Disney Genie service deeply unpopular among fans before it has launched

I wound up at Hollywood Studios tonight after work. I'm genuinely surprised at how packed the place is. Trips to UO and SeaWorld in the past week alone have been a downright pleasure compared to the scene at Studios tonight.

I was hoping for a reasonable wait to get a ride on Rockin Roller Coaster and/or Tower of Terror. Both have sardine packed queues I'm used to seeing in more peak season settings.

For everyone (myself included) complaining about reservations and lack of passes for sale, people are definitely finding their way into these parks.

The Star Wars factor is here to stay.

Meh, wait until later. Simon and I were there late a few weekends ago, and despite the posted wait times, nothing was actually that long.

Rick_UK said:

Thanks for your insight. The whole wake up at seven and starting mapping out your day doesn't appeal to me at all.

That’s why I quit going to those over crowded parks. Too much scheduling. And now it’s an upcharge. Disney has people brainwashed that these parks are fun. They are stressful.

I wouldn't go that far. Obsessive planning started long before there was any queue management at all.

And I still think many of the Disney diehards have as much fun with the Excel spreadsheets and making color coded hourly itineraries as they do experiencing the actual parks.

There's also a lot of middle ground. Every vacation I've ever taken has required some degree of planning and Disney is no different. I've spent far more time planning our trips to NYC than I have any Disney trip. I'm interested in these planning free trips that are so romanticized around here.

I've increasingly done travel that doesn't have much in the way of planning. Last summer in Salt Lake/Park City I think the only thing I booked in advance was the Summer Olympic Bobsled, and that was a one-off. My last two National Park trips (RMNP, GSMNP) were as simple as "Which hike am I doing tomorrow morning?" the night before---though that was before RMNP required reservations for vehicle access to the main trailheads. When we go to Hawaii we often book 3-4 events and a handful of meals over the course of 2-3 weeks, but if we just hung out on the beach/hiking trails and hit up the roadside food trucks, that'd be just a fine way to spend time.

I both enjoy planning a trip and also just winging it. I fly to Atlanta today for a quick trip and I still don't know how I am getting to my destination when I land nor have I booked a hotel yet. Talk about not planning!

New York is a great example of where I feel I need to plan things. At the very least, there are shows I wanna see, some of which sell out well in advance. I need to be comfortable with knowing the subway routes, too. But beyond that I can wing some things.

I'm starting to get frustrated with Disney though. Simon and I spent about five hours there this evening, and let's start with the WiFi that doesn't work half the time, and the crashtastic app. You have to basically use it for everything, and if you have a phone with a weak battery, you don't make it through the day. Everyone is walking around looking down at their phones now because they have to. It took me three tries to make a mobile food order.

Here's where I think the system is failing though. Genie/LL requires you to make choices about what attractions to do, and does things like graph wait time data. Do you really want to do that on vacation? I think the result is that most people just get in long lines because they believe the only alternative is buying LL. So standby lines are mostly miserable, and those people are not on the midways doing stuff or spending money.

FP+ led people to manage the crowds. At the very least you would start your day with three rides, and the system gave you incentives to do less popular stuff. The rides have the same capacity, but before, less people were in physical queues, even if they waited the same amount.

The fan site entitlement nonsense is silly, but I think there's legitimate criticism that the new system does not make for a better experience. If you do pay the upgrades, at best you may have an equivalent to the old system, but if everyone is special, then no one is special. I've observed some really long LL lines.

I was very much a "wait and see" on Genie+ for a while, and I still think with the right implementation (see MaxPass) it would be mostly fine, but apparently they didn't get the right implementation. I don't know if the I.T. is still working out the bugs, if FL is that much more complicated than CA, if the introduction of vanilla Genie and ILL's messed up the system, or what. But this seems strictly worse than the MaxPass implementation in basically every possible dimension. We'll probably give it a try at some point, but we're in no hurry to do so until things get smoother and I'm confident that my $15/person/day will actually result in a good experience.

Apparently the system was down in a big way yesterday, at the same time that AWS experienced a major outage, so it's implied that it's running on AWS. That means it's running in a single region, which seems a little amateur for Disney.

Knowing what I know about the MDX/Fastpass+ launch toward the end of my WDW Cast Member time, doing this all in a shockingly amateur and inefficient way would not surprise me in the least.

This just in... "everyone" is "done" with Disney. 😆

I've gone on record to say that I'm not crazy about the changes, but I'm not convinced that it's causing people to stop going.

That piece is clickbait-y for sure. But the perception of a lesser product for a higher than ever cost is causing more hardcore Disney fans than usual to question things like future trips or Annual Pass purchases. I don't think it will make a difference, but I do think all of the changes and their perceived devaluing of the product will cause some folks to at least take a break.

I'm sure that true, but hard core fans aren't "everyone." We don't renew until April, and if the price doesn't rise significantly before then, I'm sure we'll re-up. The value curve hasn't broken yet, and honestly if somehow the overall attendance does decrease, that would be a win.

I know I was on here a few weeks ago absolutely sold on the idea of not renewing. I've had the weekday pass for a few years now. If I renew at the current price point, the monthly payment actually goes down a few dollars a month. And I just found out starting in January I'll have almost every Friday off again since we are going back to 7 day a week operations. So my "no way in hell will I renew" has turned into a "well it's actually a few dollars cheaper a month and the new Guardians coaster opens this year, so let me think about it."

Topical.

Jeff said:

I'm sure that true, but hard core fans aren't "everyone."

This hits on what I've thought all along and that All Ears piece drives it home. The average person taking their once-a-year/every-few-years Disney trip doesn't get bent out of shape about many of the items on their list. They go expecting it to be expensive, to wait in line, and for everything to not be the same as it was the last time they went.

And someone correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't there the same sort of talk about switching from old FP to FP+/My Magic/whatever you want to call it? Walt spinning in his grave, it's too complicated, no one wants to do that much planning, etc.

Yeah, FP+ was also the end of days. The only real issues I had with it was that you realistically couldn't get passes to certain things as a passholder (Flight of Passage, Seven Dwarfs), but it mostly worked pretty well once they figured out how to tap people in quickly. It was really just electronic version of what was already happening. This new thing though basically throws broad crowd optimization out the window, which is my issue with it. The fan sites seem to concentrate on the money.