Magic Key sale fiasco shows Disney has work to do
How do you spend most of your time when visiting Disneyland or other theme parks? Is it going on rides, watching shows, shopping, eating?
I suspect that if you kept track, the answer would be none of those. The real answer would be “waiting in lines.”
When you have more people wanting to do something than the thing can handle, a line is the necessary and inevitable result. The ways that Disneyland, Universal, Six Flags and other parks handle their lines goes a long way toward determining how happy their visitors feel at the end of the day.
My worst wait time experience happened this month, and it wasn’t even in the park. Like thousands of Disneyland fans, I logged on to Disney’s website at 9 a.m. Jan. 10 to buy a Magic Key annual pass. Disney tends to do a good job of estimating wait times in parks, but the only estimate that Disney could offer for this online queue was “more than an hour.”
It turned out to be four hours. Some people posted on social media that they had to wait more than six hours for a chance to buy their Magic Key. Once I was through the queue, I selected my $845 pass and clicked to sign up for Disney’s payment plan. That’s when the website hung up with a “Please wait while we complete your request” notice for nearly an hour before I gave up and resigned myself to having to go back and start over.
Before my turn in the queue came up again, Disney sold out the pass level I wanted. A day waiting, wasted.
OK, it wasn’t entirely wasted. While I waited for Disneyland’s website to complete my request, I opened a new browser window and bought a Universal Studios Hollywood annual pass in less than five minutes.
I understand and support Disneyland’s decision to limit sales of its Magic Keys. The park never should return to the pre-pandemic circumstances when annual passholders filled the park to beyond anyone’s comfort level. But why not just maintain a waiting list for future Magic Key sales rather than making people endure daylong waits online? And if Disney must make people wait in an online queue, it owes them a website that will not crash when they are trying to pay.
The best queues are first come, first served. There is no lottery to determine one’s place in line, nor any glitch that denies services to some people after they wait. Disney developed industry-leading standards for managing large crowds in physical spaces. But as Disney turns to virtual solutions to manage its crowds, many Disney fans — including me — are feeling more frustrated than ever.
Yes, I can keep buying daily tickets to the parks. Fans who lose the virtual queue lottery for popular attractions can buy individual Lightning Lane passes. But when a company makes money from selling people a way out of a miserable experience the company has created, that company has a perverse incentive to keep creating miserable experiences.
That’s not the type of company that anyone wants to see Disney become.