VQ/BGs (Virtual Queues/Boarding Groups)... Yay or Nay? (Better alternatives?)

[techgeek]

Rise is still a special problem child, due to unpredictable capacity. I think aside from that you could make things flow pretty smoothly if *everything* were a VQ only. No standby lines at all, park-wide. You’d also have to cut park capacity and ride capacity to prevent people bunching up, but if the alternative is shut down or run at %50, well, it keeps a lot of people’s paychecks intact to keep the show going somehow.

But all or nothing. Part of the problem with VQ’s now is their ‘special case’ use, which just breeds confusion.

 

[A Noble Fish]

Pre-opening of dhs for Rise is the most claustrobhic And disorganized mess I’ve ever seen at a Disney park or event. Including D23.
D23 looks like a well oiled machine compared to what I saw at dhs.

To be fair, I think it’s been improved, this was the week of New Years. But it was really really bad.

No joke a girl in line near me started to vomit because she felt too closed in by all the people packed in around her. (She was close enough to me that I had to check my clothes to see if I had any vomit on me.).

So yeah... let’s not suggest more BG’s

That is an anomaly. That's the most crowded week of the year. It's not uncomfortable even in other very busy weeks. They've handled it well and a 10-year standby queue would be bad enough, but the operational nightmare that is Rise would make it a huge problem. After all, that's why they're using the boarding groups in the first place...

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

That is an anomaly. That's the most crowded week of the year. It's not uncomfortable even in other very busy weeks. They've handled it well and a 10-year standby queue would be bad enough, but the operational nightmare that is Rise would make it a huge problem. After all, that's why they're using the boarding groups in the first place...

The problem wasn’t the crowds, it was forcing too many guest into the space between security and the tap points. It was also right after they went down to a 7 am open, the week before with the 6 am open it was fine.

The problems I saw were not the crowds, but the way they handled the crowds.

I’m well aware New Years is the most crowded time to visit. I’ve been going for New Years for 10+ years and have been in Disneyland for Christmas and 4th of July.

 

[UNCgolf]

To be fair, there’s lots of places you can go before park open to get a group. I think I’m usually at least 6 feet away from any other groups when I book and show up at 7:20 after the park is open so no standing in mass crowds at the turnstiles.

Yeah, but that's just for one ride at one park. Imagine if you had to get a boarding group to ride any of the major rides at Magic Kingdom and 25,000 people were there at opening.

To be fair, that shouldn't be an issue at the moment because the parks likely won't be that busy with the coronavirus fears. That's more of an issue if they went to boarding groups overall year round, as a few people have pushed for.

 

[techgeek]

Yeah, but that's just for one ride at one park. Imagine if you had to get a boarding group to ride any of the major rides at Magic Kingdom and 25,000 people were there at opening.

To be fair, that shouldn't be an issue at the moment because the parks likely won't be that busy with the coronavirus fears. That's more of an issue if they went to boarding groups overall year round, as a few people have pushed for.

If everything is a boarding group, there’s no stress or requirement to claim everything at park opening. Special rules perhaps for each super-headliner... the rest of the e-tickets sort themselves out with plenty of capacity. While you’re waiting for an e-ticket time you can fill in with secondary attractions and shows and hold multiple reservations.

Yes, it would fundamentally change the way you experience the park... and normally I’d very against the whole concept, but desperate times... if you have to find a way to manage large scale social distancing, Disney is probably the only ones that have a shot at scaling technology and operations fast enough.

 

[UNCgolf]

If everything is a boarding group, there’s no stress or requirement to claim everything at park opening. Special rules perhaps for each super-headliner... the rest of the e-tickets sort themselves out with plenty of capacity. While you’re waiting for an e-ticket time you can fill in with secondary attractions and shows and hold multiple reservations.

I disagree strongly with this. People would want to make sure they got one for whichever ride they wanted to be on the most, and so they'd have to be there at opening. Magic Kingdom might be okay because they have so many attractions, but otherwise you'd likely get to pick one major ride a day and the boarding groups for others would all be gone. Unless you were letting people book 2 or 3 at a time like FastPasses, but then it's just a worse system than FastPass because it requires everyone to arrive at opening to guarantee they get what they want.

It's a moot point, though, because it would be impossible to virtual queue every ride. The parks absolutely have to have huge numbers of guests waiting in line at any given point in time; they're not designed to have everyone milling about at once. They don't have the capacity for it. It would be an absolutely miserable experience unless they dramatically cut the number of people they allowed in to the parks each day (which they will almost certainly never do).

 

[techgeek]

It's a moot point, though, because it would be impossible to virtual queue every ride. The parks absolutely have to have huge numbers of guests waiting in line at any given point in time; they're not designed to have everyone milling about at once. They don't have the capacity for it. It would be an absolutely miserable experience ,unless they dramatically cut the number of people they allowed in to the parks each day (which they will almost certainly never do).

I'm not talking about doing this for normal, day-to-day operations. I'm talking about resorting to this as a last-ditch effort to keep the parks open at a greatly diminished capacity. I don't know how you manage opening crowds, maybe you have to get rid of them entirely by having park entry determined by a lottery system the day before with an assigned arrival time window. There would have to be an extreme amount of adaptation, both from an operations and guest experience perspective... but we are already discussing the extreme alternative of closing the parks entirely, so what do you have to loose?

 

[jt04]

I'm not talking about doing this for normal, day-to-day operations. I'm talking about resorting to this as a last-ditch effort to keep the parks open at a greatly diminished capacity. I don't know how you manage opening crowds, maybe you have to get rid of them entirely by having park entry determined by a lottery system the day before with an assigned arrival time window. There would have to be an extreme amount of adaptation, both from an operations and guest experience perspective... but we are already discussing the extreme alternative of closing the parks entirely, so what do you have to loose?

Virtual queues and Boarding Groups for only those attractions with the longest wait times would be a strategy for peak season. People seem to have accepted BGs without too much trouble as far as I can tell.

 

[MisterPenguin]

Disneyland App Update Hints at Expansion of Virtual Queue System

Walt Disney World news, photos, and reviews! We provide you with daily news from the Walt Disney World theme parks and beyond

blogmickey.com

 

[disneygeek90]

Disneyland App Update Hints at Expansion of Virtual Queue System

Walt Disney World news, photos, and reviews! We provide you with daily news from the Walt Disney World theme parks and beyond

blogmickey.com

I’m ready for FoP virtual queue! Though realistically it could just be where they will put the ROTR boarding group info if they don’t want it front and center on the app forever.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

Disneyland App Update Hints at Expansion of Virtual Queue System

Walt Disney World news, photos, and reviews! We provide you with daily news from the Walt Disney World theme parks and beyond

blogmickey.com

Interesting find.

I don’t particularly like where this could lead but for some reason Disney didn’t ask me. Lol

 

[MisterPenguin]

I wouldn't be surprised if this enhancement came about if perhaps a Disney exec asked if they could put both RotR and MMRR on the BG system and was told, no, just one VQ at a time. And the exec said, fix that. And they did... but not in time to use it with MMRR.

 

[No Name]

I wouldn't be surprised if this enhancement came about if perhaps a Disney exec asked if they could put both RotR and MMRR on the BG system and was told, no, just one VQ at a time. And the exec said, fix that. And they did... but not in time to use it with MMRR.

The problem operationally is that if MMRR were to also use the BG system, the thousands of people who would’ve been standing in line for it are now free to make the lines longer elsewhere throughout the park. So people who don’t get there before opening, or worse, whose app just conveniently decides not to cooperate, are extra punished. DL has so many attractions that it wouldn’t be a huge deal but DHS would likely suffer operationally.

They could make people choose one BG reservation between RotR or MMRR, which would allow almost everyone to get one of the two, but would create a situation where people can’t ride both in one day, which may not sit well.

But that’s an interesting article, thanks for sharing.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

The virtual q was a clever solution when they needed to quickly open Rise before it was ready and at peak holiday crowd levels.

At this point... it’s silly. At some point someone needs to take the training wheels off and say “figure it out” and operate the attraction in a normal way. Attractions all across Disney have downtime, it happens.

And it certainly shouldn’t be the standard going forward. Rise was not ready to open, That’s why it needed VQ. Runaway railroad shows how a ride should open... long lines yes, but that’s what you want! It’s a success if you have long lines for a brand new ride.

 

[Markiewong]

What if they are going to use BG for every ride to prevent having long queues. It would basically be a buzzer system: one BG per person and you have to be back within 15/30 min and no standby lines in the park at all.

 

[UNCgolf]

What if they are going to use BG for every ride to prevent having long queues. It would basically be a buzzer system: one BG per person and you have to be back within 15/30 min and no standby lines in the park at all.

People have brought this up before, and it's impossible.

The parks do not have that kind of capacity. The only way this would be even remotely workable is if they severely capped the number of people allowed inside each park daily; they're designed to have large numbers of visitors in queues at any given time. If there were no queues, every other area in the park would be packed shoulder to shoulder at all times and it would be an absolutely miserable experience. Think about how busy it is on Main Street right now (well, not RIGHT now, for obvious reasons) and then, say, triple it (which is probably an underestimate) and carry that crowd level throughout every single shop, restaurant, and walkway in the park. People would be lined up just to be allowed inside a store.

Considering the number of hotels they've built and run, they can't possibly cap the number of daily guests at a few thousand. The hotels would be full of guests who couldn't use their tickets.

 

[MisterPenguin]

People have brought this up before, and it's impossible.

The parks do not have that kind of capacity.

That depends on having an accurate count of how many people are in queues at any one moment. For each ride that averages an hour long queue or longer, you have other rides only 10 minutes long.

Consider that DHS, DAK, and EPC each have less than 10 rides each. So, how many people are in queues, 1,000? 10,000?

While there are considerably less people in the park at rope drop than at midday, traditionally (not counting DHS for the past few months), just how crowded is the park with all those people in the park but not in queues? The park is able to hold them.

And then let's consider DHS for the past few months packed at rope drop... it's not like there weren't large swaths of the park still wide open with almost none of the guests in the restaurants or shows.

All I'm saying is that using intuition to gauge just how impossibly crowded the parks would be if all the queues were closed isn't reliable. People don't have a natural intuition for gauging how many people are in a crowd and how an X number of people would make Y space too crowded or not.

 

[UNCgolf]

That depends on having an accurate count of how many people are in queues at any one moment. For each ride that averages an hour long queue or longer, you have other rides only 10 minutes long.

Consider that DHS, DAK, and EPC each have less than 10 rides each. So, how many people are in queues, 1,000? 10,000?

While there are considerably less people in the park at rope drop than at midday, traditionally (not counting DHS for the past few months), just how crowded is the park with all those people in the park but not in queues? The park is able to hold them.

And then let's consider DHS for the past few months packed at rope drop... it's not like there weren't large swaths of the park still wide open with almost none of the guests in the restaurants or shows.

All I'm saying is that using intuition to gauge just how impossibly crowded the parks would be if all the queues were closed isn't reliable. People don't have a natural intuition for gauging how many people are in a crowd and how an X number of people would make Y space too crowded or not.

Although I mentioned all the parks, I was really only thinking about the Magic Kingdom -- EPCOT probably wouldn't have any problems right now, although a few areas that are constantly crowded could get worse (France and Japan are always slammed with people). Animal Kingdom is a bit different, because there are a few hub areas that already stay very busy and would just have more people crowding in, but in general I think they would both be fine. Galaxy's Edge and Toy Story Land would likely be incredibly packed at DHS (although Galaxy's Edge has a lot of empty pathway space to move around in outside of the specific shop areas), but the rest of the park would probably be okay.

Magic Kingdom, though, would be a nightmare. There are definitely several thousand people waiting in queues at any given time there, and even with that the pathways and shops are constantly full of people.

 

[TrainsOfDisney]

What difference does it make if I don’t wait in line next to someone but I sit next to that someone on Indiana Jones?

Waiting for a Mobile order there is usually as much of a line to pick up orders as when you are waiting in a regular line.

You can’t just magically make Disney world line-free.

 

[Magic Feather]

What if there was only one Virtual Queue...




per park