FastPass was initially launched in its official form – the familiar ticket-scanning kiosks, paper return tickets, and hour-long return windows – in 1999. At first, it was installed at just six attractions in all of Walt Disney World: Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Kali River Rapids, and the Lost Legend: Countdown to Extinction. (At Disneyland, it was tested with Space Mountain, then added to “it’s a small world holiday” and Indiana Jones Adventure.)

You can imagine that, in the early rollout of this system in 1999, the prospect of a “Virtual Queue” didn’t exist, and FastPass was not in the popular lexicon. To that end, many guests reported dissatisfaction with seeing others “line-jump” to gain priority access via a Disney-sanctioned process. A few physical fights are even known to have broken out in response to the percieved line cutting.

Others found the “return time” windows to impede on their plans for the day and reported that the system interfered with the day’s spontaneity and flow. (If only they could see us now!) But each park offering one, two, or three FastPass-enabled attractions (typically, its select highest-popularity-medium-capacity rides) allowed a good portion of each ride’s daily capacity to be filled by guests who didn’t have to wait in line – a truly groundbreaking idea! And while waiting for that one or two select attractions, they could ride all the rest!

In September 1999, the Orlando Sentinel ran a story reflecting on the first few months of FastPass, by chance capturing two quotes that are of monumental importance today:

[Guest] Stan Bonny, 61: "I think it's a great idea. It should be on all the rides."

 

[Vice President of Operations, Planning and Development at Walt Disney World] Dale Stafford: "If you did it everywhere, you wouldn't have enough space in the park. Where would everyone go?"

“Where would everyone go?”

Frankly, this is where our full look into FastPass segues into a controversial editorial here on Theme Park Tourist: our hard-nosed look at why technically, Disney Parks Would Be Better Without FastPass. In it, we dissect the eight quantifiable ways FastPass probably hurts your vacation more than it helps, including the answer to that question. Where does everyone go when every major attraction (instead of just one or two select ones) offers FastPass? You already know the answer: 

• They clog pathways, pulled through currents of people ambling around looking for something to do while waiting for their return time or their next available FastPass instead of E-Ticket queues being "sponges" like they're meant to;
• They descend en masse on smaller, non-FastPass attractions whose queues can’t support the gargantuan groups, or
• They decide to join the Stand-by queue for attractions they don’t have a FastPass for (which would be fine except that if you remember, 70% of a ride’s capacity is set aside for FastPass, and returning FastPass riders thus get the lion’s share of boarding; thus, Stand-by lines are exactly that: slow-moving, secondary queues from which two or three people move for every seven or eight in the FastPass line.)

That last one is particularly important, because the first obvious evidence FastPass’s failings began in the 2010s. That’s when Disney announced an unprecedented project of a scale never quite seen before that would truly reinvent a Walt Disney World vacation.

Budgeting well over a billion dollars (and reportedly, maybe even double that), Disney World unveiled plans for MyMagic+, a somewhat ethereal technology rollout meant to fundamentally connect the resort as never before.

Suffice it to say that a major component of MyMagic+ was to increase guest satisfaction (and spending) by making a Disney World vacation as worry-free as possible, with the My Disney Experience app as a forward-facing, all-in-one interface for wrangling the many intertwined aspects of a Disney trip, incarnate in the MagicBand wearable. My Disney Experience centralizes trip planning and shifts every aspect of a vacation to be bookable from six months to 30 days in advance, making (an almost outrageous) level of pre-planning essential.

And for the first time in history, that included FastPass.

FastPass, Plussed?

In 2014, Walt Disney World’s paper FastPass machines were officially switched off. As part of the MyMagic+ initiative, reserving space in Disney Parks’ virtual queues moved to the My Disney Experience app… and to weeks before your trip. By nature of reading this on Theme Park Tourist, we assume you know that guests can make reservations beginning at 7:00 AM, 30 days prior to their trip (60 days for guests of Disney Resort Hotels). But intensive pre-planning and a new FastPass “digital ropedrop” weren’t the only aspects of FastPass to change.

Now factored into trip planning right alongside hotel, transportation, and dining reservations, FastPass would change from a day-of, “optional” service used expertly by frequent visitors and sporadically (or not at all) by many day guests into a democratized, widely-accessible, and nearly universally-adapted system. 

Ideally, 100% of guests would now participate, and in order to make that happen, FastPass would need a few modifications that make all the difference: 

• First, it needed a set number of FastPasses distributed equally. Reportedly, Disney’s internal research had indicated an optimum number of attractions guests needed to experience in order to feel their day was worthwhile… surprisingly, fewer than 10. As a result, the number of FastPasses available to each guest was set at three.
• Second, for every guest to reserve three “virtual queue” slots, the total capacity of FastPass needed raised. Since a ride’s capacity is its capacity, period, the only way to add more bookable FastPass “slots” would be to add FastPass to more attractions, including character meet-and-greets and shows, only further reducing spontaneity and making it easy for infrequent guests to get FastPass “wrong.” 

• Third (and super important for this discussion), attractions that inherently do not need FastPass - attractions for which FastPass is literally counterproductive - got it. But yet again, a ride’s capacity is its capacity, period, so unfortunately, the byproduct of adding a FastPass line is the replacement of a “regular” line with a slow-moving Stand-by line. Rides like Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Spaceship Earth - rides able to deftly and easily handle guests - transformed their continuously-moving lines into gunked up Stand-by queues, squandering those ride’s efficiency and inflating wait times.

• Fourth, FastPass experiences at Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom are divided into fluid “tiers” such that guests can only pre-book one high-demand tier 1 experience per day, while their other two selections must be chosen from a list of less-demanded attractions, shows, and meet-and-greets.

In 1999, one or two major attractions at each park offered FastPass as a way to reserve a “slot” in the ride’s capacity. While waiting in the “virtual queue” for Space Mountain, you could hop on the Haunted Mansion, sail through Pirates, take a Jungle Cruise, and have a lunch break...

Trust us: that's not the case today. Why? We’ll finish up our complaints and move to solutions on the next page.