Patience is Passe: Disney Is Spending Millions to Reduce Resort Ride Wait Times

As the summer vacation season draws to a close, some of its major beneficiaries are taking stock of what they have learned. And it is confirming what legions of retailers have experienced the hard way: convenience rules.

Mobile phones and the mindset they have engendered are shortening consumers already hair-trigger tempers. No one wants to wait. For anything. But especially not in the hot sun of an amusement park with bored kids in tow.

Disney had pioneered the science of crowd management. It understood that to make more money it had to move more people through more experiences more quickly. Entertainment, sales, looping lines and a host of other innovations remade the entertainment industry approach to coddling customers.

It turns out that was the easy stuff, the proverbial low-hanging fruit of reducing consumer frustration. It has now brought in the engineers with stop watches to identify cuts of a few seconds which, when added up over the course of a few days spent at one of the company's parks, can result in hours redeployed to more enjoyable pursuits.

This is not just the obsessive-compulsive behavior of a famously detail-oriented enterprise. People's ability to design and manage their own experiences via computer and mobile phone may well be reducing their tolerance for for anything they perceive as less than optimal. It may not be fair, or reasonable, or even realistic, but at the margins Disney and others are gathering, they can not afford to be complacent. Disruptive innovation is a couple of buttons away. JL

The Palm Beach Post reports :

As with all magic, it's what you don't see that pulls off the trick.
A visitor to Walt Disney World would have no idea about the park's multimillion dollar project to shorten ride wait times.

"We want our guests to have a hassle-free experience. Let's face it, waiting in line is a hassle," said Brian Britain, vice-president of park operations for Disney World.

So when Space Mountain was closed, crews sped up the vehicles at the loading dock by a half second.

It's a miniscule amount of time with a big payoff.

"By saving a fraction of a second, we're able to provide a half million more guest experiences," said Britain.

At Pirates of the Caribbean, a water jet now loads boats a split-second faster and 700,000 more guests each year can hop on board, according to Disney.

There have also been some major changes, like the new Dumbo Flying Circus, where there is no line.

Riders get a pager. The children can play in the indoor playground and the pager goes off when it's time to fly.

All of the changes are overseen in one of Disney's top secret rooms. Park officials monitor multiple cameras, use complicated algorithms, and computer simulations to calculate exact wait times.

"What our operators do here in the dock, is they input the data into their computer and then it will tell us, based on where guests are in the queue," said Britain. "It will allow us to post a wait time that's more accurate."

Disney said they are right on a wait time, almost to the second.

So far, about 20 of the busiest rides at Disney World have been tweaked as part of the "added capacity" program.