Insiders are abuzz with the latest news circulating Disney’s higher-ups: MyMagic+ is on its way to Disneyland Resort in California. In case you’ve forgotten, MyMagic+ is the $1.5 billion technological upgrade imposed upon Walt Disney World in Florida over the last few years. The intricate and complex MyMagic+ system is headlined by the My Disney Experience smart phone app through which guests pre-book FastPass+ reservations months before visiting. Those FastPass+ rides (plus dining reservations, debit accounts, and hotel room keys) are then stored on MagicBands – rubber bracelets with radio-frequency emitting chips.
The prototype system is meant to equip Walt Disney World with 21st century technology for maximum vacation personalization. The problem is that poor word of mouth and the frustrating complexity of the system has put a bad taste in visitor’s mouths, and limits have enraged some of Disney’s most enthusiastic park-goers. So, the system helps Disney to keep its guests on-property for longer stays where it’s easier to spend money, but hasn’t made too many fans.
And now, insiders say that MyMagic+ is coming to Disneyland. But there are a few hurdles that Disney is going to have to face if they really intend to bring the ultra-rigid pre-planning-based program to the relaxed shores of the Pacific. We’ll look at six concepts that MyMagic+ relies on, then explain why things are different in Disneyland than they are in Walt Disney World. Make no mistake: we’re sure that Disney DOES recognize these differences and that whatever comes to Disneyland will be very different than what’s at Walt Disney World. It’s still fun to think about the differences though.
1. Planning months in advance
Walt Disney World: Walt Disney World is an international destination. Families from around the globe save for a decade or more to afford a weeklong trip to the massive Florida resort, and plan accordingly. They pore over transportation, accommodations, and dining options. Even if they don’t micro-manage, these guests flying in from around the country and around the world do need some structure (even if not as much as MyMagic+ provides for). For those guests for whom Walt Disney World is once-in-a-lifetime, they probably already planned meals and hotels, so adding ride reservations via FastPass+ isn’t too far a stretch, even if it bothers and leaves out local travelers.
Disneyland: Disneyland draws tourists from around the United States and overseas, but no where near as much as Walt Disney World. Disneyland existed for many decades as a single amusement park – not a giant resort complex like the Florida resort – and developed a very loyal following of locals. Only recently has DIsneyland begun to advertise outside the Southern California area in a serious way.
Today, a MASSIVE percentage of daily Disneyland visitors are locals who visited the park when they were kids, and live in the area. For them, it’s a family tradition and the place you go on Sunday afternoons every week, not a getaway vacation. Many locals and Southern California residents have annual passes, and stop by at the park on a whim. The idea that they’d pre-plan their visit a day, a week, or a month in advance is preposterous. It’s just a different dynamic. Disneyland trips are spur-of-the-moment. If you lived a couple minutes from Disneyland and visited once in a while on the way home from work, would you plan your FastPasses a month in advance? So while FastPass+ might still streamline the day, it would have to take a very different form. Most Disneyland visitors don’t need 60, 30, even 7 days.
2. Big perks for official resort stays
Walt Disney World: With twenty-four massive resort hotels (ranging from “value” to “deluxe”), Walt Disney World has plenty of room for all the many, many guests who travel a long ways to reach the destination resort. Even if Disney’s cavalcade of hotels is convenient, it’s also pricey. Families might find it prudent to stay in one of the thousands of hotels just outside Disney’s property, getting the same beds and the same air conditioning for half the cost. To make sure that doesn’t happen, Disney incentivizes on-site stays in many ways. Just one is that only guests staying at official Resort hotels get to pre-book their FastPass+ selections months in advance. Otherwise, you get a 30-day head start so long as you’ve purchased tickets already.
Disneyland: The itty-bitty Disneyland Resort has three resort hotels (all three of which would probably be categorized as “moderate” or “deluxe” by Walt Disney World’s pricing standards). Only a teeny percentage of Disneyland visitors stay in them. With such a lean toward local visitors, Disneyland doesn’t need two dozen hotels. Even if it had them, staying off-property is a lot easier since Disneyland is so small, with TONS of hotels along the park’s perimeter. To give perks to guests staying in Disneyland’s Official Resort hotels would be nonsensical. It may literally equate to the 1% of visitors getting 60-day advanced bookings, with 99% held off until later.
3. MagicBands
Walt Disney World: Supposedly the heart, lungs, and lifeblood of MyMagic+, FastPass+, and every other “plus” out there, MagicBands are rubberized bracelets containing an RFID radio chip, about the size of a grain of rice. The unusual little bands contain park tickets, FastPass reservations, room keys, and debit accounts with no barcode scanning and no card fumbling required. Certainly easy and simple, the bands can stay on during the length of your stay since you need them for… well… just about everything.
Disneyland: With so many local visitors making sporadic and spur-of-the-moment trips, Disneyland visitors would be altogether unlikely to warm to the MagicBand. Imagine having to remember to wear your Mickey Mouse bracelet to work that day so you can stop by the park afterward for dinner. That’s sure to go over well at the business meeting, right? In other words, the MagicBands would still be quirky and fun in California, but they’d lose much of their convenience, and isn’t that at least most of their purpose?
4. Tiered attractions and limits
Walt Disney World: As guests book and pre-book FastPass+ selections, they’re limited to choosing only a ride or two from each provided tier. Of course, it’s not explicitly stated that way. Guests simply see a screen full of attractions and are asked to “choose one.” The attractions shown are, on purpose, the park’s most popular. Wise travelers would obviously pick Soarin’, Maelstrom, and Test Track as their three FastPass+ selections when booking their selections. So, the My Disney Experience app allows you to select only one of the three. Your other two selections are forced to be from the high-capacity or less popular rides like Captain EO or meet-and-greets that probably didn’t need FastPass to begin with. It makes sense in pulsing guests to less popular attractions and keeping enthusiasts from selecting slots on all E-tickets, and it’s a necessary evil.
Disneyland: While Disneyland Resort contains only two theme parks, the two pack in as many attractions (if not more) than Walt Disney World’s four combined. Disneyland Park has all the E-tickets of Magic Kingdom (Space Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Splash Mountain, Peter Pan’s Flight, etc) plus a half-dozen more (Star Tours, Matterhorn, Indiana Jones Adventure, Car Toon Spin, Submarine Voyage, etc). If you could even convince Disneyland guests to embrace pre-booking or limiting the number of FastPasses they can have, presenting them all and saying “choose two” would incite riots. And probably for good reason. Disneyland doesn’t have too many “naive tourist” types, and a local being forced to choose a FastPass+ reservation for the vacant Muppet*Vision 3D might implode.
5. One park per day
Walt Disney World: When pre-booking FastPass+ reservation slots, guests must base their selections on being at one-park-per-day. So even if you have a Park Hopper ticket and plan to hit all four parks in one day, your three FastPass+ reservations must all be at the same park. After guests revolted, Disney tweaked the system so that reservations can be made at another park, but only AFTER you’ve used your first three, and only if you’re in the park you wish to schedule at.
The reality is that getting between Walt Disney World’s parks is a chore, sometimes taking up to an hour of bus rides, ferries, monorails, or a combination of the above, which made Park Hopping an obstacle to begin with. FastPass+ does further de-incentivize traveling between parks and makes it harder on those who were willing to pay more for the upgraded ticket. Consequently, it also limits confusion since guests would no doubt plan for a certain Park Hopping itinerary, then not make it between parks as quickly as they thought they would, missing reservations and throwing the system out of whack.
Disneyland: Disneyland and Disney California Adventure are not a boat ride away, or even a bus ride. The two are snuggled right up next to each other. Their entrances face each other across a hundred yard wide plaza called the Esplanade. To put it into perspective for Walt Disney World fans, imagine if you could start at Cinderella Castle, walk straight down Main Street, U.S.A., cross the plaza out front, and walt right into Disney’s Animal Kingdom with no turns needed.
As you can imagine, many Disneyland visitors have annual passes. Those who don’t invariably have Park Hopper tickets. It’s so easy to travel between the two that they operate somewhat like one giant theme park. As it is, guests can Hop from Disneyland to Disney California Adventure and back unlimited times throughout the day, picking up FastPasses at each and flowing effortlessly back and forth. Again, we doubt Disneyland guests would accept pre-booked FastPasses at all, but if they did, being limited to one park per day would make them hot in the collar. Certainly Disney knows this, and any FastPass+ pre-booking at Disneyland Resort will allow park-to-park choices, even if the system insists on verifying that guests purchased Park Hopper tickets first.
6. Gateless entries
Walt Disney World: Part of the “gee whiz” glitter that makes MyMagic+ and the MagicBands seem so futuristic and “gotta-try-that” are the gateless entries. Each of the parks at Disney World were retrofitted with new gate-free turnstiles where a guest need only to touch his or her MagicBand to a Mickey Mouse sensor, then scan his or her fingerprint. When the sensor grows green and sings a little song, the guest is motioned into the park by a stationed Cast Member. There’s no boring tickets, no barcode scanning, no turnstiles to push through, and no hold-ups for strollers. It’s sort of those of those grin-inducing moments that’s just plain fun and so much different than your local park can do.
Disneyland: While the quirky and technological “wow” factor of the gateless entry is certainly something that’ll make children (and parents) smile, there is a level of practicality to consider. At Disneyland, that means crowd control. On the resort’s 24-hour parties, Christmas, New Years, and other special events, the Esplanade between parks is literally crammed, swarming with throngs of people begging for entry as both Disneyland and Disney California Adventure close, at capacity. It may sound chaotic and to some degree, it is. Hundreds of guests all hoping that the parks will re-open and let in even just a few more hundred people… It’s not that we expect the masses to revolt and start pushing their way in, but the reality is that gates might be necessary at Disneyland, where the Esplanade can be a madhouse of activity.
Our thoughts
You’ve heard, as we have, of the nightmares caused by the My Disney Experience smart phone app, MagicBands, FastPass+, and the resort’s overreliance on technology with MyMagic+. We won’t claim to know that things are really that bad. MyMagic+, it seems, did not destroy Walt Disney World. Many, many guests are enjoying the freedom of booking ahead of time instead of racing around to collect record numbers of FastPass paper tickets. In other words, the system is not the end of the world. The question Disney asks is, “does it make it easier for guests to spend money and stay on property?” It would seem that the answer is yes. Our question is, “Does it make vacationing simpler and more enjoyable?” For many, the jury is still out, but we’re not seeing fire and brimstone.
All we can safely say here and now is that, despite outcry, it seems MyMagic+ and its associated components will make the trip to the West Coast and become integrated into the infrastructure of Disneyland Resort. Our intention here is not to say that MyMagic+ is a budget-sucking demon that’s ruining one Disney resort at a time. Instead, we see the six elements above as big hurdles that Disney is going to have to face if they think MyMagic+ is really needed in California.
