Tiered Pricing At Theme Parks

I've recently heard that Universal Studios theme park in California is going to start up tiered pricing for tickets into the park.  For those unfamiliar with this concept, it's basically how hotels and airlines work right now all over the world.  Rather than have a fixed price for admission into the park, Universal will change the price depending on the number of people expected to visit that day.  Notionally you'll pay more for a park when it's busy, and less when it's not.

This idea makes a lot of people nervous, and it makes me nervous too, however I think it makes me nervous for different reasons than most.  Most reactions online seem to be nervous about this because they worry that the parks will be too expensive during the times when they can visit.  Many people don't have the luxury of choosing when they can travel.  Either because of school or work schedules, many people must travel during certain periods of the year.  This is often the times when these theme parks will likely be at their highest prices.  So people assume that they won't be able to afford to go because the prices will push them out.

This is an logical reaction to this, however if you investigate this program at Universal you'll see that they'll have a ticket price cap.  This cap will likely be close to the current ticket price, with discount prices for slower days.  The parks are not going to price themselves out of existence, the goal is to get more people to come, not less.  This is not why I'm nervous about the idea of tiered ticket prices.

The reason I'm nervous come from theme park bonuses.  In recent years Disney has made it their goal to keep their parks busy all year long.  Their solution has been to offer extras during the slow seasons.  In some cases it's discounts such as the "free dining", but more often they offer things like the Food and Wine Festival, Star Wars Weekend, and Flower and Garden Festival.  Rather than discounting prices, they offer incentives, and some pretty great ones at that.

My fear is that with the addition of tiered pricing, Disney will stop offering incentives, such as food festivals, to bring people into the parks.  Likely the cheaper tickets will do this for them.  Already Star Wars Weekends have been cut, and free dinning has been modified.  Running these incentives can be expensive and require a lot of planning, lowering ticket prices is simple and cheaper in some cases.

Theme parks around the world are working to one up each other in order to get people into their parks.  This competition is good for the theme park goer, because it forces theme parks to up their game.  Tiered pricing is simple for the management yet adds nothing to the park experience.  It's a slippery slope to focus on lower prices instead of quality, if this keeps up high end theme parks will quickly go the way of the carnival.

A Quicker Trip

During a recent discussion about our plan to visit Disney World, we discovered that our timing for getting there and getting back wasn’t going to work with the time we have.  We had to make a choice, do we cut back on the Disney experience, or do we cut back on the getting there experience.  It wasn’t an easy choice, and a middle ground didn’t seem logical at all.

Our original plan was to take 4 or more days to get to and from the parks from Canada.  This would allow us to visit friends, stop at historical places, and generally meander a little between our house and the parks.  This would have probably worked a few years ago when we originally made this plan; however now it seems like our timing is a little tighter.

We spent one evening discussing what we wanted out of this trip, what was the key to an “epic” Disney adventure.  We eventually settled on the idea that Disney was the heart of this adventure, and we shouldn’t rush that at all. So our journey down and back up will have to be much more rushed.  This decision also came from the fact that we are going to want to de-stress a little when we go on this trip (for various reasons) and jumping from hotel to hotel is not a way to do that.  While we’ll have to do a bit of hotel jumping getting to and from the parks, we want to be sure we have a good long break at Disney to calm our nerves.

We also don’t want to rush the parks.  There is a lot to see and do, and we want to relax and take in all of the details.  While a road trip through the US is a lot of fun, it’s not the focus of this particular trip.  As a side note, we’ve also started to plan our cross the US road trip in the years to come; it might involve a stop at Disneyland too.

So now we have to decide where we are going to stop on this adventure.  However, now are stops are going to be on the way, with no side trips.  We’ll still stop and smell the flowers when we can, but we’ll no longer go out hunting for a particular bud.

Star Wars Is Here To Stay!

A few weeks back I posted about some of the new experiences that would not have been at Disney World had we gone when we originally planned.  One of the experiences was that of the Star Wars additions to Hollywood Studios.  While the finished Star Wars land will not be ready when we go, Disney has added several new Star Wars additions to tide people over.  Originally they were scheduled to be taken out in the spring, but Disney just announced that they're extending theses special exhibits well into the time we plan on going.

These exhibits include the Star Wars Launch Bay, a special exhibit with props and interactive fun things to do all about the new movies.  Special character meet and greets, including new and old characters.  As well as a special fireworks show, that looks pretty awesome.  In general it seems like they've put a Star Wars overlay over a section of the park, and they're keeping it for a while longer (in some cases it's staying forever).

My guess is that they put the "limited time" label on these additions just in case the movie bombed.  This way if there wasn't any interest they could switch everything out without having to commit.  However the movie did far from poorly at the theater, and it seems like they're actually adding new things regularly to these interim Star Wars attractions.  I've been keeping up with what's going on and it seems that new character meet and greets are being added, and the cruise ships are also adding more and more Star Wars material.

The only thing that I'm not so keen on, is the change they made to Star Wars the adventure continues.  Originally the attraction would have a random story line that changed every time you rode it. Now they have a "guarantee" that you'll see the new addition every time.  This never really appealed to me, even though the new scene looks pretty cool.  I like the random idea more, and it seems like the only people that would enjoy the guarantee are regular visitors.

My hope is that even more is added before we go. Although Allison may get Star Wars'ed out, I can't get enough of it.

Planning With Friends

While writing this blog I've realized that my information has really only been coming from one source, the Internet.  Any scholar would tell you that sourcing only one source is a bad idea; if that source is the Internet it's an even worse idea.  While there are a few "peer reviewed" historical and technical accounts of Disney World, frankly many of those are a little dry for my liking.  So our only option for a secondary source is to find an expert(s), and talk to them ourselves.

There are a couple of problems when it comes to finding experts.  First of all we're on the other side of the world right now, I could safely say that most of the people around us have never even been to the parks once, let alone have any hands on knowledge.  Secondly, we don't want to find someone at random because they don't know us, and frankly this blog is about our adventures in Disney World.  Then one day, during an improv meet up (I'm full of surprises), we discovered that two of our improv buddies used to live in Florida.  Better still they go back regularly, and they love Disney World.

So a plan was made, brunch with Allison's famous pancakes, and discussions about Disney World.  In this afternoon we went over lots of information.  Allison, who's been making a matrix of our timing in the parks based on reservations and extra magic hours, gave out copies of this matrix to our guests.  They were very impressed.  We went through some of our expectations and ideas for the trip.  For the most part we seem to have a pretty solid plan, however our friends had some tweaks that seem to improve our plans a fair bit.  Here are a few things that they've suggested that we're going to work into our plan:

Allison and I love miniature golf (we hate regular sized golf), and we want to try out the options at Disney World.  We had decided to do the Winter Summer Land course when we visit Blizzard Beach, and that was considered to be a good plan.  We also wanted to try our Fantasia Gardens at some point as well, but for this we were warned to avoid it on hot days, as there's no shade at all.

Throughout this planning, we've been trying to figure out if we wanted to do the Hoop-Dee-Doo Musical Revue or the Spirit of Aloha show at the Polynesian.  Our friends suggested that the Hoop-Dee-Doo show is not to be missed.  While they admitted that they haven't been to the Spirit of Aloha show in a while, so they don't really remember if it was good or not.  They were very enthusiastic about the Hoop-Dee-Doo show.

Our plan at this point has us possibly ending up at Disney World during part of the Food and Wine show at Epcot.  I've heard great things about this event, but I've also heard that it can be insanely busy.  We've been wondering whether or not we should avoid Food and Wine, to keep away from the crowds, or indulge in Food and Wine because it's that awesome.  Apparently it's that awesome.

Finally, the one piece of advice that really inspired me was that we shouldn't avoid leaving the Disney bubble.  We were encouraged to explore a few things outside of Disney World while we're in the area.  We're still not sure about that yet, however we'll have a car, so we may just venture out a little.