Undiscovered Future World Tour (& Guide) is the utmost

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pfeigelm

New Member
Original Poster
Does anyone know how I can get in touch with Epcot Guest Services from out of state to pass on a kudo?

On Wednesday I took the Undiscovered Future World Tour and it was fantastic. Almost 5 hours of lore and details re: the major attractions. However the best part was our guide, a young lady named Dany. She did her absolute best to make all the participants feel like VIPs. At one point I had a question about test track. Before you enter the building, if you look left there is a 2-digit numercal display hanging from the track as it passes the front of the building. As each car passes, it flashes up a seemingly random number. I asked what it was and she scoured the park looking for the answer. She could not find it or anyone who knew. Oh well. Today we flew back home to northern California and waiting for us on the answering machine was Dany with the answer! WOW! Thats some dedication to job and customer satisfaction. BTW The number is the car number so if there is a breakdown after that point, maintenance knows which car is the offender.

Anyway, in case you are interested, the off-limit areas we visited were:
  • the former post-show area of Imagination at the top of the pyramids. There are some creepy derelect pieces up there as well as a great view
  • The HP lounge atop mission space, which is avalable to EVERY HP employee in the world! Views of the space station and post show.
  • Cast services building. This was very, very backstage. The VP of Epcot walked by and said hi.
  • Epcot wardrobe! Test track uniforms on the same rack as Japanese kimonos!
  • The backyard of Test Track under the outdoor sections and past the maint facility

I totally recommend this tour and Dany as tour guide.
 
v_misses_epcot

v_misses_epcot

Member
pfeigelm said:
Does anyone know how I can get in touch with Epcot Guest Services from out of state to pass on a kudo?

On Wednesday I took the Undiscovered Future World Tour and it was fantastic. Almost 5 hours of lore and details re: the major attractions. However the best part was our guide, a young lady named Dany. She did her absolute best to make all the participants feel like VIPs. At one point I had a question about test track. Before you enter the building, if you look left there is a 2-digit numercal display hanging from the track as it passes the front of the building. As each car passes, it flashes up a seemingly random number. I asked what it was and she scoured the park looking for the answer. She could not find it or anyone who knew. Oh well. Today we flew back home to northern California and waiting for us on the answering machine was Dany with the answer! WOW! Thats some dedication to job and customer satisfaction. BTW The number is the car number so if there is a breakdown after that point, maintenance knows which car is the offender.

Anyway, in case you are interested, the off-limit areas we visited were:
  • the former post-show area of Imagination at the top of the pyramids. There are some creepy derelect pieces up there as well as a great view
  • The HP lounge atop mission space, which is avalable to EVERY HP employee in the world! Views of the space station and post show.
  • Cast services building. This was very, very backstage. The VP of Epcot walked by and said hi.
  • Epcot wardrobe! Test track uniforms on the same rack as Japanese kimonos!
  • The backyard of Test Track under the outdoor sections and past the maint facility
I totally recommend this tour and Dany as tour guide.
Click to expand...


Ah so that's what all that was about@ random people walking around in back of wardobe. They kept staring at me. o_O I was like huh? I'm a human being =D That just works for Disney. *smile* I'm glad you had a great time.

I'm planning on taking it soon so it was good to hear that it was a nice value. Granted I work here, the imagination top is off limits to only the ones that work at imagination and co.

I got scared when the guest started to touch and smell the wardrobe. :lookaroun
 
jedimaster1227

jedimaster1227

Active Member
For my birthday, I am treating myself to a bout of Disney tours, the first being DiveQuest at the Living Seas, the next being the Undiscovered Future World Tour and the finale being the Around the World Segway tour.

I want to go back upstairs to the old Imageworks pretty badly. It was a shame that I had to leave after I finished the Team Possible Challenge...:cry:
 
unkadug

unkadug

Follower of "Saget"The Cult
v_misses_epcot said:
I got scared when the guest started to touch and smell the wardrobe. :lookaroun
Click to expand...

Well, I guess it's better that they smell it while it's hanging on the rack than when you're wearing it. "Excuse me Miss, I want to smell your blouse" :lookaroun :eek:


But seriously...that's ODD !!!
 
Epcot82Guy

Epcot82Guy

Well-Known Member
It's a great tour. When I was a CPer, I did the Land portion of the tour, so we got to do the entire thing for free to see how it all fit together. It is great, and 99% of the guides are outstanding. That is actually the role I wanted to apply for if I had decided to return to the company.
 
MrNonacho

MrNonacho

Premium Member
pfeigelm said:
At one point I had a question about test track. Before you enter the building, if you look left there is a 2-digit numercal display hanging from the track as it passes the front of the building. As each car passes, it flashes up a seemingly random number. I asked what it was and she scoured the park looking for the answer. She could not find it or anyone who knew.
Click to expand...

Couldn't you have just asked any Test Track CM?
 
Mecha Figment

Mecha Figment

New Member
actualy you'd be surpirsed how little some of those operations people know about their own attraction. Most dont' even care.
The few exceptions i've found about this are Kilimanjaro safari, Haunted Mansion, and Jungle cruise.
 
Speedbird

Speedbird

New Member
We took the Undiscovered Futureworld tour in November with Dany and we were very disappointed. We've done most of the tours at WDW, DLR and DLPR over the years, some of them twice so I'm not speaking from an inexperienced point of view. The tour talks of backstage at Future World, we visited 3, 4 including the HP lounge, sites. One break room, a side door into Test Track to stand on the other side of the queue line and the only real interesting place, upstairs at the Imagination Institute which has been unused for years but has all the attractions still. An overly long visit to costuming, while interesting consisted of, 'This row is Norway, This row is food, etc, etc. The speil was just a rehash info from Keys to the Kingdom, KTTK Lite if you like. Ms Dany, while perky did not like being told something about WDW that she did not know, at all. And some of her stuff was just plain wrong.(Top tip Dany, people who do a lot of the tours are fanatics. And some of them know a lot, probably more than you. Remember that.)One stop on the tour was the house of tomorrow in Innoventions, which I had already done.... for free. Why were we going around stuff that is freely available to everyone? The cynic in me says, 'To waste time to make to tour last the time'. an old instructors trick to make the student think they're doing more than they are for minimum work for the instructing staff. But the capper being 40 mins with an International Representative telling us about the international student programme. 12 people smiled and nodded blankly for 40 minutes. Why am I unhappy? Is this not backstage stuff? Well yes, BUT IT'S NOT FUTURE WORLD! If I wanted to do the Round the Countries at EPCOT tour I'd have done that. Where was the Soarin'? Where was the Mission : Space? I forgot the 3 minutes at the Hewlett Packard employees lounge at M:S where we could see nothing and were told not to talk to people. Ultimately the tour ran over an hour late, a CM on KTTK told us why the guides do this, if they run long on the tour, it's too late to do anything else before shift end, and some people had to run for lunch reservations. Luckily no-one else in the party had made reservations.

If you've never done a tour at WDW, then you'll probably like the tour. But if you done a few tours, you may find it very disappointing.

One last thing and I'll stop my rant. Guides, when you have an elderly couple on the tour, one on sticks and one in an ECV, don't set off like an olympic sprinter. If it wasn't for other members of the tour hanging back to make sure they can catch up they'd been lost after 5 minutes while the guide disappeared into the distance.

:(
 
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pfeigelm

New Member
Original Poster
No arguments. I'm sure what you get out of it depends on what you bring into it. To a hardened WDW-O-phile the tour is lightweight. It was my first visit to WDW in 5 years. Frankly I had never set foot in Innovations before, so that part was interesting for me. I will admit that I, too, got bored during the "roots of Epcot talk" It was too old hat for a fan of D history. Give and take.

One other thing we had was a little talk with an Epcot Guest Relations intern from Brazil. She talked about her job, living arrangments, etc. All mundane stuff really, expect for the fact that she was an accessable piece of backstage Disney, and therefore fascinating.

Disney needs to balance the guest appetite for how things work with the illusions presented by the rides and attractions. I really dont think Walt would have wanted guests to experience any backstage goings-on. So, maybe we are lucky with what we can get.

PS-Thanks for the email address, Monty.
 

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