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Online Check-In and luggage transfer

 aloha75, Flickr

Image: aloha75, Flickr (license)

One of the great conveniences of a Walt Disney World vacation is online check-in and Disney’s Magical Express. Guests can opt to have their luggage transferred directly from their flight to their room, and they can choose to skip the front desk and have their room number texted to them during the day.

Because your MagicBand and luggage tags are shipped to you in advance, you’re able to have more time on your vacation to yourself. 

Why is this only a Disney thing? Many people book their hotels months in advance for travel beyond the World, and there’s no reason why the major hotel brands couldn’t do the same thing.

Imagine landing in Los Angeles in the morning, having your hotel pick up your bags at the airport, while you go out and enjoy the city during your day. Maybe you visit a museum or see a baseball game, then head straight to your hotel room only to find your bags waiting for you. 

MyDisneyExperience

 themeparktourist, Flickr

But Disney’s most consumer-ready tech solution is clearly MyDisneyExperience. The app/data revolution that took over Walt Disney World has such wide-reaching implications on the operation of the resort, that it’s surprising to see other entities not try the same thing. It’s great innovation isn’t just in its data-gathering, but in what data it collects.

MyDisneyExperience gives management a greater sense of how many guests intend to be in each park on a given day, and where — because of their FastPass+ reservations — they intend to be at key moments. That allows Disney to make more informed decisions on staffing and change those decisions on a minute-to-minute basis to react to guests. 

This would be a game-changing technology in many other fields. Public transit systems could better predict surges and proactively attempt to mitigate them rather than reactively try to manage them. Airports could more accurately predict which security gates will be the busiest at any given time of day and staff them accordingly. 

But that is just the tip of the iceberg. We have actually seen some businesses try to take some aspects from MyDisneyExperience and apply them to our businesses. AMC recently launched A-List, a movie subscription service — but it’s key feature is that you can make three movie reservations at a time, not unlike FastPass+. Those reservations give you better access to hit movies, while also giving AMC advance notice of which times to staff up. 

That is just the beginning though, and this only scratches the surface of Disney’s technological advancements. Hopefully they filter down to the real world sometime soon, and make our daily lives a bit more magical in the process. 

 
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