Today’s Disneyland is a price gouge, not a magical experience

Is it an expensive day? Sure.<p>Would almost every guest prefer to pay less? Absolutely.<p>But just to be a contrarian and play Devil&#x27;s Advocate, what if one were to make the argument that Disney is actually severely, ludicrously underpriced?<p>Despite allegedly being at a fraction of capacity, the place is still uncomfortably jam-packed, with obscene waiting times at most rides. That&#x27;s indicative of a venue that hasn&#x27;t reached price equilibrium. There&#x27;s so many Disney fanatics, I bet they could double or triple prices and still only take a minor hit to overall attendance.<p>And actually, many guests might actually prefer paying more, despite any preferences they might initially express. Think about it, if could ride 2 or 3 times as many rides in a day due to reasonable crowds, then you might be happier spending 1 or more fewer days in Orlando and save time and money overall paying more per day for a much better experience.

For anyone interested in the Fast App discussion from this article, I highly recommend this video from Defunct Land -- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE</a><p>The video not only does a deep dive into fast pass, but also does a statistical model break down to reveal that the modern implementation of fast pass is actually not what you might expect and serves to increase wait times for rides!

Disneyland has a big problem. It&#x27;s super popular but can&#x27;t get any bigger. As demand keeps growing, they could either increase capacity or increase prices to lower demand. They&#x27;ve pretty much run out of space to get bigger. There are two neighborhoods next to Disneyland where they could buy every home for about $1B, but it would only gain them a few extra acres.<p>They&#x27;ve already started moving some of the support buildings to cheap industrial lots nearby and then converting the on-site support buildings to ride areas (that&#x27;s how Toon Town and Star Wars land were built). But there are only so many chunks of land to buy, and despite being very wealthy, they aren&#x27;t wealthy enough to buy that much land in urban Southern California.<p>Their only option is to raise the price while removing incentives. At this point their annual pass is actually a worse deal than buying tickets when you want to go. You can only get in about four times a year on an annual pass with their new reservation system. My dad wanted to use his pass, but he could only get a reservation a few months from now -- but he could buy a daily ticket for next week.<p>Oh, and the way people get the 7am ride reservation is by staying at the Disneyland Hotel, and they also get in early to start forming those long opening lines.<p>On a side note, Disneyland has never been about inclusiveness. Walt Disney was famously racist and anti-semitic. He&#x27;d be pretty happy about the fact that only white people are going.

To me this sounds like good old Disneyland, plus an app. I grew up a few miles down the street in the &#x27;70s. It was routinely as crowded then as the author is describing now, with hours to get on the Matterhorn, Pirates, Haunted House, Tom Sawyers Island. Hours to get a couple of pancakes at a restaurant. We&#x27;d ride the spinning teacups over and over just because the line was shorter. The &quot;magical&quot; trips were on the special events, like the yearly high school graduation days, with relatively few people and we could ride the best rides until we got sick of them. Back then the best rides were rationed by E tickets, which sort of entered the language. Those coupon packs sure felt expensive. I wonder if the prices haven&#x27;t just kept up with inflation.

No one goes there anymore anyways, its too crowded

Took the kids a couple of years ago. It was a hot, crowded and expensive misery.<p>I asked for our money back. I was assertive but not an asshole. Aaaand... They upgraded our bracelets to skip-every-line. Yep, that was pretty good.<p>That evening, while waiting for the Uber Minnie Bus, a couple of senior customer service people asked about our day. I told them straight up, no embellishment. Aaaand... They gave us a skip-every-line upgrade for Epcot the next day. Also pretty good.<p>Needless to say, we are never going back.

Just recently went to Disney land myself. We did the tour hopper on a day when California land closed early for a Halloween event, unfortunately we didn’t book well enough in advance to get tickets for the event, but that’s just bad planning.<p>Anyways, the trip was amazing and magical as ever, there was no mysterious lack of black people, OPs experience is completely foreign to my own. The fast track wasn’t there, and we too looked puzzled at a group going through anyway until we realized they where accompanying a disabled guest. I don’t know if they also have some VIP thing, but I don’t mind waiting longer so someone in a wheelchair and their friends can have a nicer visit to the park.<p>We knew we wouldn’t be there at 7am, so we planned on being ready to join the RoTR virtual line, instead of being in a ride when it opened, and we got a spot, amazing ride, though I’m puzzled why after a virtual line we still had to stand in a real line for 1 hour, they could just call in fewer groups at a time. The ride was still worth it all though, absolutely amazing, I would recommend it to anyone even with the 1 hour line.<p>Cost wise, yes Disneyland is expensive, but as a european who also has to book expensive flights on top, I still think it’s worth it.

I went ages ago for about 10 days, when I heard that President Obama was going to the magic kingdom park and the park would be partially shut (the day before this was to happen) - I said to my family - lets go at the same time.<p>the place was almost empty - woo, everything was open with little to no queues<p>another thing that happened was the castle and dining - aparently you&#x27;re supposed to book ages in advance to dine there (6-9months or so) my missues did ask me about a year before we went about this and I said don&#x27;t bother... but typical me when I got there I was like wow - lets dine there.<p>My missues was not happy and recited our previous conversation and explained again (through gritted teeth) about the waiting list. I said they must have cancellations etc.. she did go up and they said not really but if you wait something may pop up<p>She waited 15min on her own and when I caught up - she said loads of people were being turned away with the same response as her (not really but if you wait something may pop up) I shrugged and just waited about 5mins more. then person on the desk said we could go in - woo, loved it it to pieces<p>Our extended family (loads of us went) was royaly pissed at us just going in without booking - we may have just got lucky though YMMV

We were there a few years back, and I saw someone with a T-Shirt that proclaimed, in large letters:<p><pre><code> Most expensive day ever </code></pre> Looked closely, and to my (lack of) surprise, it was an official Disney product.

I’m at Walt Disney World right now. It’s certainly expensive and plastic and rather boring (which is fine since this trip is for the kids), but not any worse than pre-Covid experiences at Disneyland.<p>There’s a Lightning Lane system that lets you pre-buy slots in line for the rides. The mobile app is pretty useful and takes off some of the pain in negative experiences like waiting for the awful food. People wear masks indoor as required.<p>Sure, corporations slowly spoil everything, but I don’t think Covid has been a particular turning point for the Disney theme park experience.

After I took my kids day after thanksgiving for the first time last Friday, I was wondering why this problem simply exists. And how is it possible to pay such big amount of money for outdated experiences that we had. There is a nice analysis of everything that Disney tried as far as controlling lines: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=9yjZpBq1XBE</a><p>As a person that came from USSR, I see that many of the issues are created by removing money as a control mechanism of supply and demand. If you pay entrance fee and then remove fine tuning for each ride, the result is long lines. My personal opinion is that pay-per-ride is a much better model although I can see how many may disagree. From my childhood in a country where money did not have much meaning, I learned that all-you-can eat mode for a price of entry will be filled with schemes, long lines, and tricks to game the system.

People SAY they want cheaper admission, while the same people would endlessly complain at the inevitable 2-3 hour per ride waits it would create. It&#x27;s a classic supply and demand problem.<p>Would you pay half price for an international flight that had all the seats ripped out and standing room only, so you could barely move?

I find it hard to sympathize with the author on this experience.<p>Disney is trying their best to alleviate crowds and overall bad experiences <i>by raising prices</i>.<p>First, the author was prepared to be bitter from the start of the day. Complaining about the price of parking is our first red flag. Yes, that&#x27;s right, parking your 4,000 pound car does cost $25, this is 2021 not 1965. If parking was $5 or $10 or free, would the author have a space to park <i>at all</i>?<p>The author wonders why Disney is delivering a sub-par experience. But, here&#x27;s the thing, <i>a global pandemic happened</i>, and Disney was hurt financially as a result. They are much less of a pure media company than their peers at Comcast or AT&amp;T, with close to half of their revenue coming from theme parks. Unsurprisingly, those theme parks bled cash in 2020.<p>Fast forward to 2021 and you&#x27;ve got theme parks attracting plenty of attendees, but we combine that high-labor business with a national labor shortage and&#x2F;or rising labor costs that are concentrated almost entirely in the service industry.<p>Finally, this is the biggest reason I don&#x27;t sympathize with the author: he doesn&#x27;t seem to have done a lot of research before going to the park. Disney for decades now has not been a place that you just show up on a random day and waltz on in. You <i>have</i> to plan it or you <i>will</i> have a bad time.<p>That means planning your trip with sites like mousehacking.com, and that means reserving dining and experiences far in advance.<p>I almost don&#x27;t want to get into it, but I also think that the discussion of race and inclusivity was unnaturally shoe-horned into this article. The author should already know why the attendees are mostly of a fair complexion: they&#x27;re members of the higher income brackets of the USA, the people who can afford Disney in the first place.<p>Disney did not create that nationwide racial income disparity. Though, their own racist media of the past (and perhaps even the present) did nothing to end it, either.<p>But all of that potentially interesting discussion is just thrown into an article that ultimately isn&#x27;t addressing those issues. It&#x27;s ultimately just about a guy who went to theme park despite not really liking theme parks.

It stopped being a magical experience when they stopped allowing the Disney character actors walk around the park, and started demanding everyone wait in line to see them.

At this point Disney holds children&#x27;s minds hostage. As a thought experiment, what would happen if it ceased to exist today along with its characters? Imagine the trauma many kids would experience, as if they lost someone from their family.<p>I get that Disney delivers on the promise of family-safe entertainment but this is not healthy. Certainly the capture of copyright law (i.e. endless extension of the copyright expiration period) is not the price worth paying for it.

This seems like the &quot;It&#x27;s so crowded nobody goes there&quot; thing. If prices were too high and the experience was not-quite-miserable, wouldn&#x27;t it be less crowded? It also seems like the author remembers the place as being less expensive when they were a child, but they aren&#x27;t accounting for inflation and their childhood memory was only of admissions whereas in the present they account for parking and food and possibly other costs.

I have only experienced Disneyland while in college in the early 70s. We went on Caltech&#x2F;JPL night, and our groups had the park to ourselves. I don&#x27;t remember long lines, and the price was so reasonable I don&#x27;t remember what it was. I am sure I would be totally repelled by the currently optimized money suck, just as I was recently repelled attending a conference in Las Vegas.

It might be a way better experience if they doubled the price. For me the crowds and wait times are the biggest negative.

This story says to me, &quot;keep buying Disney stock!&quot;

There are enough Disney fans that the rational thing to do would be to price it for the true believers and not one penny less. My assumption is that there is a huge value drop-off for people who don&#x27;t spend a lot of time on the franchise, and that&#x27;s why (or at least why I tell myself) my kids are going someplace else next year.

When I was a kid, there was a local amusement park that had a Galaxi roller coaster. My parents took me on a week day, there was no line, and I rode the thing maybe 20 or 30 times in a row.<p>It was <i>so</i> cosmically satisfying after having to wait in line for hours at Disneyland.

Had the similar feeling when I visited the Paris one a few years back.<p>Still found it funny given the number of adds I had to filter to read a story about being ripped off, not attacking the author as much as the site.

Reminds me of Dutch people taking their own food to Disneyland Paris.<p>The most famous Dutch theme park even has a picknick field but it made American heads explode in rage.

I&#x27;m just wondering out loud how privacy invasive the app the author mentions that sounds required for the full park experience.

the wait times are even worst then the costs... but either way I like something like Busch Gardens mush more.

“Capitalism is a smooth summabitch,” I said under my breath....<p>I wonder why the author doesn&#x27;t go to one of the socialist Disney-type parks?

&gt; Rod Benson is a columnist for SFGATE, a fine artist, and a former professional basketball player for the NBA D-League and Korean Basketball League. He’s previously written for Yahoo Sports! and SLAM magazine and is a graduate of U.C. Berkeley.<p>I don&#x27;t find a butthurt, thinly veiled anticapitalist rant about known quantities and easily accessible numbers, by written by someone who enjoys a mountain of privilege, to be particularly interesting or compelling.<p>Things are more expensive than they were in our youth. Entertainment destinations are expensive. The privileged class can afford them. These things are not new.

Sounds like when this person was younger they still got some enjoyment out of life, now woke culture has poisoned their brain so much that an online ordering system not letting the in &quot;just a bit early&quot; is a personal affront.