Ticketing/Entry System Crash

[justintheharris]

Yeah all of the new Guest Experience kiosks throughout the park were slammed. The park itself was very very busy. All major E-tickets were minimum two hour waits for a good portion of the day. We gave up and went to Disney Springs before my flight out.

I went to epcot prior to MK yesterday and Epcot seemed abnormally busy and it wasn’t until I heard about the gate crash that I realized why. MK was an even bigger madhouse.

 

[bUU]

I'm going to file this under "crap" happens. Does each park have a manager who can unilaterally make that decision?

It wouldn't be up to just a park manager. A district fire chief would have to agree, and probably someone high up in the Orange County PD, since capacity controls are safety-related and Disney's obligation to the civil authorities is that they'll responsibly manage attendance at the park.

 

[bUU]

Social media spreads news like wildfire nowadays, and we all know how entitled the idiots are now.

Without a doubt.

 

[bUU]

With respect, there is no such thing as a stupid question.

I never said that there was. I said that the questions were naive. Naiveté and stupidity are different things.

 

[drizgirl]

With respect, a lot of the questions you ask are quite naive.

Software system issues are commonplace in our society, and the idea that Disney should somehow be immune to the effects of our entire society's increased reliance on technology makes no sense. Many companies have had software system issues in recent years, and in some cases such failures have resulted in hundreds of deaths, and in other cases exposed millions of Americans to identity theft and other forms of fraud. A few hours delay getting into a theme park pales by comparison. If anything, the fact that the problems Disney has had with technology have been comparatively infrequent and inconsequential is what is notable, but of course that rarity and lack of severity of issues is perhaps why so many people are so quick to go off the rails and blow every little problem way out of proportion whenever there is an issue.

Incidentally, just because it doesn't include the provisions you want it to include doesn't mean that Disney doesn't have backup plans. It is one thing to expect triple-redundancy when people's lives are at stake (Read: Boeing 737 MAX) or when you're responsible for safeguarding someone else's sensitive private information (Read: Equifax Data Breach), but to expect that kind of redundancy to keep a bar code reader operating is irrational. SMH

When your response to a significant issue in your business is "at least nobody died" you probably can't call yourself a customer service leader any longer.

 

[danlb_2000]

With respect, a lot of the questions you ask are quite naive.

Software system issues are commonplace in our society, and the idea that Disney should somehow be immune to the effects of our entire society's increased reliance on technology makes no sense. Many companies have had software system issues in recent years, and in some cases such failures have resulted in hundreds of deaths, and in other cases exposed millions of Americans to identity theft and other forms of fraud. A few hours delay getting into a theme park pales by comparison. If anything, the fact that the problems Disney has had with technology have been comparatively infrequent and inconsequential is what is notable, but of course that rarity and lack of severity of issues is perhaps why so many people are so quick to go off the rails and blow every little problem way out of proportion whenever there is an issue.

Incidentally, just because it doesn't include the provisions you want it to include doesn't mean that Disney doesn't have backup plans. It is one thing to expect triple-redundancy when people's lives are at stake (Read: Boeing 737 MAX) or when you're responsible for safeguarding someone else's sensitive private information (Read: Equifax Data Breach), but to expect that kind of redundancy to keep a bar code reader operating is irrational. SMH

As someone his is actually living through a significant corporate systems failure as I write this, the question is not naïve at all. You are correct that there should not be an expectations that system won't fail, but companies need to have processes in place so that system outages have as little impact on the business as possible.

As the op said, one option is to just let people in without scanning their ticket. Yes, some people will get in with invalid tickets, but they to weigh whether the potential customer service benefit is worth that risk.

 

[aaronml]

I’m confused.... I thought all tickets were RFID (“tap”) instead of barcode now?

How did so many people even have paper/barcode tickets that needed to be reissued in RFID card form?

I’m curious if the issue here was actually with the MagicBand management system, which is also used for managing RFID ticket cards.

 

[KBLovedDisney]

I never said that there was. I said that the questions were naive. Naiveté and stupidity are different things.

With respect then, there is no such thing as a naive question. A question is neither naive or stupid. A question is simply that. A question.

 

[Monty]

to expect that kind of redundancy to keep a bar code reader operating is irrational

WDW hasn't had barcodes on tickets for years.

I thought all tickets were RFID (“tap”) instead of barcode now?

They are.

Whatever went wrong appears to be a distinction between the type of RFID in paper/plastic ticket media as opposed to the Magic Band RFID.

 

[danlb_2000]

I’m confused.... I thought all tickets were RFID (“tap”) instead of barcode now?

How did so many people even have paper/barcode tickets that needed to be reissued in RFID card form?

I’m curious if the issue here was actually with the MagicBand management system, which is also used for managing RFID ticket cards.

Maybe it's from third party ticket vendors like Tickets at Work, Undercover Tourist, AAA, etc?

 

[HauntedPirate]

No, there's no reason to expect a back up plan/system for something so trivial that it's used for park admission...

 

[aaronml]

WDW hasn't had barcodes on tickets for years.

They are.

Whatever went wrong appears to be a distinction between the type of RFID in paper/plastic ticket media as opposed to the Magic Band RFID.

I promise you there is no distinction — the way the technology works is exactly the same..... the cards are just another SKU in the MagicBand system, there isn’t any other difference really except that they don’t have the long-range chip (which ticketing/tapstiles doesn’t use anyhow). I saw people on Twitter specifically mentioning barcodes though.

 

[aaronml]

Maybe it's from third party ticket vendors like Tickets at Work, Undercover Tourist, AAA, etc?

This seems more likely, or perhaps Print at Home tickets from the WDW site?

I’m surprised that many people were using those though to result in multi-hour lines.

 

[drizgirl]

Maybe it's from third party ticket vendors like Tickets at Work, Undercover Tourist, AAA, etc?

I guess that's just what they get for buying their tickets on sale.

 

[HauntedPirate]

I guess that's just what they get for buying their tickets on sale.

"They didn't pay OUR price for their tickets??? Well, we'll show them..."

 

[danlb_2000]

This seems more likely, or perhaps Print at Home tickets from the WDW site?

I’m surprised that many people were using those though to result in multi-hour lines.

Not knowing what is actually going on, it could also be a case of people with non working tickets gumming things up so bad that even people with working tickets are getting delayed.

 

[xdan0920]

In a shocking development, the usual suspects rush in to defend TWDC. Imagine that.

 

[ImperfectPixie]

Equifax's failure wasn't that they had information; it was that they didn't safeguard it properly and responsibly, and let someone walk away the the personal information of millions. It is worth noting that if you qualify for free credit monitoring as a result of the Equifax data breach, you get that service from Experian, a company that has practically the same information about millions of people, same as Equifax, but Experian has a reputation for safeguarding that information.

Sorry, but just saying so doesn't prove that you'd be willing to pay so much extra such that investing that money in "more redundancies" would be the best way the company could invest that money. This goes back to something I touch on often here: It's a business, not a charity. Every thing they do has to make sense objectively.

By "lost track" you mean that you don't have the information, and therefore don't have a snowball's chance in Hell of providing any real insight into how Disney compares to others, much less providing any real insight into how much such reports are due to something related to Disney's systems versus carelessness on the part of travelers (or even just hot air fabrications of people misrepresenting what really occurred to them, for that matter).

People refuse to attach a credit card to their magic bands for a completely different reason ... due to how often dining plan meals get charged to the credit card because of human error by cast member, and because guests fail to communicate clearly what is their wish in that regard. Are there other scenarios? Sure. A few but since you "lost track" of any real information you might have had we can safely assume that there is no reason to believe it is anything out of the ordinary much less anything worth noting.

I was specifically addressing this statement:

If anything, the fact that the problems Disney has had with technology have been comparatively infrequent and inconsequential is what is notable

The problems Disney's IT department has are NOT infrequent and inconsequential.

"Lost track of" is a figure of speech indicating that I've seen so many complaints in Facebook groups in regards to credit cards being compromised during or after a Disney trip that I stopped counting. Also, not a single person I've ever seen say that they won't attach a card to their band used the dining plan as a reason...they all mentioned credit cards being compromised on/during previous trips. I've also seen people say they won't pay for their resort room with a credit card for the same reasons - they use the card to make the reservation, but then don't assign it to a magic band and pay in cash. Disney IS a business, one that collects extraordinary amounts of data on their millions of customers - through various websites and their parks - they ABSOLUTELY should do everything in their power to safeguard that information - especially where they likely collect more data points on their customers than most other companies in the world, including information regarding when people will be travelling and not at home and credit card numbers. (Think about it...how many brands/websites/resorts/shopping locations, etc. fall under the Disney umbrella?)

Every time there's something new that's high-demand, the website crashes. The system cannot distinguish between what's in stock for ShopDisney and what isn't. Incorrect error messages are commonplace (last week a friend of mine got an error that she'd already made a Galaxy's Edge reservation, when she had not - and she was able to make reservations a few minutes later during the same session), notification settings get changed without guests changing them (see AP e-mail failures), FPs getting messed up by the system...how often on this website alone do we see complaints about Disney's IT department?!?

For a company that 1) forces us to plan months in advance, 2) collects enormous amounts of data on its customers, and 3) banks on its reputation in guest service on the regular, they absolutely should invest in a decent IT department and the security necessary to protect our information.

The issue yesterday with the barcode scanning was just another symptom of much larger issues.

 

[JenniferS]

In a shocking development, the usual suspects rush in to defend TWDC. Imagine that.

In a shocking development, it appears the opposite is also true. The usual suspects rush in to attack TWDC. Imagine that.

 

[Monty]

I promise you there is no distinction — the way the technology works is exactly the same..... the cards are just another SKU in the MagicBand system, there isn’t any other difference really except that they don’t have the long-range chip (which ticketing/tapstiles doesn’t use anyhow). I saw people on Twitter specifically mentioning barcodes though.

As far as I know, there are no barcode readers at the entry turnstiles. There's a touch-point ("Mickey-to-Mickey") and a finger sensor. If it's not an RFID issue, then what could it be? Magic Bands work and printed tickets don't. Both have RFID.