Paid FP options coming soon to WDW?

[Krandor]

Summary of thread:

I want the system that works best for the way I go to the parks.

 

[jkh36619]

If they are charging 100 dollars per day per person people will sacrifice staying onsite to buy it. That 2800 is basically the difference in a on property moderate vs off property

Possibly. I still stand by my statement. $2800 isnt chump change.

 

[ellbell]

Possibly. I still stand by my statement. $2800 isnt chump change.

It definitely isn't but disney will lose money because people won't be spending money on food and rooms

 

[Eric Smith]

If they are charging 100 dollars per day per person people will sacrifice staying onsite to buy it. That 2800 is basically the difference in a on property moderate vs off property

It depends how necessary buying in to the system is. Looking at Universal's system, it's unnecessary to buy it in order to have a good time. Buying it will let you do everything in the parks in less days. It will depend what your goals are for your trip.

 

[Fido Chuckwagon]

It definitely isn't but disney will lose money because people won't be spending money on food and rooms

That $2,800 would be pure profit for disney.

 

[ellbell]

It depends how necessary buying in to the system is. Looking at Universal's system, it's unnecessary to buy it in order to have a good time. Buying it will let you do everything in the parks in less days. It will depend what your goals are for your trip.

I don't know about other people but when I fly down less days doesn't matter to me. I go to experience the parks and go multiple times. The one time person might go for less days but generally then Disney loses the money because people go elsewhere during the rest of their vacation. I don't believe people will be able to do without it in parks with few rides because the people who pay will ride multiple times.

 

[ellbell]

That $2,800 would be pure profit for disney.

Yep but then the one time people will do everything at Disney and then head to universal or sea world and spend their vacation money there instead of on Disney property

 

[WickstarRunner]

A family of 4 with a 7 day ticket would be $2800. I wouldn't call that a drop in the bucket but we are probably heading in that general direction.

You're assuming that most folks would purchase it for every day of their trip. Speaking for my family, we'd only get it (currently) for one Studios day and maybe one MK day.

 

[Spaceguy55]

I always thought FP+ was not about making everybody happy but was intended to sell more rooms, tickets and Dining plans...so at some point may be back

 

[Fido Chuckwagon]

Yep but then the one time people will do everything at Disney and then head to universal or sea world and spend their vacation money there instead of on Disney property

Long term I'm sure you're right. Disney only cares about quarterly profits right now though.

 

[Jrb1979]

Yep but then the one time people will do everything at Disney and then head to universal or sea world and spend their vacation money there instead of on Disney property

Maybe but maybe not. For example me when I visit a park I buy the skip the line pass so I can have multiple rides on attractions. Last time I was at Universal I rode the Mummy 14 times in the week I was there.

Who wouldn't want to have multiple rides on the high thrilling PeopleMover

 

[chasgeese]

Before the pandemic, insiders on other boards were hinting at a paid system being launched at some point. Then the closures and Disney announcing no FP upon reopening. That is all the information we’ve had for the last year. It’s a message board...with no concrete information, people are going to speculate and give their opinions.

No one is generalizing here anyway. People who actually measure wait times at the parks for a living, collecting and analyzing data, have written extensively on the negative impact on FP+ on standby waits. Like with math and everything. This isn’t a debatable subject, it’s demonstrable with hard facts. I loved it from a selfish standpoint because I knew how to work it, but if you didn’t? Oof.

More than that, even the people for whom this broken system worked (the minority of guests who are parks obsessives on the internet, aka me and half the people on these boards), it didn’t work 100% of the time. No matter how many rolling FPs you can get in a day, eventually you’re going to end up in a standby line at some point, being held while 30 people in the FP+ queue get waved through. It contributed to the mad rush at rope drop because people in the know understood there was a very small window to get headliners in before standby waits built to untenable lengths. Local APs and offsite guests, even onsite guests on shorter trips, basically couldn’t ride FoP or Slinky Dog except at rope drop or park close in standby. Not to mention leading up to the closures, even if you knew all the tricks, refreshing was getting harder and harder to do, because of increased crowds competing for FPs, and methods getting publicized. Folks who go regularly had been talking about that for a while before the closures, even.

The system as it was just was not working except for a small minority of people, and was growing untenable even for them, and that’s not a great way to run a theme park resort.

I fully agree that FP only works for a minority, and even then it wasn’t perfect. Also, I always found the “well it least it’s free, unlike UO, so if it didn’t work for you it was your fault” argument to be kind of BS. There were all kinds of ways it wasn’t really “free,” whether it was punishing to those who couldn’t afford/didn’t want to pay the on-site/good neighbor premium, or people who could afford the premium but only because they worked the types of jobs where planning a trip several months in advance wasn’t feasible, or locals/AP holders who just wanted to go to one park for a day and go home.

The problem is how does Disney fix it? Switching to something like the paid/included with certain hotels EP’s at UO really isn’t feasible. There are way too many Deluxe rooms for that to work (although they already have been treating the monorail resorts as sort of an “extra Deluxe” situation for a while based on their pricing). Also, Disney would have to price it much higher than UO (like VIP tour prices per day with an add-on fee if you had a PH pass) or it would either sell out or dilute the benefit because so many people would get it. At the same time, while MaxPass has been successful at DLR, they have a much higher percentage of local visitors and it only works there because no one can book FP in advance and most people who use it are only spending a day there.

I think we could see something like a tiered system of advance FP+, based on resort (like 3 for deluxe/DVC, 2 for moderates, 1 for values and good neighbor), with some sort of capacity-controlled option to buy 1-3 more per day. That could push people to pay up for more expensive resorts while also giving Disney more ability to limit the amount of pre-reserved FP’s available. I could also see them doing a tiered system granting maybe 1 anytime FP per day to deluxe (or creating a super-deluxe category for CL/monorail guests) and everyone else that had access to pre-reserved FP gets the ability to reserve one FP in advance per day. Of course I could be completely wrong, but while I don’t think the UO model is feasible for Disney, I think they are going to try to monetize FP more should they bring it back.

 

[chasgeese]

It definitely isn't but disney will lose money because people won't be spending money on food and rooms

Yeah, given what they charge for some of the Deluxes, this could lead to people who would otherwise staying longer cutting back on how many days they actually go and Disney would lose the money they would have otherwise spent on rooms (which they make a mint on), dining, and other various purchases during that longer stay.

That $2,800 would be pure profit for disney.

Not really for the reasons I mention above. A lot of the guests that could afford that amount probably spend a lot per day at WDW, it would come at the cost to Disney of those guests spending less time on property and thus spending less overall compared to not having such a system.

 

[SusanDK]

I fully agree that FP only works for a minority, and even then it wasn’t perfect.

I think we could see something like a tiered system of advance FP+, based on resort (like 3 for deluxe/DVC, 2 for moderates, 1 for values and good neighbor), with some sort of capacity-controlled option to buy 1-3 more per day. That could push people to pay up for more expensive resorts while also giving Disney more ability to limit the amount of pre-reserved FP’s available. I could also see them doing a tiered system granting maybe 1 anytime FP per day to deluxe (or creating a super-deluxe category for CL/monorail guests) and everyone else that had access to pre-reserved FP gets the ability to reserve one FP in advance per day.

I don't agree that FP+ (the currently suspended version) only works for a minority. At least it was possible to get an FP regardless of whether you did advance planning, visited spontaneously, stayed onsite or offsite, arrived early in the day or late in the day, etc. All categories of visitors had a chance to get FP's.

Your suggestion focuses only on resort guests. How is that not limiting it to a specific minority?

 

[TiggerBouncy]

Make it like every other park in the country and charge for it. On-top of that get rid of the time based system. Charge $100 per person per day and it would limit how many buy it so it shouldn't affect standby wait times too much

My concern is like everything Disney does, they will oversell it and it will be just as bad if not worse - since now you are paying.

 

[TiggerBouncy]

The thing is.... no matter how you put it, FP+ didn't work for at least half (if not more) of the people. Disney is many things, but I don't count stupid among their traits. They may be a very slow moving beast, but they do inevitably move. They have known for a long time that FP+ was problematic, and it's only one cog in the ever-churning wheel of them trying to find better ways to manage lines.

Clearly, they are aware it's not functioning as intended. So I do not expect it to return in it's most recent iteration. What their plan is, no one but them knows. But I would be shocked if they didn't try at a bare minimum some tweaks.

 

[DavidHobart]

I don't agree that FP+ (the currently suspended version) only works for a minority. At least it was possible to get an FP regardless of whether you did advance planning, visited spontaneously, stayed onsite or offsite, arrived early in the day or late in the day, etc. All categories of visitors had a chance to get FP's.

Your suggestion focuses only on resort guests. How is that not limiting it to a specific minority?

There's also the point that when ~70% of capacity goes to FP+, how much does one care about the 30% of capacity in standby that sees increases in waits?

I totally feel for anyone so helpless that they spend their day (after arriving at 11a) solely in standby, and wish they had planned better, just as I marvel at people who go backpacking without maps or compasses or water filters. There are some things you just have to plan for

 

[MickeyWaffles]

I totally feel for anyone so helpless that they spend their day (after arriving at 11a) solely in standby, and wish they had planned better, just as I marvel at people who go backpacking without maps or compasses or water filters. There are some things you just have to plan for

I understand what you’re saying, but there are ways Disney could tweak the system so that rope dropping isn’t necessary, you don’t have to book headlining FP 2 months in advance, etc. I think modified system of Disneyland’s MaxPass could work well.

I mean think of all the local APs who didn’t have even half a chance at getting headliner FP 7 days in advance. Only if they got lucky. Think of all the people who planned long weekend trips of 3 or 4 days (staying on site with 60 day FP privileges) and didn’t have a chance to get SDD, FOP or SDMT because those FP weren’t available until days 5 or 6. It is a hugely flawed system and even if many people planned, the system could still limit them. Many people were stuck with outrageous standby lines because they gave out waaaay too many FP for free to resort guests. I am one of those on-site resort guests who stayed long enough to take advantage of the FP system, but I just think there can be a better way to make it all more efficient.

 

[Fido Chuckwagon]

Think of all the people who planned long weekend trips of 3 or 4 days (staying on site with 60 day FP privileges) and didn’t have a chance to get SDD, FOP or SDMT

7DMT was not hard to get at 60 days, and was even possible at 50 days. The only things that were hard to get were SDD & FOP. Not a reason to scrap th whole system.

 

[MickeyWaffles]

7DMT was not hard to get at 60 days, and was even possible at 50 days. The only things that were hard to get were SDD & FOP. Not a reason to scrap th whole system.

Maybe so, but SDMT was difficult to get before 60+4 on our 2016 and 2017 visits. We always have 10-12 people in our group.