Want to skip the long lines for rides and food at Disneyland or Walt Disney World? As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for - because you might get it.
With virtual queues and mobile ordering, Disney has created app-based alternatives to the long physical lines that used to frustrate visitors. Instead of standing behind other guests to order food at a register, now you can use the mobile order feature on the official Disneyland or Walt Disney World app to place your order and pay. Instead of lining up in an endless queue of people waiting to get on a ride, now you can use the virtual queue in Disney's apps to claim a space in line on popular attractions such as Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, Indiana Jones Adventure and soon the new Web Slingers: A Spider-Man Adventure.
But while these features allow you to avoid time standing in a physical line, they don't necessarily make your wait any shorter. In practice, they're actually increasing the amount of time that many guests are waiting for their food or thrills. When fans asked Disney for a way to avoid long line, the finger on the monkey's paw curled, and we got these new app-based alternatives.
Yes, mobile order and virtual queues can be easy to use. With mobile order, the whole family can take their time looking at the menu, deciding what they want, then communicating that information directly to a restaurant's kitchen, with no risk of a cashier not getting your intended order right. You can decide what to order whenever you want, then skip the line and pick up your meal at your convenience. In an attraction's virtual queue, it's just a click or two on your phone to claim a spot in line, without having to rush across the park and steel yourself for a long wait on your feet. Just wait for your turn to be called via a notification on the app, and you're heading straight in.
Seems easy, right? Well, they might be too easy.
How many times have you seen a long line for a restaurant and ride and said to yourself, "forget it. That's too long. We'll try something else." Long physical waits deter people from going to overloaded restaurants and attractions, distributing guests to alternatives with more available capacity. That helps even the load around a park.
But visitors generally don't care about the greater good of efficient guest loading across a theme park. No one is paying Disney ticket prices to be part of some grand industrial engineering challenge. People want what they want. They just want to get on that ride or order that food that they wanted in the first place.
So Disney found ways to give them access to that. But removing the deterrent effect of long physical queues only added to the demand for rides and restaurants without increasing their capacity. That's why almost everyone visiting Disneyland or Disney's Hollywood Studios at the Walt Disney World Resort now starts their day before 7am, frantically reloading the page on the official park app, trying to catch it exactly at 7am, when they can submit their request to join the virtual queue for Rise of the Resistance.
Disney's app has no way of knowing which fans would gladly have waited four hours in a physical queue for the award-winning Star Wars ride and who's just trying to get a spot in the queue on a lark, because it only takes a click and people told them it was a great ride. The virtual queue system pays no attention to who's on the final day of their Disney vacation and has not yet gotten the chance to ride and someone's who's been on Rise dozens of times already and is just looking for another go.
There's no merit to the selection process. And with nearly everyone with a reservation to visit that day trying to enter the queue at once, who gets in and who does not is pretty much just a random-chance lottery. For those who lose that lottery, Disney's system to make waiting in line easier has made getting on a popular attraction impossible.
It's less dire for restaurants' mobile order, but still frustrating. Before the pandemic, when relatively few people used Disney's mobile order system, it worked wonderfully. Those who knew to use it could skip long food queue and get their meals pretty much on demand. But with mobile order now mandatory at many quick service restaurants, kitchens are getting slammed with orders just before mealtimes - many more orders than cashiers would be able to take manually in a physical queue. And many more orders than a restaurant would get with a physical line out the door.
To ease the burden on the kitchen, Disney then asks guests using mobile order to select a later pick-up time, so that the kitchen can clear the orders it already has. As a result, if you want to eat lunch at noon instead of 1:30pm, you need to get your order in before the rush. But every day it seems that the time you need to place your order to get ahead of that rush moves up earlier and earlier. We've heard that for some popular restaurants, you might now need to get your mobile order in before 10am if you want any chance to snag a pick-up time before 1pm.
A system that was designed to help people avoid a 20-to-30-minute wait in a physical line has left them in an up-to-three-hour wait in a virtual one, instead.
With so many restaurants using mobile order, there's still a deterrent effect that drives guests to other, less-crowded locations, helping to smooth demand. It's just that well-informed fans are now having to decide about where to eat lunch as soon as they get to the park in the morning, rather than just before noon as they might have before. Poorly informed fans are walking around hungry and frustrated at lunch time, though.
With pandemic restrictions lifting, should Disney retreat from mobile order, allowing walk-up, in-person ordering at more restaurants? Should it further limit the number of mobile orders it takes per 15-minute period to accommodate walk-in orders? Or will more Disney fans just have to learn to place their mobile orders early in the day, as they once learned to make early Fastpass and dining reservations?
And what to about virtual queues? Could adding virtual queues to more attractions actually reduce the load on Rise of the Resistance? It hasn't helped at Disneyland, where the park is allowing visitors to join both the Rise and Indy queues at the same time. Allowing people to wait for multiple rides at once just further increases demand, making the whole mess even worse.
To reduce the demand for Rise, Disney would need to force fans to decide whether to try for the Star Wars ride's virtual queue or the virtual queue for another attraction. That way, some fans who'd been on Rise before - or who don't care that much about Star Wars - might choose to go for an easy return time on another attraction instead of trying for the free shot at another trip on Rise that the current system allows them to take.
Or Disney could bring back the deterrent effect while giving the most desperate Star Wars fans a shot at riding by further limiting the number of available spots in the Rise virtual queue and establishing a walk-up queue that would get a certain number of rides per hour. Of course, Disney's basically had that system for years. It's Fastpass.
Now, Fastpass has created similar demand-and-supply problems over the years, but Disney could help alleviate those by returning Walt Disney World to the "one at a time policy" that Disneyland had before the pandemic led Disney to pause the system on both coasts. Or Disney could leave Fastpass on the sidelines and adopt virtual queues for all attractions whenever they have a wait - so long as guests could wait in only virtual queue at a time.
That's a fascinating scenario to game out. But it might just accelerate many guests' feeling that visiting a Disney theme park is becoming a mobile video game, where you have to make every move on Disney's app before you can do anything in the park itself.
Maybe we shouldn't have wished to get out of those long lines after all.
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In terms of the mobile ordering, they should bring back the stand-by line to restaurants so the virtual orders shouldn’t be too crazy.
This just sounds miserable. The mobile ordering just sounds like Disney has their kitchen capacity way too low. Maybe that's expected when you dont open half your dinning experiences. As for the rides, I understand the bigger attractions need the virtual queues (for now) but this isn't solving a problem, its using technology to mask it. What's weird is Universal doesn't seem to have these problems. Disney, are you self inflicting this?
/\ Universal Orlando's virtual queue system is atrocious, I guess it was one way to try and pack more crowds in during the pandemic and i'm not sure if they're still regularly doing it but I certainly hope not. I'd much rather just wait in lines than have to constantly check my phone all day hoping to get a spot...to be allowed to wait in line. Actually one of the things i've really loved about the pandemic is Disney has gotten rid of its Fastpass system which has made the experience much better.
Virtual queue for the Rise of the Resistance ride was put into place because of how unreliable it was, having people wait for hours just for a ride to break down and dump its queue is a big problem for parks especially destination parks where people can't come back. It's a huge problem and I think Disney found an interesting way to address it, but its disappointing to see they still don't feel confident enough to open it up for a normal queue.
IMO pretty much everything related to virtual queueing that the industry has tried, at least to at least for rides, has been an epic fail and should only be used when absolutely necessary. I don't eat at parks so i've never used mobile order but with restaurants at Disney World in general they have way lower capacity now, I don't know if its as much of an induced demand problem as it is a restricted supply. Like Cosmic Rays for example, which has always been packed during lunch and even later in the day, has no seats at like half the tables to facilitate social distancing. I think once that problem goes away a lot of these woes will as well. There are also some big food places that are still closed for whatever reason (I would assume staffing shortage) so once the college program and international workers come back I don't think that will be as much of a problem
The more they push these, the better effect it will have on wait times as people like me just say F-It and don't bother going to the parks
While the virtual queue is the only option it limits my desire to go the parks and experience these new rides.
Do I want to stand in a 3 hour queue? No. but do I want to miss out because my internet is a little slower? also no.
A long queue would be a deterrent to people who have ridden the ride - same as me when I rode 7 dwarves mine train - great ride, enjoyed it, but the long queue when I finished was a deterrent to go back again. If i could reserve that sitting at the hotel, or on the way to the park, then I would take that spot, possibly preventing someone else from the experience
RN: "The virtual queue system pays no attention to who's on the final day of their Disney vacation and has not yet gotten the chance to ride and someone's who's been on Rise dozens of times already and is just looking for another go."
Me: There are people who have been on ROTR "dozens of times"?
"those immense queues for pandora attractions were, by nature, exclusionary!"
They weren't though. If you really wanted to go on the attraction then you could commit to waiting in the line. As a general rule I won't enter a line that shows a wait time of more than 30/45 mins, but on my first trip to wizarding world I waited twice that for Forbidden Journey, same with Flight of Passage.
If you can only queue digitally and are reliant on being lucky enough to get a place in that virtual queue, then you can not make that choice.
@THCreative you would be surprised, I hit my 15th ride on ROTR yesterday...have never gone to the studios and not been on it since it opened (very lucky). Yesterday they were back to packing the preshows w/ no distancing so the capacity will be increasing
I'm not much of a fan for mandatory mobile ordering at some restaurants. At some establishments the modification options only allow you to remove items that typically come with your order and not add them. When bringing this to their attention, the staff infront or outside say they have to be the ones to relay the modification to the kitchen, only for them to call me to the pick-up site, once it states my order is ready, just to restate the modification before they can proceed to start my order.
@TH .... every time I go to DHS I go on Rise, so yes I’ve been on it “dozens of times”. Not sure of exact number but I’m into the 20’s for sure. I never have a problem getting in the virtual queue, either at 7 or 1, depending on when I go in.
Saturday will be my 10th visit this year, so it’s really easy put the numbers up. With MFSR usually between 30 & 60 mins I’m putting in a lot more flying time as well.
It’s rare I eat, but I thought it crazy that they even had the milk stall on a virtual queue !?!? Now that really is taking it a bit too far.
The biggest problem with virtual queues in a theme park setting is that they essentially increase the number of guests in the park through the addition of digital guests. When you hit that button on Rise of the Resistance, a digital copy of you is sent to stand in an imaginary cattle pen while you're free to roam the park. If the physical queue was used, you'd have a lot of people standing in the actual switchbacks, but they wouldn't be present elsewhere in the park at the same time, thereby reducing waits across the board. The more digital queues a person is in at once, the more the issue is compounded.
Here's an example: Let's imagine a park where virtual queues are the only option for rides. Every single ride has a virtual queue, and once you're in one you can't join another until you ride. This would naturally create the side effect of the most popular attractions having massive wait times while everything else had nobody in line. The next step would be to open those attractions without a virtual queue, but that means a limited number of attractions are handling the full capacity of the park, leading to extreme lines everywhere. The end result is that a park that might average an hour wait per attraction is now seeing two to three hour queues for everything because essentially twice as many people are in the park. Personally, I'd much prefer standing in a moderate but tolerable wait for each ride than occasionally getting right on an attraction and spending the rest of the time in much longer queues.
I was working at Disneyland when Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Forbidden Eye (aka Indiana Jones Adventure) opend. I saw that queue go to the front of Adventureland, down Main Street, back up Main Street, into Frontierland, and going up Big Thunder Trail.
The people who got on that ride were COMMITTED to going on the attraction. And while a four+ hour wait stinks, at least it was first-come-first-served, not on a lottery basis.
I think it's all about deterrent. Lines and wait times are key in keeping people circulating around a theme park and to spread crowds/loads around the property. Virtual queues and mobile ordering platforms eliminate that deterrent, which levels the playing field across the board. If the ONLY way to ride an attraction is through a virtual queue, of course every single person walking through the gate will sign up for it, because it requires no sacrifice and none of the pain/deterrent of waiting in a physical line. The same goes for mobile ordering - if mobile ordering is the only way to get food in a theme park, of course everyone is going to use it, and they are going to order from the best/most popular restaurants since there is no downside (line waiting) to getting the best food in the park over the the worst.
The real question is what do parks need to do to fix this problem while still maintaining the improvements provided by virtual queueing and mobile ordering...
Virtual Queue
Unless an attraction is brand new (in its first few months of operation, or year for groundbreaking attraction), virtual queue should not be the ONLY way to experience it. People should have the option to wait in a standby line for every attraction in a theme park, and there should be no limitation on how many times a guest can ride any single ride through the standby line. As attractions age and popularity wanes, the percentage of capacity available to guests through the virtual queue should slowly be reduced. While a groundbreaking attraction like ROTR may have 100% of its capacity devoted to virtual queue guests in its first year of operation, 10 years from now, only 30-40% of the attraction's capacity should be available through the virtual queue.
Standby wait times need to be accurate and regularly updated. The "eyeball test" may be fine after ride ops have enough information about average wait times, but regular data and measurements of actual standby wait times need to be collected so guests are given the most accurate information possible. The trick of artificially inflating wait times at the end of the day to deliberately discourage guests from getting in line that Disney does so often needs to stop. If park ops doesn't want to run attractions for an hour after closing time, clearly post on the park app and queue entrance that the line will be cut off an hour before closing time, no questions asked.
Virtual queues need to provide an accurate return time that is regularly updated, and not be guaranteed.
Guests waiting in the standby line through a closure or downtime should be boarded before those in the virtual queue.
While the most popular attractions should limit a single virtual queue experience per visit, less popular attraction should not have limits (though daily attraction capacity available to virtual queue spots should never exceed 50%). If not all of the virtual queue spaces have been used as the day unfolds, guests should not be prevented from utilizing virtual queue on those attractions just because they rode earlier in the day.
Mobile Order
Mobile ordering should be available at ALL counter service restaurants (but not food carts and "grab and go" stations).
Guests should not be able to order food via mobile order more than 1 hour before they intend to pickup.
Delivery/pickup times for mobile order should not be less than 15 minutes - in other words, if a guest places a mobile order for "ASAP", the pickup time for that order should not be less than 15 minutes later than the order time. Guests should not be able see a long line at a cashier and circumvent that line through the mobile order system.
Mobile ordering systems should be calibrated to the optimal output of the kitchen. If the kitchen can only distribute 100 orders per hour, mobile orders should be unavailable for a restaurant that already has 100 orders sold for the next hour (including those from the physical cashier). The mobile order system should recommend ordering at the cashier or placing an order from a different restaurant if mobile ordering is not available at a popular restaurant at any given time.
I can't speak for what it's like being in one of the parks post pandemic. What I can say is if you now walk into a restaurant out in the real world, and there seems to be nobody around, you would still be wise to try and get a look at the electronic order board in the kitchen. Just because there are no physical humans in front of you in a line, it does not mean you will be getting quick service.
I stopped at an Einstein Bros. Bagels recently after a Doctor's appointment for which I had to fast for have blood work done. Now it was nearly 10:30AM and I was beyond HANGRY.
I placed my order and there were only two others waiting for food.
It took just over half an hour for me to get my Nova Lox on an everything bagel because of the volume of on-line orders being prepared.
Technology does not always make things better.
@Rob - That's why there needs to be a deterrent. The sight of a line out the door of the Einstein Bros. Bagels would have probably made you think twice about even getting out of your car. Mobile ordering systems eliminate (or at least reduce) that deterrent a line provides. IF you're really HANGRY, you'll still stand in the line, but at least you know what you're getting yourself in for, but with a bevy of invisible mobile orders in front of you, that deterrent is gone until the customer is ultimately upset at the length of time it takes to receive their order in a seemingly empty restaurant, at which point it's too late because you're "pot committed" (already paid or invested significant time into the ordeal).
The same works in a theme park. If you don't need to stand in line for an hour for a ride, and can just sign up for it on your phone whenever your number comes up, that takes ZERO effort. It allows even the casual fan to feel that it's worth to give the ride a spin even if they're not really interested in the ride. Grandma, tipsy uncle, and "I hate everything" EMO cousin are going to join the rest of the family on the ride because they don't have to endure each other for 60+ minutes in a line. Force that same family to stand in that line, and they'll either skip it or reduce the size of their party to just the members that really want to ride (making spots available for other who really want to ride, or for that same family to ride a second or third time).
Technology has certainly made our lives a lot easier, but when supply cannot meet demand (or demand it artificially inflated due to easy of use), there must be some way to thin the audience by eliminating those who aren't really interested and are just coming along because it's easy (and free).
@TH: Look at any number of the Disney Vloggers that go to the parks EVERY day and gloat about how many times they've scored a Rise reservation. I think "dozens" isn't as far-fetched as it sounds. And I do find it sad that they are lucky enough to keep winning the lottery while the one-time visitor might not be as skilled or savvy enough to do so. Anyone can go and stand in a line understanding they have a good chance of riding.
Tell little 8 year old Billy who's standing there holding his stormtrooper action figure that his mom and dad, who recently upgraded from a flip phone fought and argued trying to get the app open, didn't get him a chance to ride. But luckily he can watch it on youtube from the guy who went in with his recording studio to produce the perfect "ride through" knowing where all the best angles and vantage points are since he rode it dozens of times. Have fun Billy!.....ugh
@Russell I've recently encountered some mobile orders stating a pickup time 2-4 hours beyond ASAP. I completely agree with the inflated wait times. I thought I was tripping when MGM/Epcot had almost every ride, including Star Tours, posted as a 45-60+ minute wait two few weeks ago. Some lines where even extended beyond the queue, only to be a 10-15 minute wait.
@Sarah On my last visit we where waiting in line for another ride while trying to get a boarding pass for Rise. After I got it, I had these two senior citizens, who were standing behind us, approach me to see if I could also obtain one for them since they couldn't navigate the app as swiftly. Although I tried, I knew I wasn't going to he successfully. That marked the second time I was approached by a senior couple to see if I could get a boarding pass. Since it would've been my second ride, I just sent them a screenshot of my pass so they could ride it. I just saddens me to think of all of the other guest that aren't so lucky.
Waiting in the queue just seems to be part of the theme park experience. Having to mobile order food is just an irritation.
I have an iPhone 6 Plus. Disney's App now requires ios 13 (operating system). Unfortunately, the latest update for my phone is only ios 12.5.3. In July, I could order food. But since then, I can't. Most of the APP works fine, but they have excluded the iPhone 6 and 6 plus phones. They said that the ios 13 gives them additional features, so that's now their minimum standard.
The thought of buying a new phone just seems unreasonable. All the other APPs work perfectly, and the My Experience APP does work, but just no mobile ordering. I can't justify the cost of a new phone just to order food.
The issue with this is Disney is killing the feeling of a vacation with "Your Plan to Death Vacation". Your torturing the non technically savvy and your punishing the people that believe going to a resort destination to do "what you want to do when you want to do it" is still the vacation they want.
If this is all that is left then the past is the future. Stop the virtual queues, stop fast pass, stop the endless reservations 90 days in advance and do stand by only. The lines will move faster because they are only stopping for attraction failures. AND, if a ride fails hand out a return pass so they don't have to wait again. Add "Day of" Walk-in capacity to your dinning experiences even if it's only 15% If you don't have enough ride capacity then you need to reduce park capacity OR add ride capacity.
Disney's new direction is for the 5% and not an equal experience for their guests. Disney has always had and always will have upcharge experiences but to start segmenting out people, this these process is force feeding. Making park going experiences exclusive is crossing a line.
Disney needs to find a way back to guest enjoying experiences without endless planning and frustration and if it means they have to expand the capacity for attraction experiences in DHS, Epcot, MK OR add 5th and 6th gates then they need to get off their shareholder loving ***es and do it.
I still recall being at WDW in Nov 2015 and the park capacity was so overwhelming that we gave up on getting on a lot of attractions. It makes you question whether you ever want to go back.
The ONLY (real reality...) reason virtual queues exist, is the aggresive pressure hardware & software providers (including individual sofware developers, both employed in & outside the company), are exposing on the theme park executives.
They are constantly HAMMERING their biased truth into the heads of executives, who themselves are no experts, and tend to believe what the electronic whizz-kids are selling them. It has reached the proportions of blunt brainwashing.
On IAAPA seminars, these topics are always more present, with always less critical opposition. Remember, IAAPA is an organisation who EARNS their own profit, by giving the unquestioned (protected one-sided) forum to the sales people. Critique is utmost UN-welcome with IAAPA events, in IAAPA papers and in IAAPA 'education programs'. In the most recent IAAPA webinars I attended, my online questions (difficult questions..) were always dropped in the silent dustbin, while questions who had a flair of appraisal into the subject of the day were happily forwarded to the speakers, to produce a sugar-answer.
Disney amazingly fell in the trap of this whizzkid's sales boom. The only purpose is to SELL the systems. Not to make the visitor experience better.
From my point of view (as concept developer and advisor), I'dd throw them out, ALL.
Food for thought.
Some kudos :
leastinteresting
June 1, 2021 at 5:50 PM
>>> You express the "voice of the customer", and I aggree 100%, even when my professional position is residing at the park operators' side. But, the worst advice and concept development possible is the one which transforms "guests" into "rivals". (And destroys the relaxed vacation feeling.)
Defining Guests = honorable patrons who are all treated to feel welcome in the park ànd helpfull-friendly to each other.
Defining Rivals = combative buyers who are all treated to feel competing in the park ànd hostile-mean to each other.
My personal professional vision follows the "guest viewpoint", so indeed conflicting with the blind hawk-type sales people viewpoint.
Russell Meyer
June 1, 2021 at 12:21 PM
>>> Good analysys, but you still seem to believe that the factual wrong "everything needs to be reserved" can still be adjusted within the software itself. It's untrue. The reason being, that human life always needs human interaction to be understandable, truthfull AND flexible. When the only interaction existing is human <> machine, human life is de facto 'de-humanised'.
When making a reservation (restaurant) in the traditional way, the chat-at-the-spot or the telephone call with an actual staff member provides a 'best solution for everybody'. Plus a HUMAN aggreement. Both are unexistant with a computer booking. And, it does not matter how many "computerised automatic deterrants" there could be built in, it's still a MACHINE and it cannot lead to human aggreement ... nor to Happiness + Peace. Impossible.
I will plead for abolishment...
(Will see how violent-wild the booking software sellers will act on the oncoming IAAPA-Barcelona seminars - sept 2021 - they will for sure try to brainwash all amusement park executives to buy even more of their de-humanising pseudo-solution systems. At least, on life seminar, my questions cannot be 'electronically dropped in the dustbin' like they do on webinars, the voice travels in the air of the whole conference room... lol )
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why should there be a merit to the selection process? it's a theme park attraction. if you want to go on the ride ... you should have an opportunity to go on the ride, even if it's the 50th time you've been on it and yes, even if it's at the cost of someone who is on the final day of their $4,000 vacation. theoretically, that's how it's always worked (those immense queues for pandora attractions were, by nature, exclusionary!) — this just makes it more obvious.
the problem isn't really the apps nor the phones. i don't even know how much of a deterrent the physical lines were. people have been piling into three-hour lines my entire life, and i'd venture a guess they've been doing it much longer than that. i certainly don't think virtual queues (and definitely not what disney is doing with rise) solve anything, they simply allow guests to spend more money by being out of queues more often. but I don't think they're any *less* equitable than standing around in physical lines. on the contrary, they're probably *more* equitable because guests that can't, or might be less inclined to, stand in a long line are more likely to check out an attraction!
all this seems to boil down to Crowded Theme Parks Need To Find Ways To Better Distribute Guests. maybe so! open restaurants and rides with more capacity! hire more people! pay them better wages if that's a problem! it costs $150 to go to Disneyland — if they can't figure out how to make this work, I mean, tough! they'll fire that person and hire someone who can.