Standing in the sunset glow of Batuu… alone; gazing up at fireworks from a Main Street that’s… empty; a family perfectly sized to capture that Splash Mountain photo… with no pesky strangers in the log. Anyone who’s made the mistake of mentioning “Disney World” in earshot of a smart speaker or so much as Googled the possibility will quickly find their browser filled with these rosy images of a Disney Parks vacation. In the alternate reality Walt Disney World depicted there, there’s an unspoken guarantee: your family will find a Disney trip as frictionless as all those ABC sitcom families in the ‘90s did.
Of course, anyone who’s actually been to Central Florida will tell you that those dreamy plans quickly evaporate upon arriving on Walt Disney World soil. There, reality checks you fast. Pathways surging with people; restaurant reservations sold out six months in advance; multi-hour queues in parks notoriously short on rides; infrastructure from the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s all intermingling with an army of transportation options, two dozen hotels, water parks; shopping districts; conventioneers…
You can imagine why, in the 2010s, it stood to reason that “The Most Magical Place on Earth” was losing a bit of its sleight of hand. That’s what MyMagic+ was going to solve. A billion dollar undertaking, Disney World’s all-at-once modernization was meant to add ease and simplicity back into a visit; to make Disney World as frictionless as promised; to leave guests effortlessly traversing (and spending money) across Disney’s campus. Did it work? Well…
From our lofty position in 2021 and an increasingly cemented look at what the near, post-pandemic future might hold for Disney World, it stands to reason that much of the technology Disney launched less than a decade ago is already at the end of its life cycle. What will the future hold? Let’s imagine by beginning in the past…
The rise of waiting
The story of Disney’s billion dollar MyMagic+ initiative has a must-mention prologue two decades before its implementation: the 1990s. Thanks to the arrival of fresh new leadership in the mid-’80s, Disney made a serious pivot from the decades of stagnation that had followed Walt’s death. At the studios, the Disney Renaissance (beginning with 1989’s The Little Mermaid) turned the Mouse House into a pop culture juggernaut, churning out the definitive stories of a generation for a full decade without one bust in the bunch.
Disney’s theme parks, then, found a different kind of reawakening. Under that new leadership, Disneyland and Disney World returned to an M.O. Walt himself had championed – containing the stories and characters that mattered to modern audiences – but did so with an added twist. Michael Eisner’s “Ride the Movies” era invited not just movie-themed thrill rides, but movies outside of Disney’s catalogue. As our dedicated in-depth histories of each show, Captain EO, STAR TOURS, Indiana Jones Adventure, Alien Encounter, and The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror were massive, groundbreaking, astounding, and, of course, really, really popular.
So is it any surprise that the ‘90s were also the era where waiting became a hallmark of a Walt Disney World vacation? The cinematic E-Tickets Disney launched in the 1990s were built for an onslaught of tourism, often containing lengthy but detailed queue space meant to soak up crowds (and keep them entertained while they waited). Both demand for and capacity supply within Disney Parks grew in the era, but the latter came much more slowly.
The “solution”? In 1999, Disney launched FastPass – a highly integrated and technological virtual queueing system. As a matter of fact, we dove into the complete story of FastPass (including its origin, its inner workings, and why mathematically Disney Parks would be better without it) in our Declassified Disasters: FastPass feature – a good prologue to today’s tale.
After all, FastPass quickly became a definitive feature of a Disney Parks visit. Suddenly, trips pivoted around FastPass runners seeking out paper return times, optimizing waits, and “gamifying” vacation, with in-the-know fans outwitting naive tourists. All the while, FastPass made “stand-by” wait times balloon and clogged the queues of mid-sized rides, turning walk-ons into wait-fors. Still demand increased…
Modern makeovers
The New Millennium was, in many ways, a crescendo for theme parks in the era (given that the September 11 attacks in 2001 would swiftly cool tourism soon after). Within a year of 2000, two theme parks would make the leap into multi-park resorts: Universal Studios Florida (joined by 1999’s Islands of Adventure to become Universal Orlando Resort) and Disneyland (adding 2001’s Declassified Disaster: Disney’s California Adventure to become the Disneyland Resort). That’s important, because both made their evolutions all at once.
To that end, Universal Orlando and Disneyland Resort probably have more in common than most of us tend to admit. Both are urban resorts that are extraordinarily compact, hemmed in by bordering roads and highways. Both deposit arriving guests into massive, purpose-built parking garages; both funnel them into modern, master-planned shopping districts; both have guests ultimately stand between two theme parks and head toward whichever icon draws them first. Both are also miniscule enough to be served by intra-resort transit (be it monorails or water taxis) that connect to hotels that also came online during their transitions, as well as garden walking paths, man-made waterways, and other “intentional,” planned features.
That’s markedly different from Walt Disney World, isn’t it? For better or worse, Disney World is cobbled together from many different design eras, architectural visions, strategic plans, and literal decades. Take Disney World’s shopping district, which “sprung up” in the 1970s as a mid-century shopping village, got the cinematic Pleasure Island in the ’80s, added the neon West Side filled with ’90s mainstays, then was partially masked beneath the classy “Disney Springs” banner in the 2010s, perfectly encapsulating society’s modern outdoor fashion mall tastes. At every twist and turn, one-off additions, changes, exclusions, and strategic plans have shaped and reshaped it, grafting new onto old.
For that matter, take 192 to World Drive and you’ll pass interchanges, hotels, and attractions whose development spans fifty years and nearly as many ideas for what Disney World should be. From ESPN Wide World of Sports on the right and All-Star Movies Resort on the left; under a distinctly-90s welcome sign now cooled from its purple grandeur with 2020s royal blue; past the spires of Galaxy’s Edge and the boxy beige showbuilding of Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster; Michael Graves’ staggering Swan and Dolphin to the contemporary Swan Reserve; offramps to the ‘80s grandeur of EPCOT and finally to the ‘70s blacktop parking lot of Magic Kingdom. Talk about a time warp.
A lot of Disney World’s piecemeal evolution became apparent after the all-at-once modern makeovers of Universal Orlando and Disneyland Resort. Today, it’s easy to imagine that first-time guests may wonder aloud why Disney chose to build its theme parks so far from one another in Florida… It makes us wonder, too: Given the benefit of hindsight, would Disney World leaders wish they’d established space for multiple parks around the Seven Seas Lagoon? Might they have created a resort interior free of cars and open to pedestrians like Disneyland? One with a more intentional “hotel district” like Tokyo Disney? A single core from which all theme parks, water parks, and hotels can be accessed like Universal Orlando?
Look, Disney World began as the “Vacation Kingdom of the World.” Fifty years later, it still retains the title. It does not feel harmonious, pedestrian-friendly, or master-planned… because, of course, it wasn’t. In the five decades since its opening, its sprawling (and sometimes random) growth and evolution has seen it pass through many leadership lenses. It has been reimagined; grown; shrunk. It has been brave. It has been meek. There are parts of Disney World that will always betray their origin in the ‘70s; ‘80s; ‘90s; 2000s. It’s not a harmonious whole. And that’s okay! Disney World’s grandeur, growth, and history is part of its identity.
But in the 2000s, leadership started to get serious about modernizing its facility’s technological backbone; its unseen infrastructure. And that’s when FastPass was determined to not be enough…
Friction
By 2005, the “Happiest Homecoming on Earth” promotion invited guests from around the world to return to Disney Resorts in the midst of their own turnaround. Despite the Homecoming technically celebrating Disneyland’s 50th Anniversary, it was Disney World who got the gifts – one from each resort (“Cinderellabration” from Tokyo, the Lost Legend: Soarin’ from Anaheim; “Lights, Motors, Action” from Paris, and the Modern Marvel: Expedition Everest as a gift to itself). The message: sure we went through our own late-’90s dark period, compounded by a tourism decline after 2001, but Disney World is ready for you again.
Arriving guests in the mid-2000s, though, surely recognized that Disney World was increasingly a place of friction. Disney’s internal polling discovered that some families split up entirely and criss-crossed the park more than 20 times in an attempt to reduce wait times. Queues from the ‘70s and ‘80s were overrun with guests seeking “stand-by” refuge while awaiting FastPass return times; park paths designed for audiences of those decades were suddenly brimming with 21st century crowds; infrastructure like restrooms and restaurants raced to expand for growing crowds. And frankly, the era of expensive E-Tickets to absorb them was well-and-truly over thanks to the languishing last years of Michael Eisner’s stay as CEO.
According to FastCompany’s Austin Car, Disney’s evaluation found that “certain key metrics, including guests’ ‘intent to return,’ were dropping; around half of first-time attendees signaled they likely would not come back because of long lines, high ticket costs, and other park pain points.” Disney Board Member Steve Jobs reportedly explained to assembled executives, “doing what you’ve been doing and believing that will remain the model for the next 20 years is not right.”
In 2008, Chairman of Disney Parks Jay Rasulo, Parks President Al Weiss, and Disney World President Megan Crofton used a preliminary report on the resort’s guests to form an exploratory team: Senior Vice President Andy Schwalb, Imagineering leaders Eric Jacobson and Kevin Rice, Parks Vice President Jim MacPhee, and Vice President of Business Development John Padgett. The “Fab Five” assembled in spring 2008 with the lofty goal of reinventing the Disney Parks experience, and particularly, keeping Walt Disney World relevant for a new, technological generation. Their goal was, of course, to keep guests traveling to, staying on, and spending at Walt Disney World property by reducing friction.
Technology
Though it may not seem long ago to you and I, consider just how different our world was when the “Fab Five” sat down together in February 2008 to reimagine Walt Disney World. For one thing, the iPhone was less than a year old. The App Store wouldn’t exist until later that summer, when the iPhone 3G introduced the ability to download new programs created by third party developers. For most Americans, smartphones were a daydream. The rest of us were happy enough with our T-Mobile Sidekicks, Motorola Razors, or LG Chocolates.
In fact, it’s reported that by the end of 2008, 84% of U.S. adults had a cell phone, but only 15% of those reported owning a “smartphone.”
If our phones could access the Internet at all, it was by way of expensive plans that charged by the Gigabyte… worth it, of course, to check for new comments on MySpace (which still had more monthly traffic than that new site, Facebook). Public Wifi was practically unheard of (Disney World wouldn’t get its own until 2012). And though the iPhone was a luxurious product, no one would have imagined that reflective black rectangles without keyboards would become the de facto image of the phone in quick order.
So is it any surprise that – seeking a widely adaptable tech solution that Disney itself could cheaply manufacture and a majority of guests could intuitively operate – Disney’s team needed to look beyond guests’ phones. Allegedly spurred by one of those pseudo-scientific “magnetic bracelets” in a SkyMall catalogue, President of Business Development John Padgett had a breakthrough: a low-tech wearable that could solve all of Disney World’s tech issues…
The xBand
Taking up residence in the Miniaturized Exploration Technologies laboratory at Epcot (eh hem… The vacated remains of the Lost Legend: Body Wars) Disney’s team got to work on developing a bracelet equipped with an RFID tag. RFID (Radio-frequency identification) is a communication technology consisting of a tiny radio transponder – smaller than a grain of rice – which, when triggered by a nearby RFID reader’s electromagnetic pulse, transmits an identifying number back to the reciever.
RFID can work in two ways. Passive tags have no internal power source whatsoever, merely being activated and energized by the RFID reader’s interrogating radio waves. Active tags are battery powered and thus can transmit their own signals over great distances (up to football field length), actively relaying data outward to be read. Hmm…
Now here was an answer to Disney World’s friction. Rather than carrying a park ticket, room key, cash, credit card, FastPass return slips, and PhotoPass card, a centralized, randomized ID could unite all of Disney’s dissimilar services and systems and associate them with one guest in the form of a low-cost, low-power wearable. The xBand was born. According to FastCompany, upon testing out a jerry-rigged Velcro mock-up inside the Body Wars lab, Iger reportedly said, “This little thing is going to be special. If I gave you more money, could I have it faster?” Disney signed on the San Francisco-based design company Frog to mastermind the creation of the xBand’s final form – the MagicBand – and began to parse out the industrial-organizational psychology that would make it worthwhile.
You can imagine how, in theory, the MagicBand would be a both a smooth complement to – and yet a major disruptor of – business-as-usual at Walt Disney World. And at least early on, its ambitious possibilities appeared endless.
If a MagicBand’s internal, practically-powerless RFID chip could be associated with a guest’s unique, numerical identifier tag, then short-range, passive RFID receivers could be activated with a “tap,” turning the wearable into a guest’s park ticket, room key, reservation, FastPass, and identifier. Research has clearly shown that paying via touchless technology ups guest spending (since it removes the psychological pain of a cash transaction or even a card swipe-and-sign, keeping the ‘total’ out of sight and out of mind).
But the powers of the MagicBand went well beyond petty cash. Long range, active RFID sensors installed throughout Disney’s theme parks could wirelessly, digitally track crowd flow. Theoretically, by tracking anonymized MagicBands, Disney could gain immediate, live readings of pinch points or overcrowding. In practice, that data could allow an army of traffic controllers to descend at a moment’s notice, or even lead to the instantaneous dispatching of a mini-show or character greeting across the park to balance crowd levels. In that way, MagicBand data could theoretically help schedule Disney World’s 80,000 Cast Members into the 240,000 shifts they inhabit both efficiently and intelligently.
And perhaps more importantly for guests, the MagicBand could literally revolutionize the parks’ forward-facing elements. Imagine tapping your band to gain entry to a park and having the Cast Member at the turnstile hand you a birthday button then and there… Imagine hugging a talking Mickey, who asks how your trip from Ohio was, or how you liked riding Jungle Cruise earlier that morning… Imagine collecting your on-ride photos without so much as a touch, merely having them auto-assigned to you after your ride… Imagine a giant postcard in the first scene of “it’s a small world” welcoming you by name; a screen on your Magical Express return to the airport playing “best of” moments from your trip…
The MagicBand would serve as the visible centerpiece of Disney’s resort-wide reimagining. It was, quite literally, the key… and the ticket… and the credit card. Yet it was still only one piece of a much larger revolution.
MyMagic+
In January 2010, Jay Rasulo – one of the founding executives behind Disney’s Next Generation Experience team – was swapped out with Tom Staggs (above) to become the CFO of the company. Staggs, in turn, took over Disney’s theme parks. (The seemingly random swap was thought to be Iger’s attempt to cross-train the two men, who were considered the top contenders to replace him as CEO.)
Tom Staggs stepped into the NGE project well into development, when its base of operations had moved to an empty soundstage at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. There, a massive “living blueprint” mock-up demonstrated the system’s workflow, from a guest’s initial reservation to their receipt of MagicBands prior to their trip; how Disney’s Magical Express would usher them into the company’s “walled garden” in Florida with MagicBands on-hand, ready to serve as their hotel room keys and ride reservations. James Cameron (of Titanic and AVATAR fame) and Pixar’s John Lasseter reportedly swung by the Studios to see the system in action.
With Iger’s approval, NGE moved forward. In February 2011, Disney approved a $1 billion spend on the project, giving NGE about the same budget as Disney’s five-year overhaul of Disney California Adventure. It was hoped that the new infrastructure roll-out meant to modernize a Walt Disney Vacation would be in place in 12 months’ time, with a February 2012 launch.
Parts of the project seeped through. When New Fantasyland’s Be Our Guest Restaurant opened in November 2012, food was “magically” delivered by RFID location. That December, a TRON-esque redux of the Lost Legend: Test Track saw RFID cards (later, MagicBands) carry guests’ custom car designs from pre-show to ride to post-show. Then there were the (today, much-maligned) interactive queues, peppering Disney’s dullest legacy lines with splashy games meant to make waiting bearable – at least a part of the next-gen initiative.
But the larger MyMagic+ system wasn’t fully online until 2013, when a Disney Parks Blog post by Staggs himself finally pulled back the curtain. That year, much of that billion dollars (and reportedly, much more) was spent swapping out the resort’s 28,000 hotel room doors with RFID door handles (120 a day for eight months without hampering occupancy), retrofitting 283 park entry turnstiles and tens of thousands of cash registers with RFID readers, equipping the San Francisco-sized property with 30 million square feet of WiFi, building hundreds of FastPass+ RFID touch point poles, training 70,000 Cast Members equipped with 6,000 RFID-enables wireless devices, and adding dozens of guest-accessible computer stations throughout the four theme parks…
The MyMagic+ initiative was “officially” launched on December 1, 2013 – nearly two years after its planned debut. By then, it’s estimated that 56% of Americans had a smartphone – 120 million more people than had when the NGE first launched.
MyMagic+ had been Disney’s billion-dollar gamble on the future. It was a massive infrastructure project exceeding the cost of many of Disney’s theme park builds! And when it launched, it really did revolutionize Disney World… but, maybe not in the way Disney had hoped. On the last page, we’ll dissect the remnants of this tech infrastructure to see what remains, and how that darn “great, big, beautiful tomorrow” yet again trounced Disney’s attempts to forecast the future.
If MyMagic+ officially launched in late 2013, then we now stand less than a decade from the debut of Disney’s industry-resetting infrastructure system. To look back now at Disney’s billion-dollar investment is to see it equally as a much-needed and still-used system and a pretty massive failure.
To understand why, it’s important to know that Disney’s quest to modernize was well-intended, but MyMagic+ isn’t the vast technological system it appears to be; it’s an umbrella under which a half-dozen smaller-but-still-massive systems reside. Park tickets, hotel reservations, FastPass picks, Magical Express times, restaurant reservations, Dining Plan allowances, and PhotoPass collections are all separately managed systems that, through the MyMagic+ initiative, became intertwined by way of the My Disney Experience app and its web-based counterpart.
The takeaway? Disney’s 21st century technological solution is really yet another piecemeal fusing of many eras, visions, and systems, just like Disney Springs or World Drive. And now, looking forward to looking back at a world post-pandemic, it’s easy to see that Disney World’s operations have been fundamentally changed by COVID, by a decade of technological advances, and by changing priorities once more. One-by-one, most of the revolutions brought about by MyMagic+ have faltered. Here are the two core tenets that MyMagic+ was built on, and our short explanation for why it’s time has come… with or without COVID.
1. Pre-planning (FastPass+ & Dining Reservations)
There’s no doubt that for much of its modern history, Walt Disney World has been about the least relaxing “vacation” you can choose. If MyMagic+’s quest was to make a Disney vacation back into a vacation – that is, effortless, relaxing, and smooth – it succeeded in part… but the law of conservation of stress says that to simplify your time in Orlando, you’ve got to put that planning somewhere.
For Disney guests, it came in the form of outrageous pre-planning. Planning a visit for October? If you want to eat at any of Disney World’s most sought-after restaurants, you’d better reserve it (and by extension, the park you’ll be at that day) in April; secure your FastPass picks in August or you’ll spend a lot of time in stagnant “stand-by” queues. Incarnate via the My Disney Experience app, planning a Walt Disney World vacation became a job in its own right, requiring 6 AM Eastern Time wake-up calls at least twice in the six months’ lead-up to arrival.
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, Disney famously disabled dining reservations and FastPass+ altogether, reverting the resort to, y’know, just, like, lines. So yes, you don’t get three “freebie” skips… but every line you do wait in moves quickly and continuously. Similarly, dining reservations eventually returned to Disney World mid-pandemic, but with a much more reasonable (yet still largely unreasonable) 60 days out timeline.
So as we approach a full year of seeing Disney Parks without FastPass, is it possible the veil has been lifted? Have folks recognized that the feeling of skipping the line on one major E-Ticket isn’t worth the reality of waiting in stalled stand-by queues in every other anchor attraction for the whole rest of the day? We’ll see… Realistically, it seems likely that Disney will use the “hard reset” of the pandemic to fundamentally change FastPass for good…
2. Personalization (MagicBands)
Ah, MagicBands. The heart and soul of MyMagic+. Remember, MagicBands were Disney’s Swiss army knife of technology; the inexpensive and accessorizable tool that would turn the somewhat disagreeable job of data collection into an experience guests would pay for. MagicBands made Walt Disney World’s largely-invisible upgrade a tangible, visible thing. They indeed offered the assurance of a frictionless transaction, be it at a park’s entrance, a FastPass queue, or a cash register. And (if you ignore Mom’s studious vacation research and reserving six months earlier) receiving a box of MagicBands hand-selected and labeled for each family member was the definitive start of a Disney World trip for the better part of a decade.
And while Disney’s billion-dollar investment in RFID across its resort was a bold step forward, it arguably wasn’t the best one. Frankly, MyMagic+ probably deserves to fall into the same category as EPCOT’s Future World as having suffered from the dreaded “Tomorrowland Problem,” dooming any of Disney’s attempts to actually, accurately, scientifically predict the technologies of the future.
When MyMagic+ was imagined, “apps” didn’t exist and just 18% of Americans had a smartphone. When it launched, a majority of Americans did. It’s telling that Shanghai Disneyland – well into design when MyMagic+ launched – opened in 2016 with no MagicBands at all, instead relying on smartphones to do all the same jobs day-of. (Again, no overplanning.)
Today, smartphone use in the U.S. has reached well over 80%, meaning very, very, very few guests who visit don’t have someone in their party with access to the guest-facing My Disney Experience app. And given the U.S. has easily reached a similar saturation of smartphones as China, that leaves the MagicBand a curious “middle man” process between, say, selecting a FastPass and redeeming it. Holding up a barcode on a phone works just as quickly… and doesn’t cost Disney’s theme park division the price of manufacturing, shipping, or an internal company “green tax.”
All of that might be forgiven if MagicBands had lived up to their potential. One can imagine a world where touchpoints would activate gags around Toontown, customize character encounters, or create those much-hoped-for special moments on rides. And while we got hints of those magical moments of personalization a MagicBand can create (see again Be Our Guest Restaurant and Test Track), no other real, significant uses of the band in Disney Parks stuck around. Austin Car wrote of its integration into the then-leading project at Imagineering, Pandora: The World of AVATAR:
I ask where MyMagic+ will influence Avatar Land, and Rohde turns my attention to the model, which is the size of three Ping-Pong tables. He swirls his finger around a tiny section. This little spot is where MyMagic+ will be put to use, in “the most intensive, interactive moments.” What about the area’s two big attractions? “Less so,” he adds.
Largely, MyMagic+ and the MagicBand became invisible technology. In their place, focus shifted to (you guessed it) smartphones, where the Play Disney Parks app became the de facto way of interacting with queue minigames, best embodied by its use in STAR WARS: Galaxy’s Edge, where the app transforms into an in-universe “Data Pad.” Speaking of which, RFID beacons throughout Batuu allow custom-built Droids to interact with the land (based on their extra-purchase personality chips) but otherwise, you won’t find “tap points” in the land.
Put simply: Disney invested big in MagicBands at a time when smartphones weren’t a reliable requisite for visiting guests. Every other Disney Resort skipped the MagicBands entirely and went digital with reservations, scanning barcodes rather than bracelets. It’s worked just as well, so in a smartphone-infused society, the MagicBands have served their purpose. On June 19, 2020 (again, during the pandemic), Disney announced that MagicBands would cease to be sent to on-site guests beginning January 1, 2021. While they’re still available for purchase as collectibles (and no doubt, Disney hopes you’ll continue to collect them), your smartphone alone can handle park tickets, FastPass picks, hotel room keys, reservations, and more via the My Disney Experience app.
In that way, Disney’s tech upgrade was still needed and still in use, but the revolutionary wearable meant to propel the property forward ended up holding it back.
Circle One: Plus or Minus
Disney’s billion dollar upgrade to their Florida resort, in retrospect, was neither the reinvention executives hoped, nor the failure fans feared. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Walt Disney World did need the kind of infrastructural upgrade MyMagic+ provided! For all of its shortcomings, the initiative did see the coming of the Information Age. It occurred to Disney well before anyone else that guests would be booking online and not with a travel agent. Seeing that change on the horizon, MyMagic+ standardized and organized vacation planning and provided a technology – the RFID-enabled MagicBand – to bridge the gap to smartphones.
Despite its massive cost and how much appeared to be riding on it, MyMagic+ never came to Disneyland, nor to any other Disney Resort… at least, not in name. But the advances made at Disney World’s flagship property certainly influenced choices elsewhere. Were it not for FastPass+, Disneyland would not offer “MaxPass” – its upcharge service that allows for on-app FastPass reservations rather than paper return tickets, but keeps such reservations to the day-of rather than Disney World’s preposterous pre-planning. And so it goes for Tokyo, Paris, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, where Disney World’s successes and failures in technology have been noted and influenced projects.
No one would be foolish enough to be thankful for the COVID-19 pandemic that ravaged the planet throughout 2020 and into 2021 (and likely, well beyond). That said, the monumental shift in operations at Walt Disney World has also revealed the monumental flaws of MyMagic+…. and given Disney World license to change it.
No more MagicBands. No more Magical Express. No more “walled garden.” No more Dining Plans. No more FastPass. No more Annual Passes (forever in Disneyland, and temporarily in Disney World)… Once seen as essential and immutable elements of a Walt Disney World vacation, these tried-and-true features have been given the rare chance for a hard reset; for Disney to reimagine trip-planning, reservations, timelines, experiences, capacity, efficiency, and more.
MyMagic+ was meant to reimagine Disney World and keep its infrastructure reliable and relevant for a new generation. Did it work? For a time. But now, the pandemic has provided the opportunity to start from scratch, and with that new perspective, the core tenents of this billion dollar project – its focus on pre-planning and its promise of personalization – look like the elements that didn’t quite work. In their place, it’s smartphones that’ll carry the legacy forward. Altogether, we can be thankful for Disney’s risky but required billion-dollar reimagining of “how” its Florida resort operates while also understanding why almost no one associated with it still works at the Walt Disney Company.
