If you haven’t opened the My Disney Experience app lately, check it out and you might be shocked… No, not just by rising food prices, sold-out Boarding Groups, or slashed park hours but by something much simpler; something we thought we had long-ago gotten under control: wait times.
In what we once called the “off season” – weekdays far removed from Christmas break, Spring break, and any major holiday overlays – it’s not unusual to see the waits crest an hour for Magic Kingdom’s “mountains,” Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, Pirates of the Caribbean, even the Jungle Cruise. Is it in our heads? Does it merely feel like we’re waiting longer for the same rides?
Thanks to the indispensible work of the data scientists and vacation planners at Touring Plans, we can break down this frustrating phenonenon by the numbers…
Take a look at the Flourish data visualization Touring Plans assembled from their years of collecting Walt Disney World vacation planning data, showing the top 15 longest average wait times during a random “off-season” week in late February.
It probably looks how you “remember” a Disney World vacation – sure, a half-hour wait for Big Thunder Mountain, an hour for Soarin’ or Test Track, and the resort’s longest wait – for that week, The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror – taking nearly an hour and half… But now, let’s jump forward exactly five years, to the same “off-season” February week in 2020.
That’s right – exactly five years later, the top fifteen longest waits at the resort have exploded, with the shortest of the top 15 waits now equal to the longest at the resort in 2015. It’s not just that new rides now top the list; it’s that wait times for age-old classics have literally doubled – in five years, Space Mountain leapt from an average wait of 46 minutes to 102; Jungle Cruise from 44 to 87; Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster from 49 to 105. You can explore Touring Plans’s interactive data visualization yourself, and it’s likely to leave you with one burning question:
What is going on? While it’s true that, year-over-year, attendance consistently climbs faster than parks’ capacity can keep up with (despite ever-rising prices and diminishing entertainment offerings) while ticket pricing now incentivizes “off-season” visits to spread crowds, there’s a fundamental flaw fans know all too well: FastPass.
At every turn, sluggish Stand-by lines are simply the only choice outside of your three FastPass+ reservations. How have we gone from FastPass being Disney’s greatest operational (and PR) tool ever designed to theme parks awash in stagnant waits, sold-out return times, and pathways packed with meandering crowds with nowhere to go? Today, we’ll dig into the in-depth story of FastPass… and how this panacea for a Disney Parks visit became a pandemic.
Whose line is it anyway?
Okay, so, lines. No one likes to wait in a line. And for most of human history, people didn’t.
The first written account of people waiting in a single-file line comes from the 1837 book The French Revolution: A History by Thomas Carlyle, the author described citizens forming a queue (French for “tail”) at a bakery to collect the post-Revolution scarcity of bread:
“If we look now at Paris, one thing is too evident: that the Bakers’ shops have got their Queues, or Tails; their long strings of purchasers, arranged in tail, so that the first come be the first served.”
The notion of a “first come, first served” system was considered a “French eccentricity.” While we don’t exactly know what form transactions elsewhere in the world took (because, y’know, that’s not a very interesting or important thing for people to record), it likely involved would-be customers gathering around vendors, vying for attention like you’d find at a modern deli counter or bar.
By a century later, the practice of “waiting in line” was spreading. Author George Orwell wrote in a 1944 essay of British citizens queuing for rations during World War II, wondering if visitors to Great Britain would be surprised by English people’s “willingness to form queues.”
And if you think about it, that was barely a decade before Disneyland opened in 1955! The park’s queues back then were made of metal posts and ropes arranged in a back-and-forth maze organizing guests outside of, for example, Fantasyland’s dark rides – simple, old-fashioned queue spaces that remain today.
As Disney legend has it, Walt’s a-ha moment around waiting came in 1960 when he visited Knott’s Berry Farm, the long-running theme park just a few miles north of Disneyland, to see the new Calico Mine Ride designed by legendary designer Bud Hurlbut. To board the slow-moving mine train, Walt was led up a winding path weaving through fake desert rocks and waterfalls. Only as he neared the station did he turn a corner see the waiting crowd that had been hidden from passers-by by the false desert facade, allegedly causing Walt to exclaim, “You ole’ S.O.B.!”
Walt loved that Hurlbut had hidden the wait from guests (making them much more likely to join the line and hand over a ride ticket) and that the themed pathway gave guests something more to do than to zig-zag through a slow-moving rope maze.
Disney began rolling out similarly themed queues in earnest in the 1960s, like the rolling cemetery path to the Haunted Mansion or the courtyards and fountains outside Pirates of the Caribbean, but the first truly immersive queue at Disneyland was probably 1967’s Lost Legend: Adventure Thru Inner Space. In any case, incorporating the queue into the environment became Imagineering’s standard through the steel coasters of the 1970s (Space and Big Thunder Mountains), but waiting would be revolutionized soon after…
Don’t wait; participate
As with so many revolutions and reinventions at Disney Parks, the reimagining of waiting really hit high gear in the early 1990s. With then-CEO Michael Eisner at the helm, the “Ride the Movies” era was coming to fruition. An influx of intellectual properties fueled a generation of gargantuan new rides of unprecedented style, from Star Tours to Alien Encounter; Indiana Jones Adventure to The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror. Aside from their cinematic scale, these attractions also did something brilliant: they turned queues into part of the attraction.
Like never before, this generation of ambitious attractions was designed to make the wait worthwhile, blurring environmental design, batched pre-shows, and Cast Members into the ride experience. This is where guests began to gain concrete “roles” like being an interstellar traveler or international tourist, dropped not onto rides, but into original worlds and mythologies where they had a role to play. All that world-building happened with guests passing through starport security, deciphering ancient lanuages and tripping booby traps, exploring eerie hotel libraries, or being dropped into dystopian sci-fi settings, allowing them to acclimate to the adventure while waiting.
These multi-stage attractions set the tone for today’s Imagineering pinnacles like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, requiring precision timing and incredible calibration to ensure the experience begins long before guests set foot on a ride vehicle. And though Disney Imagineers had helped mitigate ever-lengthening waits by marvelously dressing queues in sprawling, storytelling scenes with lavish pre-shows and high-capacity boarding areas, that created another problem that needed solved… And a miraculous idea seemed to be the solution. Read on…
Waiting woes
The immersive queues the “Ride the Movies” era produced were smartly designed to hold the massive crowds descending on the reinvented Disney Parks during this era, and to entertain them while they waited. But of course, this is where we begin to run into trouble. We’ll simplify it to three major problems:
- Though Disney’s newest generation of attractions was capable of supporting the descending crowds, those crowds also fell upon the infrastructure of older rides, smashing into the underbuilt queues of the park’s earlier era; lines neither built to handle the massive groups of waiting guests, nor to entertain them.
- With the growth in attendance far outpacing the Parks’ growth in capacity, ballooning waits for both new and classic attractions yielded a major downturn in guest satisfaction as guests struggled to access rides and reported feeling dissatisfied with the number of experiences they had relative to the (steeply growing) price of admission. Attendance fell sharply in 1997 and 1998 at all of Disney’s U.S. parks…
- As wait times grew, each queue became a giant sponge, collecting and holding onto thousands and thousands of people at any given time… While that may be aggravating for guests, it was equally frustrating for executives. After all, any moment spent in a queue (even a well-dressed one) was a lost opportunity to buy a snack, souvenir, or meal.
There was no doubt – a solution was needed. Disney had a vested interest in figuring out how to reduce wait times at Disney Parks.
Solution 1: Add capacity
Sure, the most immediately obvious choice would simply be to raise the park’s capacity through new attractions. Capacity is perhaps the most impactful (but least obvious) aspect of a Disney Parks visit; it literally determines pretty much everything about your day. That’s why it’s one of Disney’s four Keys to Guest Service (coming after safety, courtesy, and show).
And trust us – the math here matters. After all, each attraction has a given theoretical hourly capacity (a sort of “best-case” number of guests who can experience it in an hour under ideal, “friction-free” conditions, possible practically only in simulations). For example, Space Mountain’s theoretical hourly capacity is reportedly about 2,000 people per hour – a simple function of the ride’s per-vehicle capacity and possible dispatches-per-hour.
But much more important than that manufacturer-supplied number is the more reasonable operational hourly capacity (accounting for the realities of operation, like an empty seat here and there, a momentary pause to help a guest board, etc.)… for Space Mountain, reportedly closer to 1,800 people per hour. Think about what that really means: if you step into Space Mountain’s queue as the 1,801st guest, you would expect a wait of 1 hour. If you’re 901st in line, mathematically that’d be about a 30 minute wait. Easy! Simple! So far…
Expanded over a 12-hour operating day, that gives Space Mountain a realistic daily throughput of over 21,000 guests. Put another way, Space Mountain has 21,000 available “slots” that can be filled – an impressive number, even if it’s nowhere near the 60,000 guests on average who visit Magic Kingdom each day.
And mathematically, it really is that easy: add up the daily throughput of all attractions, divide by the number of guests in the park, and you arrive at the number of attractions guests will experience – on average – in a day. Stated more intuitively: spreading the same amount of guests around more available “slots” is a good thing. If you add more capacity, the number of average attractions a guest will experience inches up, closer and closer to another whole number.
The bad news? Adding attractions – especially good, high-capacity, sought-after ones whose capacity will be fully utilized – is expensive and time consuming. So while adding capacity is an obvious surefire solution to cut lines, it’s not shareholder friendly, which pretty much eliminates it as a practical first response to wait times rising.
Solution 2: Raise prices
At the end of the day, Disney Parks maintain a careful balance when it comes to price. The idea, of course, is to balance guest experience, operations, and profit – all’s fair in capitalism, including purposefully pricing out income groups.
Except that in the 1990s, Disney Parks were still seen as a growing enterprise within the Walt Disney Company. In the midst of the Parks’ radical reintroduction to pop culture, price increases during the decade were already among the largest jumps Disney Parks admission has ever seen counting for inflation. And Disney Parks attendance was plummeting, remember, and not because they’d priced out a bottom financial tier. Instead, because of the guest services aspect throwing the balance out of whack.
We’ve seen this “solution” a lot over the last few decades, haven’t we? And it makes sense – raising prices maximizes Disney’s revenue and theoretically raises the floor, limiting the number of guests who can practically afford to visit. While it doesn’t mesh well with Disney’s egalitarian brand or magical message, raising prices should cut attendance… except when it doesn’t, which, as many fans will tell you, it hasn’t. Largely, price increases have been far too gradual (a few dollars more each year) to elicit sticker shock rejections, and Annual Pass payment plans have made mid-tier passes a little too within reach.
Solution 3: Wait less
Well, duh. Of course “waiting less” would be a solution to reinvigorate guests and to make them feel that they’d seen and done more at Disney Parks. But how?
Enter Disney electrical engineer Greg Hale, who initially began to develop the concept of a new kind of line altogether. It began when select guests were chosen to participate in some evaluation at the still-new Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Guest groups were given journals and asked to document their day – what they ate, bought, and rode; the time they entered a queue, got on the ride, and finished the ride; their feelings and accomplishments, and their satisfaction with the day.
But here’s the difference: a test group was provided with a special pass that would allow them to do things a bit differently.
Those guests would be able to visit the entrance to Kilimanjaro Safaris – the park’s undisputed anchor attraction – and, rather than entering the queue, would be provided with a return time equal to the ride’s current wait. For example, guests arriving at 10:00 to a 45 minute wait would be given instructions to return at 10:45.
That’s the birth of the virtual queue – guests aren’t “line-jumping” at all; they’re waiting just like everyone else… just… not in the line. Which means that during that 45 minute wait, they could explore animal experiences, ride other attractions or, of course, eat and shop. After their wait, they’d be invited to enter the ride through its exit and gain priority boarding.
From that simple experiment, FastPass was born. In action, FastPass takes a ride’s hourly capacity – its available “slots” for that hour – and sets aside a large portion (typically around 70%) to be pre-booked (initially, the day-of). The “regular” line became the Stand-by line – as its name implies, an option for guests who are ineligible for a FastPass (usually due to already having one outstanding at the time) and are willing to accept secondary boarding precedence.
But remember, a ride’s capacity is its capacity, period. And this is important, because it’s the crux of what would become the major fault of FastPass: Space Mountain can still only process 1,800 people per hour, but with FastPass, 1,260 of those “slots” are already spoken for by guests out in the rest of the park. So now, though you may have only 540 people physically standing in front of you in the “Stand-by” line, the wait time will still display as an hour, accounting for the 1,260 people in the virtual queue. And since those returning during their virtual queue return windows get priority boarding, the “Stand-by” line won’t move as quickly, and may pause for stretches as the returning virtual queuers are given precedence.
And at least back then, that wasn’t a problem… but as wait times today will tell you, things are about to get rough…
FastPass was initially launched in its official form – the familiar ticket-scanning kiosks, paper return tickets, and hour-long return windows – in 1999. At first, it was installed at just six attractions in all of Walt Disney World: Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Kali River Rapids, and the Lost Legend: Countdown to Extinction. (At Disneyland, it was tested with Space Mountain, then added to “it’s a small world holiday” and Indiana Jones Adventure.)
You can imagine that, in the early rollout of this system in 1999, the prospect of a “Virtual Queue” didn’t exist, and FastPass was not in the popular lexicon. To that end, many guests reported dissatisfaction with seeing others “line-jump” to gain priority access via a Disney-sanctioned process. A few physical fights are even known to have broken out in response to the percieved line cutting.
Others found the “return time” windows to impede on their plans for the day and reported that the system interfered with the day’s spontaneity and flow. (If only they could see us now!) But each park offering one, two, or three FastPass-enabled attractions (typically, its select highest-popularity-medium-capacity rides) allowed a good portion of each ride’s daily capacity to be filled by guests who didn’t have to wait in line – a truly groundbreaking idea! And while waiting for that one or two select attractions, they could ride all the rest!
In September 1999, the Orlando Sentinel ran a story reflecting on the first few months of FastPass, by chance capturing two quotes that are of monumental importance today:
[Guest] Stan Bonny, 61: “I think it’s a great idea. It should be on all the rides.”
[Vice President of Operations, Planning and Development at Walt Disney World] Dale Stafford: “If you did it everywhere, you wouldn’t have enough space in the park. Where would everyone go?”
“Where would everyone go?”
Frankly, this is where our full look into FastPass segues into a controversial editorial here on Theme Park Tourist: our hard-nosed look at why technically, Disney Parks Would Be Better Without FastPass. In it, we dissect the eight quantifiable ways FastPass probably hurts your vacation more than it helps, including the answer to that question. Where does everyone go when every major attraction (instead of just one or two select ones) offers FastPass? You already know the answer:
- They clog pathways, pulled through currents of people ambling around looking for something to do while waiting for their return time or their next available FastPass instead of E-Ticket queues being “sponges” like they’re meant to;
- They descend en masse on smaller, non-FastPass attractions whose queues can’t support the gargantuan groups, or
- They decide to join the Stand-by queue for attractions they don’t have a FastPass for (which would be fine except that if you remember, 70% of a ride’s capacity is set aside for FastPass, and returning FastPass riders thus get the lion’s share of boarding; thus, Stand-by lines are exactly that: slow-moving, secondary queues from which two or three people move for every seven or eight in the FastPass line.)
That last one is particularly important, because the first obvious evidence FastPass’s failings began in the 2010s. That’s when Disney announced an unprecedented project of a scale never quite seen before that would truly reinvent a Walt Disney World vacation.
Budgeting well over a billion dollars (and reportedly, maybe even double that), Disney World unveiled plans for MyMagic+, a somewhat ethereal technology rollout meant to fundamentally connect the resort as never before.
Suffice it to say that a major component of MyMagic+ was to increase guest satisfaction (and spending) by making a Disney World vacation as worry-free as possible, with the My Disney Experience app as a forward-facing, all-in-one interface for wrangling the many intertwined aspects of a Disney trip, incarnate in the MagicBand wearable. My Disney Experience centralizes trip planning and shifts every aspect of a vacation to be bookable from six months to 30 days in advance, making (an almost outrageous) level of pre-planning essential.
And for the first time in history, that included FastPass.
FastPass, Plussed?
In 2014, Walt Disney World’s paper FastPass machines were officially switched off. As part of the MyMagic+ initiative, reserving space in Disney Parks’ virtual queues moved to the My Disney Experience app… and to weeks before your trip. By nature of reading this on Theme Park Tourist, we assume you know that guests can make reservations beginning at 7:00 AM, 30 days prior to their trip (60 days for guests of Disney Resort Hotels). But intensive pre-planning and a new FastPass “digital ropedrop” weren’t the only aspects of FastPass to change.
Now factored into trip planning right alongside hotel, transportation, and dining reservations, FastPass would change from a day-of, “optional” service used expertly by frequent visitors and sporadically (or not at all) by many day guests into a democratized, widely-accessible, and nearly universally-adapted system.
Ideally, 100% of guests would now participate, and in order to make that happen, FastPass would need a few modifications that make all the difference:
- First, it needed a set number of FastPasses distributed equally. Reportedly, Disney’s internal research had indicated an optimum number of attractions guests needed to experience in order to feel their day was worthwhile… surprisingly, fewer than 10. As a result, the number of FastPasses available to each guest was set at three.
- Second, for every guest to reserve three “virtual queue” slots, the total capacity of FastPass needed raised. Since a ride’s capacity is its capacity, period, the only way to add more bookable FastPass “slots” would be to add FastPass to more attractions, including character meet-and-greets and shows, only further reducing spontaneity and making it easy for infrequent guests to get FastPass “wrong.”
- Third (and super important for this discussion), attractions that inherently do not need FastPass – attractions for which FastPass is literally counterproductive – got it. But yet again, a ride’s capacity is its capacity, period, so unfortunately, the byproduct of adding a FastPass line is the replacement of a “regular” line with a slow-moving Stand-by line. Rides like Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Spaceship Earth – rides able to deftly and easily handle guests – transformed their continuously-moving lines into gunked up Stand-by queues, squandering those ride’s efficiency and inflating wait times.
- Fourth, FastPass experiences at Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom are divided into fluid “tiers” such that guests can only pre-book one high-demand tier 1 experience per day, while their other two selections must be chosen from a list of less-demanded attractions, shows, and meet-and-greets.
In 1999, one or two major attractions at each park offered FastPass as a way to reserve a “slot” in the ride’s capacity. While waiting in the “virtual queue” for Space Mountain, you could hop on the Haunted Mansion, sail through Pirates, take a Jungle Cruise, and have a lunch break…
Trust us: that’s not the case today. Why? We’ll finish up our complaints and move to solutions on the next page.
Guests of Disney Parks were unhappy and wanted to spend less time waiting.
To spend less time waiting, Disney designed a “virtual queue” for popular attractions.
Access to a “virtual queue” gave guests time to spend money and made them happy.
To make guests happier, they democratized it with FastPass+.
To democratize it, they needed to distribute it equally (3 per person), raise its capacity, and limit access to the most popular attractions to ensure an optimized system.
And just like that, we’ve arrived at the parks we know them today.
The Failure of FastPass
Remember how we said in 1999, you could grab a FastPass for Space Mountain, then hop on board a high-capacity attraction like Haunted Mansion, Pirates, or Jungle Cruise to wait for your return time? And that is FastPass at its best; a true “virtual queue” for a high-popularity-medium-capacity attraction. And with just one or two FastPass-equipped attractions in a park, it works beautifully as a fun and exciting way to get to “wait less; ride more.”
Jump to today. In 2020, 25 attractions at Magic Kingdom offer FastPass. And remember that troubling truth we saw on the last page: the unintended byproduct of equipping an attraction with FastPass is that its regular line is, by design, replaced with a slow-moving Stand-by line. So today, let’s say you get a FastPass for Space Mountain, Peter Pan’s Flight, and to Meet Mickey. Sure, it’ll feel swell to zip through the FastPass lanes at those three attractions, bypassing guests in a standstill Stand-by line…
But, flashback:
[Guest] Stan Bonny, 61: “I think it’s a great idea. It should be on all the rides.”
[Vice President of Operations, Planning and Development at Walt Disney World] Dale Stafford: “If you did it everywhere, you wouldn’t have enough space in the park. Where would everyone go?”
Where would everyone go? We’re living it. While you wait for your Space Mountain return time, try the Haunted Mansion. Nope. By nature of also being a FastPass attraction, its once continuously-moving, highly-efficient, “people-eating” line has turned into a swampy, stagnant Stand-by line with an hour-long wait. Maybe a piratical jaunt will pass the time? Nope. Though it’s an immensely high-capacity ride, it, too, got FastPass, meaning if you didn’t snag one, you’re relegated to a backed up Stand-by line that moves about 30% as fast as it used to.
There’s a reason the high-capacity Omnimover-based Little Mermaid dark ride at Magic Kingdom can earn 45 minute waits while its identical twin at Disney California Adventure is routinely a walk-on. Yep… FastPass. (You’d see it again comparing the two resorts’ Winnie the Pooh rides or Midway Mania.)
But forget those headlining, anchor attractions… What about the smaller “asides;” the kinds of hidden gems and mid-level attractions that make Disney different from Universal? Sure, maybe every E-Ticket has a dreadful Stand-by line thanks to FastPass, but hey, that’s what “supporting” attractions are for! The idea in 1999 was literally that those attractions were meant to play that very role, “filling in” the day between FastPass virtual queues.
But take a look today. Magic Carpets of Aladdin? FastPass. Tomorrowland Speedway? FastPass. Enchanted Tales with Belle? FastPass. Mickey’s Philharmagic?!? FastPass! Even the Mad Tea Party was outfitted with FastPass, again ensuring that a majority of the ride’s capacity would go toward pre-booked FastPass reservations, leaving lines for even these smaller, time-filling attractions as… Stand-by.
The operational hourly capacity of Goofy’s Barnstormer, for example, maxes out at just over 300 people per hour, or 3,600 in a day. With 70% of its pitiful capacity set aside for FastPass reservations, barely 1,000 people per day (remember, out of Magic Kingdom’s 60,000) will even have the chance to ride without a FastPass the entire day.
The end result is that – if you’re lucky – you’ll get one, two, or even three FastPass reservations for popular attractions. But as a result of FastPass itself, every other wait you encounter will move more slowly and even take longer. And since rigid tiering of available experiences is a necessary evil of spreading out access to popular attractions, if you want to ride all three “tier 1” attractions at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you will have to wait in the swampy, barely-moving Stand-by line for two of them. Period. One FastPass, but two Stand-bys.
Now certainly, Disney’s industrial-organizational psychologists have done the evaluation signalling that frankly, people don’t care. Clearly, guests are charmed enough by their three guaranteed FastPass attractions and the joyous feeling of “skipping the line” three times that they don’t mind waiting the other six or seven times. So maybe all’s well that ends well. But it doesn’t have to be this way… Just imagine…
Fixing FastPass
Let’s get this straight: many people love FastPass. Again, how can you not adore the idea of “skipping the line,” for free? And though guests often criticize MyMagic+ for its overreliance on pre-planning, and though we lambasted FastPass for the many ways unknowing guests can do it “wrong,” the fact remains that it’s just plain cool to have a few rides “guaranteed” before you even step into the parks.
But technically, the mere existence of FastPass makes all the waits in the park longer than they would be otherwise, turning “Stand-by” lines into crawling, awful waits for attractions that can and should be able to process people quickly and efficiently while simultaneously gunking up smaller, less efficient attractions and limiting their availability and attractiveness to walk-up guests. And again, there’s no doubt that Disney’s internal surveying suggests: it’s worth it! People don’t mind! To most, those three FastPass “skips” are saving them from agonizing waits, nevermind that the waits altogether, across the park would be less if FastPass disappeared, more than making up for their saved time.
So how could FastPass be “fixed” without people feeling they’ve lost a service they hold dear? The answer is surprisingly simple: that FastPass should really only be offered on a small selection of each park’s biggest anchor attractions – say, Magic Kingdom’s “mountains” – and even then, only once waits crest 30 minutes should the feature become available.
That’s it. That would be a massive step toward fixing it. It would leave the queues for high capacity attractions like Pirates and Haunted Mansion moving smoothly and continuously as they’re designed to do; it would allow people to spend their wait for the return window on the Speedway, Dumbo, and Mad Tea Party – the role those attractions are well-suited to play.
Why isn’t it that easy? Because if everyone is promised three FastPasses, the park needs to offer enough FastPass “slots” to match, which is why so many attractions that don’t need FastPass, have it. Even though there’s no line to skip at Muppet*Vision or Philharmagic, the feeling that you’ve saved time is sometimes more important than actually saving it.
Waiting on the (Disney) World to change
Since 1999, FastPass has been an industry-charger.
Though Universal attempted to match the virtual queue system for a short time, its parts eventually went the way so many others have: complex, device-based, paid-for virtual queue programs, or straight-up, paid-for line-jumping. Disney invented, mastered, and (arguably) overexpanded FastPass in the course of two decades, but all the while, it remained deeply ingrained in guest’s ideas about and satisfaction with their Disney Parks vacation.
What does the future hold? For now, it seems like we’ve gotten about as close to full, broad adaptation of FastPass as is possible. And as many guests will tell you, it’s not working. Though the solutions are mathematically simple (scaling back on the number of attractions offering the service, or on the percentage of “slots” reserved for it), the problem itself isn’t.
Though technically FastPass makes your average time waiting in a day longer, it gives you three “high moments” that, psychologically, override that fact. Meanwhile, as the previous 4,000 words have shown, understanding why FastPass isn’t working requires (gulp) math. Which means that getting rid of or even reducing access to FastPass would be perceived as a reduction in guest value, likely translating into Facebook rage and “never coming back” threats.
So as FastPass expands and wait times inflate, Disney’s one-time solution for keeping guests out of lines has – ironically – become the system that forces them into lines… What does the future hold? Boarding Groups? Paid-for FastPass? Something else? We’ll be the first to let you know…
