NextGen

By Jason Garcia, Orlando Sentinel

Future visitors to Walt Disney World will be able to reserve ride times from their home computers and bypass hotel check-in desks entirely once they arrive at the resort, the head of the Walt Disney Co.'s global theme-park division said at an investors conference Thursday.

The advances are among of a series of technological initiatives Disney is developing in hopes of making visits to its increasingly crowded theme parks easier to plan and less intimidating to navigate, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts Chairman Tom Staggs said at the conference in Anaheim, Calif.

"In the coming years, we'll introduce a broad set of systems and tools that will help us create a more seamless and personalized experience and help guests get more out of their visit with us," Staggs said. The ultimate goal, he added, is "to welcome more and more people, while making their experience more satisfying, more personal and more immersive."

Staggs' comments offered the first detailed glimpse at a secretive initiative dubbed "Next Generation Experience," or "NextGen," that Walt Disney Parks and Resorts has been working on for more than a year. The budget for the project is said to be around $1 billion — as much as Disney spent to build its recently launched Disney Dream cruise ship.

In his remarks, Staggs described a "a version of Fast Pass for an entire Disney vacation." Future guests, he said, will be able to reserve specific ride times for popular attractions and secure seating for shows, make restaurant reservations and pre-book other experiences long before they leave their homes on vacation.

They will also be able to able to obtain their room keys in advance, eliminating the need to check into hotels and allowing them to proceed immediately to their hotel rooms or the theme park once they arrive on Disney property.

"Our tools will help our guests better understand all that we have to offer and better plan their time with us," Staggs said.
Other advances, he said, will include incorporating personalization for individual guests into rides and character greetings, adding more interactive queues designed to entertain people while they wait in line for attractions and designing behind-the-scenes systems that allow operations workers to better monitor and steer crowd flow to ease congestion.

Disney will also aim to cull more personal information from its guests, which Staggs said "will put better information into the hands of our cast, so they can deliver even better and more personalized service."

Staggs declined to say when Disney would begin to implement many of the advances in its theme parks, though he said the company has already applied for "a number" of patents related to the work. Disney would not elaborate on his comments in any detail.

"It will be some time before we roll out the bulk of these developments," Staggs said. "But we're well into development."
The decision to pump more than $1 billion into developing systems that aid in vacation planning and crowd flow underscores one of the biggest challenges facing Disney's flagship theme-park resorts, particularly Disney World, which has four parks and roughly 25,000 hotel rooms. As those resorts have grown bigger over the years, they have also become more complex to navigate and more crowded, threatening to undermine Disney's historically high guest-satisfaction ratings and deter repeat visits.

"We know that our guests love creating great memories," Staggs said. "We also know they don't exactly relish waiting in line, checking in at the resort, worry about missing their favorite attractions or feeling uncertain about how to best navigate and access our properties."

There are risks. Former company officials have questioned whether technological advances would boost attendance or guest-spending enough to justify the more than $1 billion price tag or whether advance-planning by some guests could spoil the experience who do not pre-plan and arrive in a park only to find the most popular attractions already booked.
But Scott Smith, an instructor at the University of Central Florida's Rosen College of Hospitality Management, said there are also several advantages. Issuing hotel room keys in advance, for instance, will ensure Disney gets its guests into its parks more quickly.

Smith likened it to similar advance check-in options at some Las Vegas casino resorts where "the idea is that you go right to the craps table.

"Disney is probably looking at the same type of philosophy," Scott said. "The sooner we check you in, the sooner you go into our parks and start spending money."

In addition, a new generation of technology-savvy travelers increasingly expects features such as customizable vacations and interactive attractions, he said.

"Their audience is so much more sophisticated now," Smith said. "If you're not investing in this already, you're going to get left behind. And the last thing Disney wants is to be saddled with the reputation of being old school."

 

Not sure I like the idea of all the planning ahead of time. ; Yup Sean you read right. ; Don't like planning our trips. ; No point with a toddler since it always changes. ; I am very curious to see if anything will come out of this idea.

Anyone heard anything about this?

 

I hadn't seen the news until your post. ; I'm a bit of a planner, so I will be thrilled with some parts of his. ; I know where you're coming from though. ; It's really tough to plan a lot of details too far ahead with really young kids. ; My DS is almost 11 and it's just getting better now.