![]() ![]() It's simply unfair to their guests to do otherwise. But I believe they face an ethical obligation to make their physical queues as pleasant and comfortable as possible, too. Parks have an obvious legal obligation to provide accommodation for people who physically cannot wait for a ride under those conditions. Standing for hours in the heat in an unthemed serpentine queue, with no access to a bathroom? Yuck. Some physical queues can be brutal to wait in. Unfortunately for those visitors for whom an overdrawn account means a problem for them and not for the bank, some parks seem to be getting to that point.īut charging people money they struggle to afford is not the only way that parks can be unfair in managing attraction access. Only when parks devote a significant portion of their attraction capacity to people paying to skip the regular queue does a park begin to feel like an economically stratified experience. But those who can afford to get through the gates have been able to enjoy pretty much the same experience as the wealthiest visitors. America's shrinking middle class often needs discounts or to visit on lower-priced dates to afford visits to some parks, especially the most-expensive Disney ones. Theme parks ceased being an affordable option for poor families long ago - if they ever were an option. It's something else to pay for an ILL (seriously, Disney, do you even think of acronyms when naming your products?) after coughing up $100+ a day to visit Disney.įinancial costs also raise social concerns. It's one thing to pay for Flash Pass after getting through the gate on a cheap Six Flags season pass. Disney charges a premium price just to get into the park, so many fans are not happy with the additional charges on top of that to experience popular attractions without extended waits. That's why so many parks now sell upcharge line-skipping services, such as Universal Express, Cedar Fair's Fast Lane, and Six Flags' Flash Pass.ĭisney is in that business now, too, with its Individual Lightning Lane and Disney Genie+ products. Theme parks long ago figured out that they could substitute the time and opportunity costs for a financial one, earning them extra income in the process. If you choose popular attractions with long waits, you limit the number of rides you can do in one day. While you are in line for one attraction, you can't be in line for another. There is an opportunity cost to pay, as well. The more people who wanted to go on a ride, the longer you had to wait for it.īut your time isn't the only cost of a traditional theme park queue. The old, traditional method for that has been to charge the guest's time. That means that a park must charge some cost to guests to secure their place on the ride. Fans don't need to give up anything extra to ride.īut when demand exceeds supply, the "no free lunch" rule applies. If supply exceeds demand, it's a walk on - the theme park equivalent to a free lunch. Queuing becomes an issue only when demand exceeds supply - in this case, supply being the number of people who can be accommodated at dispatch in any given moment. (As a long-time website publisher, I am intimately familiar with this business model.) Just make it free, open it to everyone and hope someone bothers to show up and ride. If someone built a janky attraction that no one wants to ride, there's no need to worry about how to price it or design a queue. Well, there's no free lunch that anyone wants to eat. Let's start the analysis with an assumption: There's no free lunch. Virtual queues are just one of the alternatives to traditional, physical queues that parks have employed in recent years. Walt Disney World revived its virtual queuing system this morning for the grand opening of the new Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind roller coaster at Epcot.
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