Disney World's "biometric" system was designed to foil visitors buying unused ticket days from brokers, who bought up partially used tickets from other park visitors. That gave visitors who bought those tickets a price break, but also left them vulnerable to scammers who would be selling voided, used-up or counterfeit tickets, too. (And, of course, by eliminating the secondary market for tickets, Disney set itself up to make plenty of extra money from ticket sales, too.)
Now, Disneyland appears to have started using a "biometric" system of its own. But instead of using those fancy, schmancy finger scanners, Walt's original park is going old-school.
They're taking visitors' pictures.
Disneyland's long used photos to verify the identity of annual passholders when they use their passes to enter the parks. Starting today, Disney's begun taking photos of anyone using a multi-day pass for the first time, according to the LA Times report linked above. When someone tries to enter the park on subsequent days, the turnstiles attendant will see the photo of the original user of that pass. If that picture doesn't look like you, you're not getting into the park.
Disneyland doesn't sell no-expire tickets, so conceivably Disney could purge the photos 14 days after the ticket's first use, when the multi-day ticket expires anyway. But the LAT report doesn't address that issue.
And taking photos seems to me a slower way to get the ID of visitors than the WDW finger scan. (FWIW, Universal Studios Hollywood uses the finger scan.) Throwing one more element into this, a much higher percentage of Disneyland's visitors are annual passholders than at WDW, so this system won't represent a change for them. (APers now get their photos taken by Photopass photographers in the park during their first visit on a new pass.)
What do you think?
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Although I don't know their methods, they can save time by photographing the whole family and linking the tickets. Families usually travel together as a group.
They can avoid photographing kids since I don't expect the sharing of child tickets to be the problem as long as they are with the adults.
If the tickets are bought at the ticket booths, they should consider a quick photograph there. Maybe they should redesign the ticket booths to accomodate the taking of photographs.
Never get in line behind grandparents with lots of grandkids . Bad idea.
I'd never buy one, but if there are several companies doing it, then it must be a pretty big market for it.
Simple, but effective!
I would also add that passholders should be able to scan their own tickets. They should use that automated scanner where you insert your pass into like they do for all tickets at WDW. Yes, it's there at the DLR and works they just don't use it. And I'll add that one cast member should be able to man two turnstiles since all they'll be doing is looking at photos that pop up on the screens. That would save on labor costs which I'm sure would excite someone in management.
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