Disney Excuse-ademic: Imagineering or Profiteering?

"To all those who come to this happy place: Welcome. Disneyland is your land.” Walt Disney, 1955

….”so long as you sacrifice your mortgage payments, savings, and any disposable income that you used to spend on money or education. Instead, give it to us.” New Walt Disney. Probably. 

My Childhood

I’ve been to Walt Disney World 35 times. I’m not terribly cultured. I can’t help it. And now I take my kids every year as a Disney Vacation Club member, just like my parents did before me. Take, not force. Maybe. 

For my parents, it made sense to take me to Disney. Every year we visited my uncle Charlie and cousin Jordan, who just so happened to live in Orlando. And what do you do with a hyper, fairly extroverted two-three-four year old while in Orlando? Go see the Mouse himself. 

Those trips are what I remember most from my childhood. The wonder of the bubble wands, the smells of Saratoga Springs, the cuddles from characters, the fantastic fireworks; I was consumed by the magic.

As I’ve gotten older, that nostalgia is now part of who I am. I identify so closely with it because it was such a large part of my upbringing. Don’t judge me. It’s not as if I would classify myself as an individual trying to escape reality and, in doing so, attempt to relive my childhood by harbouring juvenile proclivities, evading the burdens of accountability in a deliberate endeavour to perpetuate the essence of one's nascent years. Definitely not. I’ve had too much therapy.

Quite the opposite, I think. My maturity has paralleled in line with the brand itself. I consume more than the parks. I take in the films, the music, the TV series—all while being active on fan community forums and even listening to the quarterly earnings call because I'm a teeny, tiny shareholder.

Take that generational, indoctrinated love for a brand—any brand, but in my case, Disney—and imagine my emotional state when I start to see it being eroded so overtly, without remorse, by commercialism and greed.

Here’s my story of how my relationship with Disney has evolved over the years.

Mickey’s Money

“If Disneyland was indeed The Happiest Place on Earth, you’d either keep it a secret or the price of admission would be free and not equivalent to the yearly per capita income of a small sub-Saharan African nation like Detroit” Paul Beatty, The Sellout

It’s no surprise that Disney is a powerhouse corporate entity. They raked in £21bn last quarter alone and own over 200 companies. I can accept that it is a business, and to succeed, it must make revenue and grow. I have owned two businesses, one with institutional investment, and I watch Succession religiously. I know how money works.

It’s actually all quite easy. You increase revenue by either a) getting more customers or b) charging more.

To get more customers, Disney has perks that attract people to the parks. But over the years, those perks have started to disappear and become paid-for experiences. Last year, in 2021, when you were paying thousands of dollars to stay at a Disney hotel, you used to:

• Be able to park your car there for free. Not anymore, that’s $25 a night.
• Get free transportation to the airport to your hotel on the Disney Magical Express. Not anymore, make your own way there.
• Get free MagicBands to scan in and out of the park as your park ticket. That’s too expensive, you can now pay $20 per band.

Prices have increased over the years too, as one would expect. A soda that was $3.99 last year is now $4.29. A Dole Whip (a pineapple based ice cream) is now $5.99, up from $4.99 the previous year. They’re still worth it, mind you. And of course, there’s the daddy of all price hikes. Entry to the park is now up to $179 for a single park ticket. That used to be $3.50 in 1971. While you might think that could be in line with inflation, the 3,671% price increase is four times that of the price increase for gasoline, rent and wages in the same period.

Now, however, Disney has started to find that they don’t need “more customers”. They need to “charge more” instead. Disney is an experience where a theme park has a limited capacity of 90,000 and the removal of these perks, while continually price gouging guests, suggests that the demand is there. To continue to appease shareholders demanding year-on-year growth there is only one strategy to take.

It may have taken fifty years for Walt Disney World to increase ticket prices to that eye-watering level, but these perks were all removed within the space of months. It's not just the imbalance of cost versus value that has me asking, “Where has my Disney gone?” It’s also the acceleration of the profiteering that makes it all too obvious.

Excuse-ademic

March 15th 2020. The pandemic forced the parks to close for only the 8th time in their history.

After 118 days, on July 11th 2020, Disney reopened its doors to nostalgic, escapist cultists (like me).

Disney spent over $1bn making regulatory and operational changes to cope with the new normal that the pandemic brought with it. At the time of reopening, guests had to jump through operational hoops like booking the exact days they were going to each park (“park reservations”). They witnessed a lesser guest experience with shops closed, firework shows reduced, parades cancelled, no character meet and greets, and no buffets. 

COVID was a perfectly legitimate excuse.

You know the saying, “you don’t know what you had until it’s gone”? It never felt more true. Despite the limited capacity, the parks were full. And as of May 2021, all restrictions disappeared, and demand was the highest it had ever been.

Previously, Disney needed to recruit guests to come to the park with new rides, good deals, and free perks. They were at the behest of the guest. The new normal is quite the opposite. Disney found that guests were willing to jump through those operational hoops. All of them. Anything to get back to the magic. Even with a lesser guest experience.

And so, in what sounds like a conspiracy theory, they began experimenting with how many hoops to force guests through, no matter how outlandish or severe the request. They also had no need to bring back the experiences they had been holding back. Cutting down on amenities that were previously seen as an added perk, but are now seen as an added line item. The operational efficiency (a corporate way of saying “cost cutting”) was overt.

During the pandemic, Bob Chapek came along and took over as CEO. He was the ex-CFO. As if that doesn’t tell you all you need to know about his motivations and focal area, just go by his well-known nickname: Bob Cheap-ek.

Why bring experiences back or change things if guests are still willing to pay for an experience without them? Years later, most of those experiences didn’t return; some still haven’t. 

Fantasmic didn’t open until Nov 2022 - two years later.Annual Passes returned in April 2023 (at higher prices, a change system with less benefits of course).As of writing, even if you stay in a Deluxe Disney Hotel paying a minimum of $500 per night, your room still only gets cleaned every two days.Disney Dining Plan is returning January 2024, nearly three years later.

Yet neither the operational hoops nor the holding back of experiences were what tipped the balance; that feeling of “I’m being financially screwed”. . 

The pandemic changed the paradigm. With never before seen demand, guests are at the behest of Disney.

“Demand at our domestic parks continues to exceed expectations, with attendance on many days tracking ahead of our 2019 levels. We’ve not seen a demand abate at all and there are many days where people can’t get park reservations” Christine McCarthy, CFO

Christine sounds so joyless. Where’s the magic Christine?

This enabled them to do things that they felt they were previously unable to do. Like stopping the sale of annual passes to guests because they know that annual pass holders spend less than out-of-town tourists. Or introducing those pesky park reservation systems so Disney could right-size resources where demand was the highest, while also preventing guests from entering parks even if they had a ticket!

The most radical of the “we can get away with anything” experiments was Fastpass Plus. With this system, guests could reserve set times for three attractions and skip the standby queue. Completely free, at no charge. A few months had gone by since the reopening, and guests, like myself, were questioning why one of their most beloved experiences hadn’t returned. Can you see where this is heading?

Genie+

Disney Genie was first talked about at the Disney D23 Expo in August 2019. It was introduced as a “comprehensive vacation planning tool” that provided personalised itineraries based on individuals preferences and interests. In my mind, it was a perfect use of personalisation that allowed different types of guests to experience Disney in the way they wanted to experience it.

Nothing happened for years.

Then, all of a sudden, three months after re-opening the parks when fireworks didn’t even make a comeback, the app arrived in October 2021, without any prior warning (their new financial year is October 1st by the way, just saying)

It was clearly rushed into production. It was as if engineers hadn’t worked on the app for years, and now it was immediately required in the parks. It was almost as if the purpose of the system had changed from its original conception of “a personalised vacation planning tool” to something else. 

Don’t believe me? Look at the visuals presented in 2019 and what was live in the parks in 2021. Aside from the technical glitches that occurred for weeks after it was released, what had everyone in stitches was the lorem ipsum at the bottom of the app as the legal disclaimer.

What was its new purpose? What new hoop will it make guests jump through?

The personalisation itinerary tool that offered recommendations actually did give one recommendation (that was in no way personalised): to upgrade to Genie +; a multi-tiered paid structure where, in order to skip the line, you pay as much as $23 per person, per day. What used to be free under the name “Fastpass +” is now paid for under the new system Genie, whilst simultaneously besmirching the name of the beloved character Robin Williams brought to life in Aladdin (sorry Will, you also did a good job).

But that's not all. Genie+ doesn’t give you access to the rides that you would want to skip the line for. The Flight of Passages, the Frozen Ever Afters and the Cosmic Rewinds of the World…you guessed it. They cost extra under the completely associated but in no way associated name “Lightning Lane”. $15 extra, per person, per ride. For a family of four, that’s almost half the price of a park ticket.

The logistics of this system add to the questionable imbalance in commercial ethics. I won’t even begin to explain how to physically book something because I don’t have 10,000 words to discuss all the permutations and intricacies. It must honestly be easier to build the “personalisation” system than use it. 

Guests can only book one ride at a time, at the time that is recommended to them. Those times can’t be viewed prior to booking Genie+. There is nothing stopping the algorithm (and it is often accused of doing so) recommending times that are three to five hours in the future for the most popular rides, just to keep the guests in the park for as long as possible for more of their sweet, sweet dollar bills. 

This happens. I’ve personally experienced it. Disney are now incentivised to make standby lines as slow as possible because they have managed to monetise the alternative. Within the app itself, you can see these inflated standby line wait times above the “skip the queue for $15” call to action. It feels dark-pattern-y, for the UX-ers out there.

It’s a terrible precedent to set that’s more akin to a fairground than a theme park. Certainly not what Walt would have wanted. He was a poor Midwest boy himself and wanted his parks to be accessible to all. 

Disney is not trying to add value. It’s trying to extract it. 

And it worked. It was reported in the Q3 2022 earnings call that guests spent on average 40% more in the parks than they did pre-pandemic. Can you imagine increasing your average order value by 40%? That feels like something only a self-serving software vendor would suggest in an inflated case study without proper statistics. In this case, it was true.

Commercialism over guest experience

The obtuseness, overtness and obviousness of this type of nickel and diming are so great that it feels like Disney thinks we’re morons. Maybe we are, as we continue to pay. It was reported that a third of all guests now use the paying-for-what-was-once-a-personalised-perk Disney Genie + system. To get away with something that’s so in our faces at such an accelerated pace feels dirty. They’re fleecing people in broad daylight.

“But David, they’re using that profit to invest in their parks”.

Said nobody. Ever.

The Disney parks are one of the most profitable sectors of Disney, taking in $2.2bn net income this past quarter. That money is used to prop up other loss makers, notably Disney+, that lost $1.5bn in the same quarter. 

The last investment in the parks was Tron which took 2,000 days to build. In that time, Universal have managed to build a brand new theme park, Epic Universe, with a rumoured ten rides - four of which are roller coasters. Tens of projects have been cancelled, like Mary Poppins (it was only a waltzer, for goodness sake) and the vast majority of developments that were promised at Epcot. The lack of investment was so obvious that in the recent D23, where new projects were announced, we were only treated to the news of some new character meet and greets and blue-sky, not green-lit concepts designed to fill up the time on stage.

I’m fed up and broken, and I clearly need some salt for the chip on my shoulder. It is this experience that led me to write The Person in Personalisation, out July 2023 (Register here).

It might sound like an overreaction to some, but to be so emotionally invested in something for so long and for that thing to take such a dark turn leaves me with a nasty taste in my mouth. 

Where the direction of travel is now so overtly focused on short-term shareholder value with no care given to the long-term guest-experience. The catalyst (or excuse, or opportunity) was the pandemic, accelerated by a new CEO’s ego to satisfy.

Sure, some will be turned off, but I'm sure some sorry cultists will suck it up for a chance of nostalgia and escapism.

See you in October for my next annual vacation, Mickey**. 

**Even if you won’t be there as part of a meet or greet because you’re not really there to greet me but you’re not not there as part of a cost-cutting exercise for Bob Iger to save money. It’s only a matter of time before I’ll need to pay to have a picture with u, so I’ll get those photos in now whilst I can…