No More Stand-By Line for Toy Story Mania

I'm selling you magic.

Disney magic.

I think one of the major issue with the lines at the WDW Studios park is that Toy Story Mania! is one of two rides currently operating without a height restriction. That and the Great Movie Ride are the only mechanical rides a child under 40 inches can do. Meanwhile, if you look at Disney California Adventure Toy Story Mania! (TSM!), which has the same two tracks layout and split station for disabled guests, there are no fast passes offered.

The wait times for TSM! in California are a lot lower than in Florida, usually 25 (slow days) to 60 minutes (days when the park has HUGE lines). Beside the obvious lack of Fast Pass, the other explanation is simply this: Disney California Adventure over 4 times the number of mechanical attractions that the Florida Studios has. Add to that a few more legit family headliners, like Soarin' and Radiator Springs Racers and TSM! is not a focal point of the park.

Instead of building that third track in the empty and cavernous soundstage 1, maybe building another high quality family attraction would have helped?

P.S: Tokyo Disney Sea Toy Story Mania! is a 2 to 3 wait 99% of the year with fast pass gone in an hour. The ride is the same, but the waiting line is in a Coney Island Trolley Park.

I tend to agree... it's not much of a ride park. Most of what you can do there is a show. I mean, the car stunt show can literally hold nearly a third of the crowd on a busy day. It's huge. And silly as it is, a lot of attractions offer Fastpass that don't do anything other than semi-commit you to something at a given time. We've had passes for Festival of The Lion King and Nemo at AK, and they serve no purpose. It's just two different lines streaming into the same building at the same time.

*walking by innocently, whistling to myself*

And silly as it is, a lot of attractions offer Fastpass that don't do anything other than semi-commit you to something at a given time. We've had passes for Festival of The Lion King and Nemo at AK, and they serve no purpose.

So they're offering something guests don't need?

Hmm.

*keeps walking*

(winky)

Get out of my head Gonch. Same thought exactly before I even read your response.

OK, so maybe you're not getting it. The sentiment by guests in this situation is, "I wasted a Fastpass for something that didn't benefit me? I'll never do that again." I've seen it countless times.

Oh, they'll do it...again and again.

Dance, puppets, dance!

Mwhahahaha!

People often spend money on things that don't benefit them.

I work in a theater box office, and at -- literally -- every show, we have customers who paid Ticketmaster an extra fee to have tickets emailed to them to print at home so they could avoid the box office, who come to the box office to trade in those tickets for "real" tickets. (I occasionally take joy in politely pointing this out.)

It seems to me that with Fastpass, among other things, Disney is selling a perceived benefit rather than an actual benefit: Disney promotes Fastpass, free or paid, as a way to avoid standing on line. Many, especially infrequent visitors, buy in out of ignorance.

Lord Gonchar said:

on a single ride (or ride half) it works just fine

If you are referring to Space, that's not how it works. The merge point can send both Standby and FP guests to either Alpha or Omega---and the standby queue is absolutely used to fill holes in the FP line.

I was...sorta. I really was referring to all the instances in this thread where it was mentioned by others - Space Mountain, Soarin', TSMM (presumably in the future), and so on.

Anyone have any idea how they did it on TSMM for this test? Really would have loved to read something from someone that observed it in action.

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/10/11/disneys-fastpass-b...stand.aspx

I swear I don't write for Motley Fool under the psyeudonym, "Daniel Kline"

The ideas presented there really look back to something more similar to to PPR than the RAD model. Except Pay-Per-Ride is really morphing into Pay-Per-Reservation.

Your admission includes a set number of reservations (and I see no reason not to vary this based on how you visit - less for off-property visitors, more for staying at a higher level hotel, etc) with additional opportunities to 'upgrade' your admission to allow more rides.

The way it's presented in the article, the whole reason for going to a more reservation-based way of doing things (or mostly-reserved vacations) is to monetize the FastPass system. It's not a lost opportunity to monetize, but rather it's the catalyst for doing so.

The article is a bunch of speculation. The reality is that the system was always built with premium offerings in mind, and I've heard it suggested that they could simply turn it on if they wanted to. However, it's hard to say if it's their outright intention to do so at this point. A ton of focus has been shifted to other up-charge and VIP experiences, in part, the theory goes, because they don't interfere with the existing core experience for everyone else, and the margins are insane. This is everything from the "adventure" tours at Animal Kingdom to the tours at The Land, the train/monorail maintenance house, the Frozen VIP stuff at DHS, the after-hours parties for Epcot and AK's Lion King, etc. These are routinely selling out.

These aren't unique to Disney, either. We had a number of offerings at SEAS in the same category, and UO has been doing them for years. I'm just surprised at how many Disney offers compared to just two or three years ago.

We did the Illuminations Sparkling Dessert Party a few weeks ago. At $49 each, it seemed a little steep, but it was totally worth it. Flambéed doughnuts and bottomless bubbly, and the best viewing of the fireworks from anywhere.

Lord Gonchar said:

I was...sorta. I really was referring to all the instances in this thread where it was mentioned by others - Space Mountain, Soarin', TSMM (presumably in the future), and so on.

Anyone have any idea how they did it on TSMM for this test? Really would have loved to read something from someone that observed it in action.

Space and Soarin' both can and do mix FP and Standby at merge into either left or right sides. It's not the case that one side is exclusively FP, and the other exclusively standby. That mixing allows the merge CM to use the standby queue as the "spring" to deal with unexpected fluctuations in ride capacity and/or FP return flow.

Reading between the lines on the tweets/posts about TSMM's test, it looks like they were trying to use day-of releases of FP+ to do the same thing with an FP-only line. Reports suggest that success was mixed---several incidents of backups interspersed with periods spent sending empty cars for a lack of riders.

Thinking about this a little bit with my queuing theory/control systems hat on, getting it even mostly right could be tricky. There are a number of independent variables that you can't control (downtime, slow guests in load/unload, etc.) and the time scales of the things you can control---new releases of return times and the width of arrival windows---might be too long to effectively control the system. Rule of thumb is that you need the controlled variables to be on a smaller time scale as the uncontrolled ones, but I don't immediately see how you can get there from here.

I can understand some people would like the opportunity to schedule a time for rides in advance but he idea that I would have to schedule a ride in advance to be able to even consider riding it at all just seems weird. I suppose going to Disney is not like just going to an amusement park in general.

Brian Noble said:

Space and Soarin' both can and do mix FP and Standby at merge into either left or right sides.

Reading between the lines on the tweets/posts about TSMM's test, it looks like they were trying to use day-of releases of FP+ to do the same thing with an FP-only line.

Exactly as I guessed they would handle a reservation-only situation.

It's Disney. If anyone can dial it in and pull it off, Disney can.

Right. The problem is, I'm not sure it is possible. The only lever they have---release new return times X minutes into the future---might not actually work, even for X == zero, unless they also start monkeying with the width of the return window. I suspect an hour is just too long for what they are trying to accomplish, because it gives newly-added guests too much flexibility about when to come back. Paris uses a half hour resort-wide, but even that seems iffy given the timescales at which they have to adjust.

Worse, they also need a mechanism to keep the flow of potential new guests high. That's going to be hard unless you have enough people constantly checking their phones to see if a slot suddenly opens up.

Compare that to the system they have now: an inexhaustible supply of ready-to-ride guests that they can add to the FP-flow on a minute-by-minute basis, as well as a "second half" of the ride that can accept guests from the FP line if it backs up. And, if you watch the CM at merge do what they do, they do make these sorts of fine-grained balancing decisions on a time scale of a minute to several minutes. From all appearances, they need to do this to avoid either unduly long FP return waits or empty vehicles on the FP side.

Again, this is going back to a bunch of control systems stuff that I haven't done in several years, but the basics are fairly simple. Just going off the cuff, the only way I can see this working is by sending text alerts to guests who just happen to be standing near the attraction with an "instant" use-it-right-now-or-lose-it "surprise" FP+ when you need them to show up.

Edited to add: ultimately, it sure seems simpler to figure out how to cross-route guests between the two "sides" of TSMM, assuming that's what Soundstage One is going to be.

Not sure I can really add anything to that.

But yeah, tighter windows along with creative thinking for day-of and on-the-fly FastPasses could get them pretty close I'd bet.

And while it might be blashphemous to say in the room where "Think of the capacity!" is the equivalent of the real world's "Think of the children!" but how close is good enough?

Like if they could get within 5% of running full capacity, is that acceptable?

That's the equivalent of averaging 1.5 empty seats per train on a standard B&M. Some partks wish they ran that, I'm sure. Granted, Disney doesn't do anything half-assed, but...

This would have been a great Coasterbuzz Podcast episode.

Maybe it could still be a podcast episode? ;~P

If you consider this thread the transcript of the podcast episode, then it already was.