News WDW Resorts to add fees for parking

[Brian Noble]

Mickey's Birthdayland/Toontown Fair and former Fantasyland attractions would beg to differ on that point.

Toowntown area was a 1-1 replacement (reskin of the coster, reconfiguration of the meet&greet). The rest of NFL is additive unless you are going all the way back to the closing of the subs and the skyway, and even then it's an increase. And I don't think it's even remotely reasonable to go back that far. The subs closed >20 years ago.

Edited to add: Oh, and double dumbos, while not a huge investment, was a nice tip to the folks who used to wait in the hot sun for an hour to ride a 3 minute spinner.

 

[RobidaFlats]

Toowntown area was a 1-1 replacement (reskin of the coster, reconfiguration of the meet&greet). The rest of NFL is additive unless you are going all the way back to the closing of the subs and the skyway, and even then it's an increase. And I don't think it's even remotely reasonable to go back that far. The subs closed >20 years ago.

Replacement does not equal addition. Hence the disagreement with the phrase "purely additive".

 

[ford91exploder]

Yeah, I'd be super annoyed. I don't have enough coffee in me yet to deal with that on check out day. Next time put the Do Not Disturb sign out!

Trust me they were out the night before and they do not honor them on checkout day They even keyed into the room a couple of times while we were there.

Distinctly not a high end experience

For reference most of these incidents were at AKL

 

[21stamps]

Trust me they were out the night before and they do not honor them on checkout day They even keyed into the room a couple of times while we were there.

Distinctly not a high end experience

For reference most of these incidents were at AKL

Wow. I've never stayed at AKL..but just booked it for April. They better not knock on my door unless they're bringing me a latte.lol

 

[ford91exploder]

Wow. I've never stayed at AKL..but just booked it for April. They better not knock on my door unless they're bringing me a latte.lol

You will Love AKL it's an amazing place

Hey if they brought latte's for us we would have been out in ten minutes or less !!!

Seriously though the mouse keepers at AKL have too many rooms to clean for the staff allocated

 

[GoofGoof]

Regardless whether any manipulation of room supply occurs, kissing or surpassing 90% occupancy levels is inherently problematic and impacts guest satisfaction levels. Room turnover, availability, demand pressure on resources and other aspects suffer.

Keep that in mind when housekeeping is knocking on your door at 8am on checkout day.

I agree. Assuming the 89% occupancy is a legit number they can't push it much further. It's logistically almost impossible to operate a hotel that's always running at 90%+ occupancy. What some chains will do is overbook hotels certain nights and then send guests who check in late to a different hotel in the same city, but I can't see that going over really well at WDW unless you are upgrading me from All Stars to GF and even that may not be acceptable to some people. Iger acknowledged this in an earnings call a few quarters back. He said they needed to increase capacity at the resorts. Maybe this CBR project is the start of that.

 

[GoofGoof]

Every stay since 2011 in fact I got so hacked off about it we would deliberately delay out departure to 10:45 just to make a point

The do not disturb sign usually works.

 

[Notes from Neverland]

We always use the Do Not Disturb sign and only remove it when we are headed out for an extended period (parks, etc.). Haven't had any issues.

 

[LAKid53]

We always use the Do Not Disturb sign and only remove it when we are headed out for an extended period (parks, etc.). Haven't had any issues.

The only time we had an issue with housekeeping knocking on the door was when we left the do not disturb sign on until mid afternoon. We were staying at GFV and she wanted to make sure we didn't need anything, since she'd seen us go in and out of the room earlier.

We got a call from the front desk once because we still had the sign on the door when the guys from DCL came by to pick up our luggage - we were riding the bus to the Port. They wouldn't knock on the door with the sign hanging...

 

[Laketravis]

Like @ford91exploder, I've had several instances where housekeeping ignored the DND hanging on the door on check-out day. They base their cleaning schedule in part on ME departure times and hit those rooms a couple of hours or more before the ME time for guests in those rooms. I didn't realize this until I answered the door one morning and pointed out that checkout wasn't until 11am. She responded that my ME was for 10:00am. I told her that was still a couple of hours away and to come back then.

 

[GoofGoof]

The only time we had an issue with housekeeping knocking on the door was when we left the do not disturb sign on until mid afternoon. We were staying at GFV and she wanted to make sure we didn't need anything, since she'd seen us go in and out of the room earlier.

We got a call from the front desk once because we still had the sign on the door when the guys from DCL came by to pick up our luggage - we were riding the bus to the Port. They wouldn't knock on the door with the sign hanging...

I think a lot of people probably forget they have the sign on the door and leave the room. If it's on the door at 8am they have no business knocking. If it's past noon I would be ok if they just knocked and asked if I needed anything.

Like @ford91exploder, I've had several instances where housekeeping ignored the DND hanging on the door on check-out day. They base their cleaning schedule in part on ME departure times and hit those rooms a couple of hours or more before the ME time for guests in those rooms. I didn't realize this until I answered the door one morning and pointed out that checkout wasn't until 11am. She responded that my ME was for 10:00am. I told her that was still a couple of hours away and to come back then.

It's smart to use the ME times to plan room cleaning. It's dumb to knock 2 hours early.

 

[matt9112]

Stating facts is not welcome here. I've read one too many from you today, elitist.
Dial down on the common sense.

All of these fees are coming. WDW wants near empty parks only occupied by the top .05 percent of the country. I think that's what this thread is saying anyway..

If they could extract the same cash flow...yes they would love that much cheaper cms could just follow them around. But the price increases theoretically needed would not be sustainable. I DO believe disney is aiming for the say 150k a year house hold easy. Nor rich but we'll off.

 

[matt9112]

Yes, wealthy people can afford more than poor people. They can buy more vacations, cars, houses, jewelry, and iPads. What's your point?

Thankfully we all die the same. Billionaire gets cancer still sad?

 

[matt9112]

With the resort fees, I think they feel that they are competing with other hotels in the area that charge resort fees and therefore artificially lower the nightly rate on search sites. If you are choosing between The Grand Floridian and the Ritz Carlton and the Ritz charges a resort fee and comes up $35 a night cheaper, you might get tricked into staying there.

Personally, I wish that state legislatures would pass laws that require any mandatory fees to be included in the nightly rate at all hotels. That way, consumers are always comparing apples to apples.

With airline bag fees and such, they are not mandatory fees. If you don't check a bag, you don't pay the checked bag fee. At a hotel with a stupid resort fee, you still have to pay the fee if you don't use the gym or pool or whatever they say the fee is paying for.

Those other resorts are real world class resorts!! Disney's are not....ever. you pay all that money because of the brand not the substance. The four Seasons is cheaper than GF and my god thats a resort.

 

[G00fyDad]

It also helps drive out those pheasants who shouldn't be at Disney anyway. Only wealthy people should afford to visit Disney more than once in their lifetime.

Good luck keeping this guy out!

 

[matt9112]

New Fantasyland, the Pandoraverse, and Star Wars/Toy Story all seem to be counterexamples to that claim. The first was purely additive. The second is a pretty clear expansion of what was at best a stub land. I suspect it's not hard to show the DHS changes are capacity increases as well.

New fantasy land added little to no capacity over what had been removed prior. (Nemo,skyway) ect

And DHS will have better rides...more capacity? Maybe not.

 

[tissandtully]

Like @ford91exploder, I've had several instances where housekeeping ignored the DND hanging on the door on check-out day. They base their cleaning schedule in part on ME departure times and hit those rooms a couple of hours or more before the ME time for guests in those rooms. I didn't realize this until I answered the door one morning and pointed out that checkout wasn't until 11am. She responded that my ME was for 10:00am. I told her that was still a couple of hours away and to come back then.

I think the DVC rooms are the worst at this, if I don't have the sign up, we get housekeeping barging in at 8 a.m.! It's crazy.
Now we leave the sign out, and actually sometimes really bad at getting out before 11, I think we were an hour late leaving AKL one time and someone from the front desk came up and asked us if we wanted to extend our stay, lol. There's no way to do late checkout with DVC points rooms.

 

[ford91exploder]

I think the DVC rooms are the worst at this, if I don't have the sign up, we get housekeeping barging in at 8 a.m.! It's crazy.
Now we leave the sign out, and actually sometimes really bad at getting out before 11, I think we were an hour late leaving AKL one time and someone from the front desk came up and asked us if we wanted to extend our stay, lol. There's no way to do late checkout with DVC points rooms.

Being DVC I agree

 

[GoofGoof]

I think the DVC rooms are the worst at this, if I don't have the sign up, we get housekeeping barging in at 8 a.m.! It's crazy.
Now we leave the sign out, and actually sometimes really bad at getting out before 11, I think we were an hour late leaving AKL one time and someone from the front desk came up and asked us if we wanted to extend our stay, lol. There's no way to do late checkout with DVC points rooms.

DVC operates at near 100% capacity. With a hotel if you check out late they can just divert the next guest to a room that isn't occupied instead of your room. There's usually a minimum of 10% of the rooms at a hotel vacant at any given time but there's no give with DVC. If you check out there's almost always going to be someone checking in the same day. The other thing is there's always someone trying to check in early. People get annoyed that their room isn't going to be ready until 4PM even though that's the checkin time. People have become accustomed to asking for early or late check-in or check-out and getting it most of the time. With DVC if you aren't out by 11 there's a good chance the person checking into that room will be delayed, especially if it's a popular check-in day. There's a lot of rooms to clean and the villas are much bigger than a standard hotel room so they take longer. It's not a lot of time between 11am and 4pm. Now of course they could just bring in more people to clean but that will increase maintenance fees.

 

[EOD K9]

There's no way to do late checkout with DVC points rooms

I was able to get a 1 hour late checkout once due to an extenuating circumstance. But generally no, you need to be out at the designated time.