Waiting woes

The immersive queues the “Ride the Movies” era produced were smartly designed to hold the massive crowds descending on the reinvented Disney Parks during this era, and to entertain them while they waited. But of course, this is where we begin to run into trouble. We’ll simplify it to three major problems:

1. Though Disney’s newest generation of attractions was capable of supporting the descending crowds, those crowds also fell upon the infrastructure of older rides, smashing into the underbuilt queues of the park’s earlier era; lines neither built to handle the massive groups of waiting guests, nor to entertain them.
2. With the growth in attendance far outpacing the Parks’ growth in capacity, ballooning waits for both new and classic attractions yielded a major downturn in guest satisfaction as guests struggled to access rides and reported feeling dissatisfied with the number of experiences they had relative to the (steeply growing) price of admission. Attendance fell sharply in 1997 and 1998 at all of Disney’s U.S. parks...
3. As wait times grew, each queue became a giant sponge, collecting and holding onto thousands and thousands of people at any given time… While that may be aggravating for guests, it was equally frustrating for executives. After all, any moment spent in a queue (even a well-dressed one) was a lost opportunity to buy a snack, souvenir, or meal.

There was no doubt - a solution was needed. Disney had a vested interest in figuring out how to reduce wait times at Disney Parks. 

Solution 1: Add capacity

Sure, the most immediately obvious choice would simply be to raise the park’s capacity through new attractions. Capacity is perhaps the most impactful (but least obvious) aspect of a Disney Parks visit; it literally determines pretty much everything about your day. That’s why it’s one of Disney’s four Keys to Guest Service (coming after safety, courtesy, and show). 

And trust us - the math here matters. After all, each attraction has a given theoretical hourly capacity (a sort of “best-case” number of guests who can experience it in an hour under ideal, “friction-free” conditions, possible practically only in simulations). For example, Space Mountain’s theoretical hourly capacity is reportedly about 2,000 people per hour – a simple function of the ride's per-vehicle capacity and possible dispatches-per-hour.

But much more important than that manufacturer-supplied number is the more reasonable operational hourly capacity (accounting for the realities of operation, like an empty seat here and there, a momentary pause to help a guest board, etc.)... for Space Mountain, reportedly closer to 1,800 people per hour. Think about what that really means: if you step into Space Mountain’s queue as the 1,801st guest, you would expect a wait of 1 hour. If you’re 901st in line, mathematically that’d be about a 30 minute wait. Easy! Simple! So far... 

Expanded over a 12-hour operating day, that gives Space Mountain a realistic daily throughput of over 21,000 guests. Put another way, Space Mountain has 21,000 available “slots” that can be filled - an impressive number, even if it’s nowhere near the 60,000 guests on average who visit Magic Kingdom each day. 

And mathematically, it really is that easy: add up the daily throughput of all attractions, divide by the number of guests in the park, and you arrive at the number of attractions guests will experience – on average – in a day. Stated more intuitively: spreading the same amount of guests around more available “slots” is a good thing. If you add more capacity, the number of average attractions a guest will experience inches up, closer and closer to another whole number. 

The bad news? Adding attractions – especially good, high-capacity, sought-after ones whose capacity will be fully utilized – is expensive and time consuming. So while adding capacity is an obvious surefire solution to cut lines, it’s not shareholder friendly, which pretty much eliminates it as a practical first response to wait times rising.

Solution 2: Raise prices

At the end of the day, Disney Parks maintain a careful balance when it comes to price. The idea, of course, is to balance guest experience, operations, and profit - all’s fair in capitalism, including purposefully pricing out income groups.

Except that in the 1990s, Disney Parks were still seen as a growing enterprise within the Walt Disney Company. In the midst of the Parks’ radical reintroduction to pop culture, price increases during the decade were already among the largest jumps Disney Parks admission has ever seen counting for inflation. And Disney Parks attendance was plummeting, remember, and not because they’d priced out a bottom financial tier. Instead, because of the guest services aspect throwing the balance out of whack. 

We’ve seen this “solution” a lot over the last few decades, haven’t we? And it makes sense - raising prices maximizes Disney’s revenue and theoretically raises the floor, limiting the number of guests who can practically afford to visit. While it doesn’t mesh well with Disney’s egalitarian brand or magical message, raising prices should cut attendance… except when it doesn’t, which, as many fans will tell you, it hasn’t. Largely, price increases have been far too gradual (a few dollars more each year) to elicit sticker shock rejections, and Annual Pass payment plans have made mid-tier passes a little too within reach.

Solution 3: Wait less

Well, duh. Of course “waiting less” would be a solution to reinvigorate guests and to make them feel that they’d seen and done more at Disney Parks. But how?

Enter Disney electrical engineer Greg Hale, who initially began to develop the concept of a new kind of line altogether. It began when select guests were chosen to participate in some evaluation at the still-new Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Guest groups were given journals and asked to document their day - what they ate, bought, and rode; the time they entered a queue, got on the ride, and finished the ride; their feelings and accomplishments, and their satisfaction with the day. 

But here’s the difference: a test group was provided with a special pass that would allow them to do things a bit differently.

Those guests would be able to visit the entrance to Kilimanjaro Safaris - the park’s undisputed anchor attraction - and, rather than entering the queue, would be provided with a return time equal to the ride’s current wait. For example, guests arriving at 10:00 to a 45 minute wait would be given instructions to return at 10:45.

That’s the birth of the virtual queue - guests aren’t “line-jumping” at all; they’re waiting just like everyone else… just… not in the line. Which means that during that 45 minute wait, they could explore animal experiences, ride other attractions or, of course, eat and shop. After their wait, they’d be invited to enter the ride through its exit and gain priority boarding.

From that simple experiment, FastPass was born. In action, FastPass takes a ride’s hourly capacity - its available “slots” for that hour - and sets aside a large portion (typically around 70%) to be pre-booked (initially, the day-of). The “regular” line became the Stand-by line - as its name implies, an option for guests who are ineligible for a FastPass (usually due to already having one outstanding at the time) and are willing to accept secondary boarding precedence. 

But remember, a ride’s capacity is its capacity, period. And this is important, because it’s the crux of what would become the major fault of FastPass: Space Mountain can still only process 1,800 people per hour, but with FastPass, 1,260 of those “slots” are already spoken for by guests out in the rest of the park. So now, though you may have only 540 people physically standing in front of you in the “Stand-by” line, the wait time will still display as an hour, accounting for the 1,260 people in the virtual queue. And since those returning during their virtual queue return windows get priority boarding, the “Stand-by” line won’t move as quickly, and may pause for stretches as the returning virtual queuers are given precedence. 

And at least back then, that wasn’t a problem… but as wait times today will tell you, things are about to get rough…