations many, many months out in advance. I, for example, have been planning our vacation for over a year and would have no way of knowing when Disney decides to do a crappy upgrade like this. To me, this is when Disney needs to suck it up and think of it from the guest's perspective. As, I believe it was, the OP mentioned, some folks come down on a very limited budget and may not have the cash needed to go out of pocket.

 

[MysticOrient]

Not to sound like a jerk, but unless your job handles 20+ resorts, 20,000+ rooms, multiple departments, and millions of transactions a day, you can't compare them. This new system was completely built by Disney so any technology that was existing had to be completely removed from the servers before it could be implemented. There is no going back. There are many reasons for this new system and it has to happen. Disney doesn't have a choice anymore.

There is no other contingency for charging to dining plans. The POS systems at the restaurants have to charge something. I'd like to hear any ideas if you have any.

FYI ... yelling doesn't always solve the problem.

That's a valid point. But it just seems weird to me that Disney didn't plan for any potential risks. My company, too, uses all in-house systems. Just because Disney's system is completely built in-house doesn't mean it would have to be completely shut down 100%.

And you're right, it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with my company, but I do believe that the project managers, systems folks, etc., in Disney should have thought about any possible risks and potential work-arounds in the event that something like this might happen.

And of course, I agree with you, that yelling doesn't solve the problem. Although my post said that, I would hope the little laughing guy would have informed the reader that it was kind of a joke.

 

[MysticOrient]

You do realize that speaking loudly at a Cast Member is not the way the best way to solve a problem....
Somethings, believe it or not, are out of the Cast Members control.

People, relax... it was a joke! Geesh!

That being said, I have encountered less-than-"magical" stuff on a few of my Disney vacations. In those instances (and not as bad as this topic is about), I have maturely and quietly voiced my concerns to the CM on duty. I have never (nor would I ever) yelled, spoken loudly, etc. That being said, in my situations (again, different than the OP's situation), I have remained calm and firm in my delivery of what the issue at the time was and how I expected them to fix it then. Each time I was never rude to the CM nor was I curt, inappropriate, loud, jerky, immature, etc.

My comment about speaking loudly was a joke.

 

[Tom]

And there we have the EXACT problem here. I am usually the last one to call foul on Disney, and quite often I tell people stuff isn't as big a deal as they may think, but this is a huge deal for a myriad of reasons.

If this system has been in development for a decade as you say, then it was ______-poor planning not to have some sort of plan for if something like this happens.

I work for a company on the Forbes 100 who works with millions of financial transactions across dozens of systems every day. You are absolutely right - downtime happens. Especially when you are making a wholesale change to the system.

HOWEVER, it's my company's responsibility (and Disney's, in this case) to make this as PAINLESS to the customer as possible by HAVING contingency plans.

I know that in the Disney-bubble people who work there are trained to think that each shop, restaurant, etc. is it's own financial entity, which on some cases it is WITHIN WDW. But it's still all owned and run by Disney for the most part, and even the places that aren't (like in WS) they still use Disney terminals/etc.

You know what happens at my work (who deals with just as many, if not more, customers per day than Disney)? We pull out sheets of paper and start writin' stuff down. We do what it takes to keep the customer experience, get them on their way, and we deal with it all later. If we lose some cash in the process, it's on us - the customer gets taken care of.

In this case, there are about a dozen different methods they could use. Just because they can't run it through the machine doesn't mean the entire place is frozen up. They could have issued emergency "coupons" (you know, little pieces of paper, like before everything had to be on a card?) at the hotels, they could have kept manual track of them at the restaurant and reconciled them later (and if people ended up with extra free meals, hey, that's the price the company pays for downtime, anticipated or not), they could have set up a mini-call center for restaurants to verify things at, any number of things could have been done.

I'll tell you why this peeves me - it's because many families couldn't afford to do what the OP is doing. I help a LOT of people plan Disney trips, many of whom never dreamed they could afford to go. Families spend years saving for a one-week trip. And many that do the dining plan do so because they want to have a fixed-food cost so they don't have to worry about that during the trip. Not everyone has some AMEX Platinum card without a limit they can just throw stuff on. I know families that, if this happened to them, and they were "trapped" on Disney property without a car, they'd be hard pressed to be able to afford to spend $100's extra on food they hadn't anticipated (even if it gets reembursed later).

So, big bad on Disney for this one. We all know system outages and updates/upgrades happen and can go wonky, but that is DISNEY'S problem, not the guest. Disney should have done whatever they needed to and given people out the food they had paid for without making them pay their own $$ in advance. It's great they FINALLY let people put them on room charges, but it's pretty inexcusable that it took as long as it did.

To anyone who thinks, "Oh this is no big deal, if you can't afford a few extra meals you can't afford to go to Disney", I ask them to think about the 5-year old with them who's dreams the parents scraped money together to be able to make come true, and how not everyone is in a financial position to come up with $100's of extra dollars with no notice when they had already paid for the meals in advance.

1000000% true. Excellent post. Completely right on all accounts.

Heck, I was at a convention last week and one of the vendors lost their CC processing, so they busted out the old Credit Card impact machine from the 80s and were making carbon imprints. Obviously Disney couldn't do this with the KttW cards (since they don't have raised letters) but CMs should still know how to write.

Just print out some forms with columns like GUEST NAME, CARD #, # OF MEALS, TIME, DATE, MEAL TYPE. Give it to some data entry monkeys to put in later that night or the next day. If someone actually gets away with using an extra meal credit because of it, SO BE IT.

Again, inexcusable to put the burden on the guest. It's Disney's problem from start to finish. If they have to work a little harder or take a few hits to keep the guests happy and to maintain the "simplicity" of the DDP, they need to do whatever it takes.

 

[lebeau]

Again, inexcusable to put the burden on the guest. It's Disney's problem from start to finish. If they have to work a little harder or take a few hits to keep the guests happy and to maintain the "simplicity" of the DDP, they need to do whatever it takes.

Agreed.

I would not be a happy camper at all.

Disney fail.

 

[Phonedave]

Fine I can give you a technical reason complete with a metaphor.
Think of each hotel at Disney as a tree in a forest. Each hotel works independently of the others. They are all in the same system and they touch each other but the still have their own root system.

This is why anytime you have a problem with your dining plan while having breakfast at another resort they are usually unable to do much other than call your hotel.

We are planting a new tree. This tree is going to be larger, sturdier, and have longer branches than all of the old trees combined. However in order to flourish we have move the birds nests from the other trees. If we move them all at once the tree will be overwhelmed and die. Plus it takes a lot of volunteers to move nests.

For each tree, we move the birds nests to their own branch of the new tree. We then have to cut down the old tree to ensure the new tree can get enough nutrients. Sometimes if birds are flying, they come back and the tree is gone so they become lost and unsure of where to go. Eventually after some searching they find the new tree and get on with their happy lives.

Ultimately it is a slow process but the one large tree will have branches for each hotel. This will allow birds from one branch to easily visit birds on the others. But have you ever tried to replant a tree after you cut it down? Not so easy is it?

At the end of the day we are moving to a single composite system that will make it easier to do EVERYTHING!

Birds on branches, thats cute.

But, if I understand your metaphor, you are consolidating your back end databases from multiple IBM (DB2 ?) platforms into one centrally hosted database platform from a different company with a in-house designed front end.

If you had said that in the first place, instead of "our contract with IBM is up and we no longer have tech support" there would have been no need to invoke images of Geddy Lee singing "The Trees"

Yes, there are most assuredly points of no return when doing database consolidations. It's like making a cake. You can measure out all the ingredients and before you mix them still put them back in their original containers, but once you put all them all together, they are stuck that way. As yes, who knows in the history of the system what person kludged in a undocumented table or join.

So, I excuse the technical reasons. But it still sounds to me like it is a royal mess. And making people pay for something they already paid for, thats just bad. If anything, WDW screwed up, and WDW takes the hit. If someone gets extra food, then tough. WDW is the one that has the defective product here, not the customer.


-dave

 

[Glasgow]

Absolutely unacceptable, period. No WAY that you should not have some sort of contingency in place that does not require guests with DDP to pay for meals (even temporarily). What if you don't own a credit card and didn't have hundreds of dollars in cash with you?

Sure, the nice thing for the guests to do is to be understanding of the situation but it's just astonishing to me that somewhere as customer focused as Disney did not have a backup plan in place to compensate for the impending issues.

Fail +1

 

[amejr999]

I can hardly say I'm surprised. Disney's IT systems have been a disaster for years, and it seems clear that they haven't exactly learned anything from that yet.

 

[unkadug]

I can hardly say I'm surprised. Disney's IT systems have been a disaster for years, and it seems clear that they haven't exactly learned anything from that yet.

It seems pretty clear to me that it's a matter of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. It's a matter of lack of communication between departments and lack of teamwork.

 

[DisneyJoe]

You WERE running multiple interconnected independant systems - the serious downside? All of the intersystem communications. The upside? Local entities could operate in the event of a network collapse, or outright attack.

The new system sounds like a Site Wide Domain - virtually identical to what my old company had from about 2000 to the present. Advantage: uniform structure, uniform Security and Trust. Disadvantage: VERY fragile in the event of Network failure or Domain attack.

I think that you are giving them much more credit for systems architecture than they actually have, unfortunately.

 

[AEfx]

So, I excuse the technical reasons. But it still sounds to me like it is a royal mess. And making people pay for something they already paid for, thats just bad. If anything, WDW screwed up, and WDW takes the hit. If someone gets extra food, then tough. WDW is the one that has the defective product here, not the customer.


-dave

Exactly the point.

If someone was holding a KTTW card that had a meal plan on it, they should have eaten for free (ESPECIALLY when they had reservations previously).

Disney could have off-loaded the data of which cards were valid to a temporary database, and housed a few people in a call center to verify them via phone if need be.

Or, they could have just tracked it on paper. Truth is, this whole thing could have been done without the guest ever knowing something was wrong, therefore they wouldn't have had the opportunity to "cheat" the system by going to multiple places because they wouldn't know anything was wrong (could have been told, "receipt printing issues" for the lack of a printout). So the restaurant marks down which cards were used, and when the system goes back up you have a team to enter them all in (could easily bring in some temps to do this).

Sure, a few people might end up getting some extra meals out of it if somehow they figured out what was going on and "cheated". Big whoop - again, that's what happens when a company does a massive change like this and a bit of loss is acceptable to ensure your customer experience. Disney can afford a few meals instead of putting families in such a potentially bad situation.

So the IT stuff is irrelevant - we all know computers go down, we all know system upgrades rarely go according to plan when transferring to a live environment. Since the customer never directly interacts with that system, though, it should have been blind and seamless to the guest. It's not IT that screwed up, but whatever management decided to just "wing it" and not have a contingency plan in place.

 

[Phonedave]

ummm - think of all this as hope . There may very well be IT folks that have thought of all that I said - stymied by old fart managers that can barely operate a cell phone or log on to Facebook .

Or it may be money.

Our IT department has almost NO budget. If I want something done, I need to come up with money in MY departmental budget, and transfer it to them.

Many companies are starting to do this. Making the IT department almost like a separate company, but one with a captive customer base.

So now what happens is I have to convince my chain of command about what we need to pay for in my systems. Of course my chain of command are not IT people. If they were, they would be in the IT department. So it is even harder to convince them of the importance of improvements.


-dave

 

[CRO-Magnum]

And therein lies the problem...

This new system was completely built by Disney so any technology that was existing had to be completely removed from the servers before it could be implemented.

...at hand. The resort and parks people generally get it, but there is a huge gap from there to the IT teams and project managers who often don't have the guest in mind first (even the leadership!). As an IT consultant who has done work for Disney on multiple occasions in the past I can tell you:
- Disney doesn't write software; nearly everything they do except the "last mile" is outsourced and they rely on their outsourcers entirely too much. So Disney IT gets the blame but they often aren't the primary cause. It's the penny-pinching.
- Disney has horrible controls in place and and already thin and overloaded IT staff
- Disney has a long history of exposing guests to their blunders (anyone remember 1990 when Disney reluctantly started moving people from the wings at the Contemporary because of the re-tarring of the roof???? - and that's one of three from the 8mo I worked there in Reservations)

Disney and a contingency plan? Get real. Their contingency is giving away plush and the rare free meal or room.

After Project Tomorrowland in the early 2000's I stopped doing work for Disney with two rare exceptions because you're not working for Disney so much as you're working with their outsourcers. Now I just go as a guest and remain blissfully unaware.

BTW - the right way to do it is to keep both systems up and running so you can cut back to the old system if new one doesn't work. It's possible, it's been done before, and it's how Disney handled the cut-over to their new Reservation system in the late 1990's. Standard IT 101 kind of stuff. But their outsourcer(s) probably have only taken the remedial IT classes....

 

[WI DISNEY FAN]

I think they should just have pallets of Spam at each restaurant and open the bars. It works for the cruise lines. At least all the toilets work. :lol::lol:

 

[Mammymouse]

I think they should just have pallets of Spam at each restaurant and open the bars. It works for the cruise lines. At least all the toilets work. :lol::lol:

Spam :hurl: UGH!!:hurl: I just had a flashback to elementary school. You know what happens to second graders if they don't like something (spam and string beans) and the teachers make you eat it. :hurl: