And adding more attractions increases attendance.
No.
Adding more attractions and marketing them to kingdom-come increases attendance. Toy Story Land did not need a Superbowl spot the year it opened in a park that was low on things for guests to do even with the addition of two attractions, neither of which were e-tickets.
... and yet it got one.
And partially as a result this kind of marketing agression, we see 90 minute waits for a coaster that in any other park in Central Florida, would see nothing like that for a ride with a comparable level of theme/emersion.
Legoland has a coaster with MORE that's usually near walk-on, for instance.
If Disney opened TRON and did not include an international marketing blitz to promote it, the bump in attendance that potentially swallows all that extra capacity and then some wouldn't be nearly as large, wouldn't you agree?
My point here, is it is within Disney's power to manage things in a way that improves the guest experience. Because that's the less profitable route, they chose not to - even with something as non-consequential as what the Toy Story Land addition gave us.
Fastpass is meant to give guests an option of riding am attraction without waiting in line. It's a guest service plain and simple.
That's what it says on the tin and I believe that was the intent of the original fastpass but I I believe that today, management looks at FP+ as a marketable benefit for onsite guests.
Since fastpass lines can easily exceed 20 minutes these days for more popular attractions, I'd say it fails on that "not waiting in line" front, even if that's really what it's still supposedly for.
They can't offer resort guests straight out front-of-the-line access because they have too many rooms and not enough ride capacity. Likewise, offering the current Fastpass system to only resort guests would create huge customer service problems with everyone else paying $100+ to get in and spending most of their time in standby watching these other people walk by for everything but with resort guests getting 60 day access (or more, in some cases) and with some guests at the highest tier rate of rooms able to get more than three in advance, they have a marketable reason to pay their inflated room rates while making it appear like a somewhat "fair" system to
all.*
Just look in this very thread (and many others) where people's argument against the 30 day window is "Nobody's stopping you from booking a room on property and getting the 60+ access, too." and that's exactly the point Disney doesn't want to come out and say but expects people to understand if they want fastpass access to 7DMT or FOP or pretty much anything else opened in the last decade worth doing.
What started as a guest benefit within the parks is today, a strategy to secure more on-site bookings and it works. If Disney didn't see it that way, why would they even offer the tiered system as they do?
Read the thread, and no it's still not clear what you think will happen to attraction capacity by opening new attractions. Like I said before, people don't stop wanting to go on Space Mountain because TRON is open. What tends to happen when new attractions open, is that the rides with open capacity now (Tiki Room, Carousel of Progress, People mover) end up with fewer people, and the popular rides stay popular. There's just more of them.
As I said before,
it creates more fastpass availability in the park for popular attractions. Again, as I agreed with you before, people won't stop wanting Space Mountain because of TRON but now the demand will be TRON, then Space Mountain which means other people will have a shot at the Space Mountain Fastpass that didn't before and for people who book fastpass for both TRON and Space Mountain, well maybe someone new will get lucky with a Seven Dwarfs Mine Train Fastpass or a Thunder Mountain Fastpass.
I'm not arguing that popular rides don't stay popular (and from the sounds of it, you haven't seen the line for People Mover lately) but more popular rides means more popular ride choices, both for standby and fastpass.
More importantly, though, instead of focusing your example on the park
most able to handle the fastpass system both today and since the start of it, I think it makes more sense to consider the other three parks which definitely did not have enough that was in demand to support this system when it originally rolled out and have not added enough to handle it, today.
The impact of all of this is much greater in the other three parks where there are fewer attractions overall and where the gap in popularity among them is more obvious - especially Epcot where at the moment, you basically have three attractions that are the center of what people want to do and they have to make it tiered to deal with that and do dumb stuff like make a viewing area for the night show something in the same tier so it looks like they have more "premium" experiences to choose from.**
Again, there being an available fastpass for Journey Into Your Imagination or, let's say, The Little Mermaid show is hardly evidence that the system is working. A fastpass for an attraction with little or no standby wait to begin with isn't really a fastpass, is it?
And if these attractions
did need it so badly, why didn't they along with many others, have it before fastpass got it's "+"?
Were people happier waiting in line the day before they flipped the switch on the new system than the day after?
*I'm not trying to argue that people who pay Disney's prices for rooms shouldn't get something extra in return. I'm just pointing out that as with many of Disney's modern "premium" experiences (i.e. up-charges of one kind or another), this benefit added to one group while taking something away from everyone else.
Frankly, it's pretty cuthroat, even within the 60 day group for people to get the fastpasses they want sometimes, even with the advantage - just look at the various "strategies" people around here employ.
**Oh the fools who get this and can't book another fastpass in the park all day since this happens at the end of the night but think they're getting something special when Frozen, Test Track, and Soarin' are off the table at the time they book.
