The End of Spontaneity

Now, with Disney doing everything it can to fill every room every night,
every room on property can be filled over a month in advance, even for traditionally
slow seasons. Mark checked for alternate locations for his October trip, and
there were no rooms remaining anywhere. Between Annual Passholder and Florida
Resident discounts, Magic Your Way promotions, postcard codes and other methods,
people wanting to schedule a last-minute trip to Walt Disney World and stay
on property are frequently out of luck. While this is great for Disney, again
the ability to be spontaneous and decide “hey, let’s see if we can set
up a long weekend down at the parks” is being lost.

Mike and Mark agreed that the experience of staying on- versus off-property
is extremely different, and both prefer staying on-property.

The increased occupancy level also increase the crowd levels, which makes
it a lot harder to see as many attractions as you used to. More and more,
people are looking to use touring plans from TouringPlans.com
(the official site of The
Unofficial Guide), RideMax
or Tour Guide Mike in order to
see as many attractions as possible. While Mark doesn’t spend as much time
going on attractions any more, it cuts down on the ability to “choose
your future” and make the theme park interactive if you’re following
a forced death march to see everything that you can. You can’t decide to stop
and watch live entertainment because it would put you off your schedule.

As we discussed last week with
the possibility of advance Fastpasses coming soon, then even more planning
will be required and even less spontaneity will be possible. Your choices
may be limited in what attractions you can see if Fastpasses are gone or mostly
gone by the time that you get to the park first thing in the morning.

Mark can even picture a MouseFest attraction meet where you have to get online
to get your Fastpass in advance in order to attend the meet, and if you don’t
get your Fastpass, you can’t participate in the meet on the spur of the moment.

Mike mentioned that the Magic Your Way ticketing options make it harder to
be spontaneous due to the complexity. Mark disagreed, saying that the front-loading
of the ticket pricing lets you add a day or two at the end for a small price,
letting you make the decision on the fly, especially because you can upgrade
on the fly, as long as you upgrade while the ticket is still active. Mike
raised the concern that your Disney hotel would be unavailable, since there
is often a waiting list for the ability to extend your stay.

Mark noted that, while the Magic Your Way tickets let you be more spontaneous
to add a day at Disney, it does remove the ability to be spontaneous to go
to other local attractions, such as Universal or SeaWorld. Mike noted that
there are some good attractions outside Disney. Mike asked Mark about the
last time that he had been to attractions outside of Disney. Mark hasn’t been
to Busch Gardens Tampa in the 1970s, or maybe 1982 or 1983. He hasn’t been
to Universal since around 1990 or 1991.

Mike noted that he had to finance his last Universal annual pass due to the
price. Mark discussed why the other parks in the area feel like they have
to match prices with Disney, and why the competition makes it difficult to
go to other parks due to the high incremental cost.

Mark then invoked the original plan of Disneyland, where you could choose
your next adventure from the Hub at Disneyland, and then go into each land,
have an adventure, then choose your next adventure. Then he compared it to
the current state at Walt Disney World, where you need to follow your touring
plan with military precision until you drop.

Mark really misses the days where you could be spontaneous. Mike agrees that
he’s not sure that the change is a good thing. Mike mentioned that it’s a
shame that most visitors don’t get the chance to see the other great things
that the Orlando area has to offer.

So what do you think? Do you enjoy planning your meals six months in advance?
Do you prefer planning out everything that you’ve going to do each day well
in advance? Would you prefer the ability to change your mind and not run into
capacity controls? Let us know by sending an email
or calling our toll-free feedback line (1-866-939-2278) and let us know what
your favorites are!

Changing the Feed?

We’ve gotten a lot of positive feedback on the new format of shorter, more
frequent shows. Currently, we have MouseStation three times a week, with short
subjects on Mondays, featured topics on Wednesdays and listener feedback on
Fridays. We also have the MousePlanetWatch news on Thursday. We’re still currently
maintaining the series of three feeds, one for MouseStation only, one for
MousePlanetWatch only and one for both shows.

Based on listener feedback, we will be deciding whether to merge the feeds,
and return to a single feed with all shows, folding MousePlanetWatch into
the main MouseStation feed. That would still leave us with four shows per
week, but there would be only one feed. With the current listener numbers
being fairly even between MouseStation and MousePlanetWatch, it seems as if
there’s a great deal of overlap between the shows.

Please weigh in on the idea of returning to a single feed via email
or by calling our toll-free feedback line at 1-866-939-2278. Don’t forget
that we love voicemails because then we can put your voice on the show!

Wrapping up

Please take a few minutes to complete our listener
survey. It helps us learn more about you and what you like most about
this podcast.

Don’t forget to go to the iTunes podcast directory and give us a good rating!

You can get your MousePlanet (or MouseStation) swag from the MousePlanet
CafePress store and the brand-new MouseStation
CafePress store.

Thanks to our audio engineer and sound editor Steven Ng.

Thank you for listening!

Subscribe to the podcast