Disney Changes the Game Again

In 1999, The Walt Disney Company revolutionized the theme park industry.

Disney introduced the concept of the virtual queue, a system we knew as FastPass.

For 25 years now, park officials have tweaked the system repeatedly, ultimately leading to what we now call Lightning Lane.

Along the way, management has made challenging decisions regarding best practices.

That sounds like corporate boardroom jargon, but it’s true. Executives must work on a constantly evolving math problem.

Sometimes, there’s a logical conclusion sitting there, but nobody wants to take it.

Eventually, the company reaches a logical crossroads wherein there’s little choice but to do the obvious thing, even if it’ll prove unpopular.

Early in the morning on October 16^th, 2024, your favorite company did just that.

Disney just changed the game again. But this move is sure to set the internet ablaze with criticism.

A Rumor Confirmed

I warned you two weeks ago that this particular change was coming.

In discussing Disney Rumors for October, I eschewed my conventional format and focused on this one thing.

As you might imagine, I knew this one was coming. Honestly, I’d been waiting for it for years.

The first time I stayed at Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, I utilized their Universal Express Unlimited Pass.

At that moment, I knew what Disney’s future held because the system made too much sense not to implement.

No matter what anyone tells you, Universal Studios remains the vastly inferior younger brother to Disney. It’s the Seth Curry to Steph Curry.

For a time, Universal has done something quite a bit better than Disney, though, and that’s the Universal Express Unlimited Pass.

I wrote about this option last year on UniversalParksBlog, but it’s not a challenging concept to understand. It’s exactly what it sounds like.

You get the Universal equivalent of Lightning Lane as an amenity for your hotel stay at the company’s most expensive properties.

Alternatively, you pay hundreds of dollars per day to purchase this unlimited pass.

So, for that price, you might as well just stay at the hotel as well.

For years now, that’s been the blueprint for the deluxe version of the digital queuing system in place, the one formerly known as FastPass.

Disney has always known it could adopt this strategy, just as management understood that paid FastPass was a thing long before Lightning Lane.

The company has participated in a waiting game as it calculated the best time to implement its own version.

And that moment is…October 30^th, 2024.

Meet the Lightning Lane Premier Pass

Justin Hermes heroically spent the “don’t talk to me until I’ve had some coffee” part of his morning explaining the new system to you.

The news broke at 6 a.m. on USA Today that Disney will do exactly what the rumors suggested.

Disneyland and Walt Disney World will both offer a new, super-upscale version of Lightning Lane.

Called the Lightning Lane Premier Pass, it’s a new package that fits in the middle between Lightning Lane and a VIP Tour.

As Justin mentioned, people who purchase Lightning Lane Premier Pass (LLPP) can enter the Lightning Lane queue once per applicable attraction.

For example, let’s say that you’re at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. The park currently offers 13 different Lightning Lane attractions.

With standard Lightning Lane, guests may choose one of the options in the top tier. They are:

• Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway
• Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
• Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith
• Slinky Dog Dash

Then, you can pick two others from the other tier (or three if you don’t pick something from the top tier). Here’s that group:

• Alien Swirling Saucers
• Beauty and the Beast Live on Stage
• Disney Junior Play & Dance!
• For the First Time in Forever: A Frozen Sing-Along Celebration
• Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular
• Muppet*Vision 3D
• Star Tours – The Adventures Continue
• The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror™
• Toy Story Mania!

As I type this on October 16^th, Lightning Lane for Hollywood Studios costs $26.

You’ll experience a minimum of three attractions with your Lightning Lane purchase.

However, you’re subject to time windows. Disney will list a return time for your Lightning Lane, and you must enter the queue by then.

So, the “cheaper” system costs $26 per person plus tax each day but doesn’t guarantee many attractions.

The Stress Reliever

Disney will market LLPP as a stress reliever, albeit a pricey one.

The idea is that you experience all 13 attractions I just mentioned for one daily fee.

As you should know by now, Hollywood Studios sometimes has up to seven attractions that require hour-long waits.

During a daily park visit here, you have no way of knowing which ones you’ll get to experience. It’s totally dependent on the crowds that day.

With the new Premier Pass, Disney is promising that you can do them all.

Even better, you don’t need to be looking at your phone all day.

Instead, the LLPP entitles you to Lightning Lane queue access whenever you want.

So, this option is akin to Disney’s VIP Tours, where Cast Members known as Plaids check you into the Lightning Lane queue.

The difference is that you can do it yourself now rather than having a Disney employee do it for you.

How much would you expect to pay for that privilege? Well, if you didn’t read Justin’s article, prepare to be shocked.

Here are the published prices thus far:

• Disney’s Animal Kingdom: $129-$199 plus tax  
• EPCOT: $169-$249 plus tax 
• Disney’s Hollywood Studios: $269-$349 plus tax 
• Magic Kingdom: $329-$449 plus tax”

And we should remember that Disney raises prices every 12-18 months. So, that’s the lowest they’ll ever be.

The one thing that won’t feel stress relief is your bank account.

But the pricing does make sense in that VIP Tours cost several hundred dollars per hour.

Even the most expensive LLPP at Magic Kingdom is less than what you’d pay for a Plaid.

Disney’s New Business Model

A point I’ve stressed for months is that Disney projects flat growth in the theme parks division for the next several quarters.

In a boardroom, there’s no scarier term than flat growth. If you don’t believe me, please remember back to November 2022.

Bob Chapek told people on an annual fiscal earnings report that the entire company would have flat growth for the next year.

The dude was fired two weeks later. That’s a real thing that happened.

So, the new deluxe FastPass option we’re discussing here should be viewed as what it is.

This is Disney’s rather shameless attempt to squeeze more revenue from the same batch of customers.

That’s the math problem I referenced earlier, and it’s a constant one for park planners.

Only X amount of guests will visit Disneyland and Walt Disney World on a given day.

Meanwhile, Disney cannot increase prices often because it absorbs a media (and fan) drubbing each time.

Right or wrong, the perception is that Disney has priced the parks too high already, and people will attack the company for additional increases.

Solving a 25-Year Problem

How does a business increase revenue and profit margins in such a situation?

In Disney’s case, it gave in three years ago by replacing the free FastPass system with the paid Lightning Lane program.

Now, Disney will introduce the Lightning Lane Premier Pass, which is the price of 10-20 days of standard Lightning Lane.

And let’s not overlook a key component of this program. It’s only available to guests staying at Disney Deluxe or Deluxe Villas Resorts.

That’s the surprising part of the announcement to me, as I wasn’t privy to that part of the conversation.

I admire the cleverness of the premise, though.

Simply by implementing the program, Disney earns more from the same number of guests.

Now, those tourists who desire LLPP will have the incentive to book a stay at Disney’s most expensive resorts.

Otherwise, they cannot purchase LLPP. So, they stretch their vacation budget two different ways.

Before you can buy the best version of Lightning Lane, you must book a hotel stay at a Deluxe property. That’s win/win for Disney.

Disney Solves for X

All of this is theoretical, though. Disney has quietly tried some other ideas in the past that didn’t turn out well.

For example, there was once a 90-day FastPass window. Disney offered it exclusively to Club Level hotel guests. And it wasn’t popular.

I suspect that won’t be true for LLPP, though. As I mentioned in Disney Rumors, some guests already split VIP Tours.

They’ll happily travel in a group of ten strangers in exchange for the privilege of skipping the lines at the parks.

That’s quietly the target demographic for this new version of FastPass, the one where the program reaches its logical conclusion.

Disney has crafted a digital queuing system that persuades deep-pocketed guests to spend several hundred dollars more per day.

That’s how you change flat growth on a balance sheet into a huge profit.

After decades of trying, Disney may have just solved for X. In the process, it changed the theme park game again.

And before you decry them for it, please remember that Universal has been doing the same thing for many years now.

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