Yes, ostensibly, the park reservations are a way to manage guest satisfaction by ensuring the parks are never overcrowded. However, we all know that's not how they're being used: the parks are more consistently crowded now than ever before, with long waits for everything from E-tickets to popcorn. That's feature of the park reservation system, not a flaw.
Even during the most restricted periods of operation after the shutdowns, it was rare that any domestic park not named Disney's Hollywood Studios to have no capacity available. Sure, there may not have been availability for certain blocks of tickets (CM sign-ins, APs, etc), but most parks had same-day availability the overwhelming majority of the time. Even Studios was relatively easy to get into if you planned a few days in advance. And all that was when the parks had severely reduced entrance capacity.
Now that those capacity restrictions have been long lifted, the reservations remain in place. Not as a way to ensure that guests are able to get through the park entrance, but in order to throttle the park's capacity on a given day to ensure consistent levels of crowding regardless of the number of people in the park. It's not a way to ensure a great guest experience, it's a way to allow Disney to do the bare minimum to get by.
Everything from the number of cashiers at restaurants, to the number of vehicles cycling through an attraction, to the number and types of entertainment, to the length of the park's operating day is finely tuned, creating an equally miserable experience on an off-season weekday as a weekend during spring break.
Of course, any long-time CM worth their salt could predict crowd levels on any given day to help forecast staffing needs, but now that Disney knows the exact numbers in advance, they can fine tune the staffing levels to ensure a day with only 10,000 guests in the park still has waits as long as a day with 60,000 guests. Rather than reducing the number of guests to ensure a high-level of service, they allow in as many as are interested and reduce the capacity across the board to make sure no guest accidentally gets an outstanding day. It's the Harrison Bergeron of customer service.
Yes, it's Disney's fault for not adding adequate capacity to meet the growing demand in the late 2000's. It's Disney's fault they tried to try and further avoid meaningfully adding capacity through the 2010's with the much-maligned NextGen/My Magic+ project. And yet again it's Disney's fault that they're still attempting to ration theme park capacity, rather than finding a way to address the root of the problem. All four of WDW's parks are underbuilt for their attendance, and have been for at least a generation. Instead of working to ensure the best guest experience possible, they're content to make everybody miserable, regardless of the season. I'm sure that's doing wonders for their beloved GSAT numbers.
I am not sure I understand how park passes can be used to have consistent staffing. That doesn't make sense to me? How would that work?
If park passes sold out three weeks in advance all the time, I would agree that they are a useful tool to manage staffing. But they don't.
Instead, park passes are still being distributed well after Disney has already scheduled their cast members, so the variation in attendance doesn't impact the staffing decisions. It can't, because park passes are incapable of generating the necessary data in time to be useful when scheduling decisions are made.
WDW visitors can be divided into several groups:
(1) On site visitors. These guests typically book their vacation packages well in advance, and although Disney doesn't know what park they are visiting on a given day (unless they have a dining reservation), they know how many people are visiting a park and their distribution between the parks is likely easy to model to a reasonable level of precision. Without park passes, Disney has most of the data they need to schedule the staff efficiently for this group. The process of collecting data from park passes probably doesn't lose much money by deterring ticket sales. The interface for selecting park passes is bad, but people booking a Disney resort hotel are likely to be motivated to figure it out.
(2) Off-site multi-day guests. These guests are similar to on-site guests, in that they booked their trip well in advance and are likely to have booked park pass reservations with enough time to be taken into consideration when Disney makes staffing decisions. However, without park passes, Disney can easily predict where and when these guests will be in the parks, because they are a multiple ways to estimate how many people fall into this group. I suspect that park passes from this group doesn't actually provide much value. But I am convinced that the downside of added planning complexity doesn't actually lose much money for Disney from this group also. If you can plan a week long vacation to Orlando, you will probably figure out the park passes without giving up and making Disney lose a sale.
(3) Annual passholders. These guests typically book park passes less than three weeks in advance. They also are likely to not show up if they have a park pass if the weather is bad, or for other idiosyncratic reasons why an AP may decide not to show up last minute. Because of the late booking, park passes do not gather useful data for scheduling for Disney outside of the peak periods (when Disney already knows the parks are full). Park passes deter APs from visiting the parks at the last minute, reducing sales at Epcot festivals and other events. This group is not deterred by the poor park pass reservation interface, because they know how it works. I believe that park passes probably reduce the value of APs to Disney, by reducing the anticipated annual per capita spending. I am confident that park passes from this group do not provide Disney meaningfully valuable data for scheduling. But I am open to the possibility that deterring last-minute overcrowding from suprise viral events or whatever may have value to Disney similar to the value destroyed by park passes.
(4) Last-minute single or multi-day ticket guests. These are new customers, people who live locally, but do not have APs, and other casual customers. They are deterred by the poor park pass reservation interface and are likely to go to Universal or SeaWorld when they get frustrated or confused by the system. If they manage to figure it out, they probably have booked a park pass less than three weeks out, so Disney has no scheduling benefit from most people in this group. The impact of park passes on this group is unambiguously negative. Disney is subsidizing Universal and SeaWorld and reducing sales with a very modest benefit.
Overall, I think Disney is losing sales without commensurate benefits from park passes. The attendance patters of groups 1 and 2 can be predicted by park passes well, but that is of little value because Disney has always been able to accurately model these groups. Groups 3 and 4 are not modeled by park reservations in time to impact scheduling, but the system does reduce total sales from these groups. In other words, these groups mostly just have a financial downside because of park passes.
I believe that it is possible for this to occur. Disney is a large organization where ideas can build up a lot of internal momentum, and it is possible that the negative impacts of park reservations on Disney's bottom line would go unnoticed due to their subtly.
But I am also open to the idea that I am wrong somehow. I just don't know where. Are my assumptions about groups 1-4 incorrect?
