You see the throngs of people standing between you and the ride. You aren’t worried, though. You have an advantage that they don’t.
You confidently approach the line, but you veer at the last moment. The regular entrance is for the ordinary people. You’re one of the chosen few. You even enjoy your own park attendant. You walk up to a Cast Member, and they look at you expectantly. Authoritatively, you raise your arm to show that you belong. With a nod of recognition, the employee confirms that you are a member of the elite. The theme park’s version of the velvet rope lifts, and you enter the much shorter line, for you have…a FastPass!
In that moment, you are the chosen royalty of the Happiest Place on Earth.
In 1999, the geniuses at Disney finally recognized that their exponential growth rate had an unfortunate consequence. Eventually, the lines at their park attractions would grow so long that they would discourage guests from visiting. In order to adapt to this situation, the company’s world-renowned Imagineers crafted a clever solution. They would add secondary lines to their most popular rides and character experiences. The park’s system would control the number of times a guest could enter the second, much shorter line.
By allowing a few such FastPass usages each visit, Disney guaranteed their visitors would enjoy all their favorite parts of the various theme parks without having to fight the crowd. If you’ve spent any time at one of Disney’s iconic theme parks over the past 16 years, you’ve utilized a FastPass at some point. Have you ever taken a moment to consider how it came into existence or works so cleverly, though?
Let’s take a deep dive to learn about the genesis of the FastPass, its evolution across multiple Disney parks throughout the world, and its latest phase as FastPass+.
A growing need…
The first aspect to consider regarding the invention of the FastPass is its purpose. During the late 1990s, the most common complaint Disney received in feedback from guests was wasted time. Rather than enjoying all the restaurants, shops, shows, and attractions available at a theme park, guests across the world vented that they spent far too long stuck waiting in line. Their problem was also Disney’s problem, because people standing in a queue aren’t people buying food, drinks, or souvenirs, which cost Disney tens of thousands of dollars per minute.
In order to alleviate this issue, Imagineers needed a solution that would lessen time spent in line. This puzzle was trickier to crack than you may think. After all, anything they offered to shorten the customer’s wait must be available to everyone. That’s a vicious circle, because the new option would quickly become as congested as the old one. Plus, the idea of adding a second line seemed particularly counterintuitive. All that should accomplish in theory is giving people a different waiting queue. The same park guests are still in the same two lines, making the crowd levels for the attraction identical. So, what’s the enhancement?
The solution was an elegantly simple: design a pass-based system that empowered guests with the ability to virtually wait in line for an attraction without physically doing so. It’s the equivalent of calling for an imaginary baserunner in a backyard baseball game. Getting such a revolutionary process off the ground, however, was not an easy endeavor.
A new tomorrow
1998’s attendance report was grim. Disneyland, the American original, claimed 13.68 million in attendance in 1998, which was a troublesome decline of 4 percent from 1997. Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, the most popular theme park in the world, suffered an even stiffer decline of 8 percent to 15.64 million. Epcot and what was then known as Disney-MGM Studios both experienced 10 percent falls to 10.6 million and 9.47 million, respectively. While there are always a multitude of reasons when park attendance fluctuates from year to year, Disney execs had cause for alarm with their 1998 numbers.
With guests telling them that giant attraction queues were a deterrent and park visits dropping at an alarming rate, the company prioritized crowd control solutions. The idea of a velvet rope kind of second line, while daring, fell into place once the Imagineers determined the mechanics.
One of the issues Disney Company has with developing new technologies is how to roll them out in the various parks across the world. The locations all operate differently, so a single concept requires variance and nuance across the distinct facilities. Company employees like to say that the sun never sets on the Disney Empire, a play on historical maxim used for the British and Spanish empires as well as the holdings of Xerxes I of Persia.
Disney never needed to act like bloodthirsty conquistadors to claim their territories. The locals warmly welcomed each invasion, but a change as all-encompassing as a new theme park queue system required a lighter touch. Corporate executives plotted the introduction of FastPass in combination with their most ambitious theme park to date, Animal Kingdom.
Still the world’s largest theme park, the expansive offerings at Animal Kingdom required a new type of thinking by Disney’s Imagineers. In 1998, the company boldly announced the intention to open a new park at each of its existing properties over the next five years. To alleviate the ambition of this goal, they calculated that FastPass would solve the organic crowd concerns at each new location.
Animal Kingdom became the trial run just over a year after its 1998 debut. In July of 1999, the park added a series of kiosks. People with daily tickets or annual passes to Animal Kingdom could approach these FastPass distribution machines, sticking their admission ticket into the designated slot, and then recieving a paper FastPass with a return time.
The system assigned the user with an hour-long window for a ride return later in the day. The only information the paper showed in 1999 was the attraction of choice and the FastPass timeframe. The more advanced data wouldn’t appear for years, when the company acknowledged that there were flaws in the system that they should address by evolving the actual FastPass. Once the guest reached the attraction, a sign reflected the current FastPass printout window. Nearby was another sign displaying the current average waiting period for staying in the standard queue. The belief was that by showing the comparison information, Disney consumers would adopt the new system quickly.
The first FastPass options
At first, each guest could hold only one FastPass at a time, a rule that Disney relaxed afterward. The system operated through an incremental return time process. After a defined number of FastPass requests, the return window advanced five minutes. So, ride returns began at the park’s opening and then escalated an additional five minutes until park close. Convenient signs located above the attractions indicated the standard line wait-time as opposed to the current window for FastPass return time. By quickly eyeballing this information, guests could form an opinion about which way fit their plans.
Unlike later years, few rides “sold out” in the early days since people were unfamiliar with the system. The most frequent complaint involved the disruption of plans. Animal Kingdom in particular was always tricky to navigate, so the idea of having to return to the designated attraction at a set time later in the day proved chaotic to some guests.
Despite the occasional criticism, FastPass testing largely received glowing reviews from customers. They loved the idea of basically walking to the front of the line at a later time rather than standing in line right then. There was also a freshness to the idea of something new at a theme park that excited people. Finally and most importantly, FastPass offered the most imperative feature for theme park tourists: it was free. Other, later parks were not as generous.
During its trial run, FastPass kiosks were located at three attractions: Kali River Rapids, Kilimanjaro Safaris, and Countdown to Extinction, which is now known as Dinosaur. Imagineers chose these three options for the trial run for a combination of factors. There was no existing FastPass queue during the inaugural period at Animal Kingdom, and so Disney wanted to test their skip-the-regular-line idea in areas where they could easily divide riders into different segments. They also wanted to perform the trial on popular rides to see how much a FastPass would curtail the customer’s wait-time. Finally, they wanted their new kiosks placed at different areas across their most expansive park to study user behavior. Needless to say, testing proved wildly successful, and Disney was ready to advance the concept into other parks.
Lucky thirteen
After a few brief tests at Space Mountain, employees provided a full day of trials on July 29, 1999, a process they repeated through August 1st. A few days later on August 5th, the company went all-in on the concept. They announced that their huge new ride at Disney-MGM Studios, Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith, would include a continual FastPass queue, something they had tested even before the ride debuted on July 29th. As such, the birth of FastPass coincides with the start of Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster.
By the end of 1999, 13 Walt Disney World attractions featured FastPass lines. Magic Kingdom’s rides were Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Jungle Cruise, and Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. Epcot, which never had many attractions with large lines during the 1990s, chose Test Track and Honey, I Shrunk the Audience. Joining Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster at Disney-MGM Studios were Star Tours, Voyage of the Little Mermaid, and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Animal Kingdom didn’t introduce any additional FastPass offerings beyond the initial three.
FastPass goes West (then East)
Image: Disney
With Walt Disney World fans delighting in the FastPass experience, Disneyland quickly received its own rollout of the burgeoning technology. Their line-reservation system began its trial phase at the same time that Orlando’s became permanent. On August 1, 1999, Space Mountain in Anaheim featured another four-day test period. Unlike at Walt Disney World, there was a delay between the experimental phase and the actual implementation of FastPass.
On November 19, 1999, Disneyland officially welcomed the FastPass queue system. They set up a series of Priority Pass entrances for It’s a Small World, which received an annual spike in traffic each holiday season. The company considers this ride, not Space Mountain, the first to employ FastPass. Both of them were operational by the end of November, but It’s a Small World issued the first FastPass that wasn’t part of the test period. Five days later on November 24th, Space Mountain officially added the FastPass service. During December of 1999, Splash Mountain and then Roger Rabbit’s Car Toon Spin became participants.
The rollout of FastPass at Disneyland was an unqualified success. Disney confidently added kiosks at Disneyland Paris and Tokyo Disneyland within months. By the summer of 2000, all of its parks ran FastPass smoothly. In less than a year, Disney fundamentally altered theme park behavior in a way that persists today. In 1999, they were the only company offering secondary line queues. Virtually every major theme park entity provides it today, although most Disney competitors refuse to offer their versions of FastPass for free.
Flaws in the system
While FastPass still exists at several Disney theme parks, the company eventually sought a replacement with MyMagic+. The explanation for this billion dollar enterprise is that there are numerous issues with FastPass. From the first days of its implementation, clever/deceitful consumers uncovered flaws in the system.
At the start, FastPass printouts didn’t include significant identifiers. There were date stamps on the tickets, but they were in fine print relative to the larger text of the return-time windows. People started realizing that they could pick up discarded FastPass printouts to use during future visits. This may sound unbelievable today, but it was a serious issue at the time.
The cause for such flaws was understandable. Disney Imagineers tried to build the user-friendliest system possible, which meant printout minimalism. The FastPass acquisition process involved two phases. The first step was getting the FastPass printout as documented above. The second step involved returning at the designated time to enjoy the attraction. At this point, the FastPass holder would show their ticket to the Cast Member manning the Priority Pass Entrance. The employee would wave them through to the shorter line queue. When the park guest reached the ride itself, a different Cast Member would ask for the ticket and then provide the guest with access to the attraction.
Despite the legendary diligence of Disney employees, few people holding FastPass tickets were ever turned away at the start. Corporate policy dictated that employees never tell guests no. If someone showed up too early for their FastPass window, the Cast Member politely advised them to return later when the ticket would become valid. If the guest showed up well after the expiration of the window, say 8 p.m. for a FastPass that expired at noon, the vast majority of employees honored it anyway at the company’s request.
Handing a Cast Member an expired ticket seems like something an employee should catch, but few did. In the early days, they received training saying not to scrutinize the tickets carefully beyond the start of the FastPass window. Someone showing up at 11:15 a.m. in the example above would receive notification to return at noon, but that was the only type of refusal encouraged. So, someone who had a FastPass from a previous day could use it as if it were new, an exploit that shameless guests abused.
There were other flaws as well. Enterprising guests discovered another system flaw when they inserted expired tickets and annual passes into the FastPass kiosks. Due to poor error checking, the original versions of these machines failed to recognize outdated tickets. So, they dutifully spit out valid FastPasses. People who knew about this error could have the run of Disney theme parks, riding to their heart’s content. Disney always targeted eight to nine rides as the intended number for guests during a quality day at one of their theme parks. With minimal effort, people employing this exploit could wind up with 10+ FastPasses.
Another known issue was the printout itself. The FastPass wasn’t exactly the dollar bill with regards to counterfeiting prevention techniques. Clever malcontents recognized that they could create their own versions of the printouts at home. There were even downloadable Make Your Own FastPass kits available online. The most enterprising of these folks started selling their counterfeit offerings on eBay. Guests would buy them online and then show up for a day of maximum riding at a Disney theme park. Suffice to say that when Disney grew wise to this trick, a lot of people wound up experiencing disappointing days at the Happiest Place on Earth before presumably returning home to leave a lot of negative feedback for the shady sellers.
Keeping it honest and boosting awareness
Over time, Disney evolved the FastPass concept to encourage greater use while discouraging dishonesty. They started changing the nature of the printouts to reflect a time stamp to avoid future-date cheating. They also altered the dissemination of FastPass printouts by changing the way the machine cut them. The updated kiosks cut the tickets differently, creating a perforation that was more difficult for people to mimic during counterfeiting attempts. They also updated the software to determine the validity of park tickets prior to authorizing the FastPass. Eventually, Disney even trained their Cast Members to reject FastPasses beyond the return time window, which caused a fair share of disgruntled customers.
The cheaters were the smaller concern to Disney. Sure, the company didn’t like that some guests were ripping off the system, but it didn’t bother them anywhere near as much as the sheer volume of park guests who ignored FastPass entirely. Disney observers chronicled this oddity for years. Guests would stand in line directly under FastPass signs that displayed return-times to note that if they acquired such a ticket, they would get to enjoy the attraction sooner. People stood in the long lines anyway. Disney must have felt like they were engaged in a food fight with someone on a hunger strike.
The company tried to boost FastPass awareness in numerous ways. They added central kiosks that allowed guests to acquire FastPass tickets for rides throughout the parks. The idea was that the walking might have discouraged people from participating. They added informative display signs to show how advantageous FastPass usage was relative to standing in line.
Disney even altered the fundamentals of the program to allow people to carry multiple FastPasses at once. Rather than receive a new one after the old one expired, the company added a new element to the printout in 2002. A second time listed on the ticket signified the moment when a person could acquire a different FastPass, even if they had not used the prior one. In this manner, theme park guests could finally hold multiple valid FastPasses simultaneously.
Savvy visitors maximized their days at the Happiest Place on Earth by developing intricate strategies to attain the most FastPasses possible. They learned that some later attractions weren’t added to the original distribution system. Popular rides such as Roger Rabbit’s Toon Town at Disneyland offered FastPasses that didn’t count against the waiting window for the attractions on the main system. The same was true of Disney’s California Adventure’s nighttime show, World of Color.
Traffic and the burning platform
Image: Disney
Disney began the development of My Magic+ and its offshoot, FastPass+, due to lingering issues with the original FastPass system. Ostensibly created to reduce wait-times, the first version of FastPass never truly achieved that goal. There was no hard data to reflect that guests were spending more money at Disney theme parks, either. The decidedly mixed results were a source of continued frustration for the company.
To understand the issue, think about how FastPass should work. Over time, Disney executives have collated extensive data about attraction behavior. They understand that Omnimover rides provide an easily calculated rate for ride occupancy since they move at the same speed all day. Keeping rides such as The Haunted Mansion full of guests shouldn’t require much strategy, but there’s still a science to the process. It should service a certain number of guests each hour and, thereby, each day. That traffic should be relatively static.
Image: Disney
Through the FastPass system, Disney should have the ability to drive guest behavior by providing FastPasses at set increments. Rather than offering a guesstimate about wait-time, the company should theoretically stabilize traffic throughout the day via this system. The only catch is that people have to use it. Disney theme parks were stuck in a precarious situation wherein not enough people used FastPass technology, while too many of the ones who did abused it.
There was also a second, much more dramatic problem. Disney Imagineers are notoriously stagnant in the best possible way. They see themselves as the keeper of the flame with regards to Walt Disney’s legacy. They would rather change too little than change too much. That’s why so much of each park has remained consistent relative to the way you remember them from your childhood. Many of the changes made are seamless ones that enhance your guest experience without altering the purity of your memories. That’s a wonderful development style that has worked for over half a century. It’s also what makes Disney the gold standard in the theme park industry.
Something changed that no Imagineer could have anticipated, though. You’re using it right now. The Internet represents landmark change in the way humanity interacts. It offers historic means of communication while providing novel new forms of entertainment. Disney theme parks once faced relatively little competition when it came to how people wanted to spend their free time. As the Happiest Place on Earth, it had an easy sales pitch. That was true until it discovered the proverbial Burning Platform.
You may remember this concept from your business class. It’s a theme based on a real incident from 1988 when a supervisor working on an oil rig woke up to discover that his habitat was on fire. Most of his co-workers died in the blaze, and he faced a literal life-or-death decision himself. Trapped in the middle of nowhere, he could remain on the platform and burn alive or he could alternately jump 15 stories to the waters below. The leap would probably kill him and, if not, he would freeze to death in the water within minutes. He chose to jump, noting during a television interview that he chose probable death over certain death.
Even as it stood as the most popular theme park enterprise in the world, Disney executives believed that the company stood on the proverbial Burning Platform in the social media era. They feared that newly available distractions would disrupt their business model in the same manner as the Internet had negated the need for print media and physical mail. Whether this belief was founded in reality or extreme paranoia is up for debate. Either way, the people running Disney experienced a compelling urge to address the inertia within their company’s theme parks.
The fear of change versus the need for it
With people at the top of the food chain seeking change and diehard Imagineers protecting the old ways, the entire company suffered a stalemate. Eventually, CEO Robert Iger got involved, picking the side of technology over stagnation. The end result was that a project named X-Band moved forward. You know many of the kernels of it as My Magic+, but the most important one for the purpose of this discussion is FastPass+.
Disney knew from their research that guests weren’t experiencing the optimal number of rides during a day at the park. Some were enjoying too many while others weren’t getting enough due to self-inflicted wounds. They chose to stand in line rather than utilize existing technology. The company’s original plan with FastPass was to drive consumer behavior. It hadn’t worked to their satisfaction, and so a key part of their next phase of technological evolution would center on achieving this task in the most user-friendly manner possible.
Not your 90s FastPass
Image: Disney
The X-Band that you now know as a MagicBand promises several benefits to park guests. You can check into your hotel room, pay for your food and souvenirs, and enter Disney’s theme parks using the same accessory. It’s a Trojan horse for the company as well. By asking consumers to use bands, they can project park traffic ahead of time.
The FastPass+ system fundamentally alters the distribution system. While you can acquire FastPasses at the park, the optimal method is to select them at home. All Walt Disney World ticketholders can visit MyDisneyExperience.com to plan their itinerary up to 30 days in advance. Guests staying at Walt Disney World resorts gain an additional 30-day window, meaning that they can book their FastPasses two full months prior to arrival. It’s a planner’s dream, and it delivers vital information to Disney about expected guest traffic on a given day. They can also more easily project and maximize crowd traffic behavior and attraction occupancy.
The central knock on FastPass+ is that it removes any semblance of spontaneity during a day at the Happiest Place on Earth. People without selections are likely to face longer wait-times due to the fact that they are the last people to state in interest in the various attractions. It’s also clearly intended to discourage guests from leaving Disney property (can you really afford to go to Universal or SeaWorld on Thursday, and miss your Test Track slot?).
Disney tries to sidestep the issue by driving consumers to utilize the FastPass+ service. The company invested roughly $80 million to enhance the functionality of MyDisneyExperience.com in anticipation of people going online to book their selections. The company delivers automated reminders, a sort of kindly nagging, to remind people with purchased park tickets to use FastPass+. The goal here is to control the process of park attendance. Disney believes that they’ve raised the daily occupancy at Magic Kingdom by over 5,000 people simply by employing the new technology.
In order to achieve such an impressive goal at the world’s most trafficked theme parks, some changes were made to the previous FastPass system. Under the original version, there was no upper limit to the amount of FastPasses a person could acquire. That’s precisely how so many people managed to abuse FastPass classic. FastPass+ is much less forgiving. The updated system provides users with their choice of only three selections, a tremendous reduction from the prior version. At the beginning, there was no methodology in place to gain additional ones, although Disney relaxed that rule after a few months. People can now acquire an extra FastPass+ after they’ve used their first three, but you can only do so at a park kiosk, similar to the olden days.
That leads to another difference in the systems. Under the new version, you must choose the same park for all FastPasses, even if you plan to hop between parks. After you’ve used your first three, you can acquire a new one at a different park, but that’s somewhat tricky to accomplish in execution. The most popular FastPass+ selections quickly advance the return windows until late in the day, and attractions such as Toy Story Midway Mania are exhausted early on most days. None of this surprises Disney, and it’s easy to speculate that this is even an intended part of the infrastructure. The company more easily controls the population and thereby the maximum occupancy at each park if they discourage park hopping via FastPass+ limits.
Image: Disney
There is another layer of control FastPass+ provides. Disney implemented a final dramatic change from the prior iteration of the service. FastPass+ tiers the most popular attractions at Epcot and Hollywood Studios, parks that are top-heavy with regards to quality rides. This is to prevent quicker FastPass+ sellouts. For example, Epcot features Test Track and Soarin’ and a bunch of other attractions that have little to no wait in line.
Without using FastPass+ tiers, everyone would select both of those rides plus something else in high demand such as prioritized seating at Illuminations. To prevent this, Disney forces guests to choose between all three of them. My Disney Experience lists each one as part of Tier 1 and provides only one such FastPass+ selection per guest per day. The same is true at Hollywood Studios, where choosing Toy Story Midway Mania means ceding Rock ‘N’ Roller Coaster and guaranteed seating for Fantasmic! as the opportunity cost.
In short, Disney now locks down the system to prevent the rampant abuse in the prior FastPass system. Some guests feel like they receive less value under the new FastPass+ system, but Disney feels the need to be more restrictive in order to assure that the people who wait until the last minute to make their selections don’t get shut out completely. They prefer guests to book their FastPasses earlier, of course. It’s simply not feasible for everyone, though. By protecting the interests of everyone, Disney restores its ability to ensure that guests enjoy those eight to nine daily attractions per visit while simultaneously increasing the number of park visits.
There is a certain amount of credulity involved with the news that a company as forward-thinking as Disney still employs technology originally implemented in 1999. They do this despite the fact that they famously invested a billion dollars into a new design that functions quite well at Walt Disney World, not only enhancing the guest experience but also boosting maximum ride and park occupancy as well. What this information reflects is how brilliant an idea FastPass was at the time as well as how difficult it is to provide a better solution that is cost-effective. Even Disney itself struggles to surpass their own achievement, recognizing that while FastPass+ is better, it’s not a perfect fit for every park, at least not yet.
