My Take on the “Disney Experience”

Recently, my wife convinced and took me on a trip to Disney World in Orlando, FL.

Growing up, I liked Disney’s cartoons but as an adult, I was a skeptic about how I would enjoy it. In my mind, Disney was meant for kids or families who wanted to get out and enjoy on some rides , etc. For us adults with no kids, I had the perception that Disney was not meant for me. But then, after my wife’s persuasion, I decided to give it a shot. We went to Disney in March and visited two parks (Epcot and Animal Kingdom).

Now, having visited Disney, I will say that I had a little bit of a transformation and began to understand what the “hype” was all about. As a UX designer in my professional life, I was amazed by amount of attention to detail that was put in by Disney employees towards keeping their customers happy and satisfied. It was almost as though every Disney employee and tourist attraction screamed “ Our customers and their safety are our №1 priority”.

There were plenty of subtleties involved in ensuring the customer experience was held to a high standard at Disney and I am sure I missed a lot of them but I wanted to list a few that caught my attention:

• The wrist bands: Disney offers every customer a wrist band prior to their arrival at the park. The wrist band is the key to EVERYTHING — from entering a park to purchasing food to using Fast Pass + rides. I really enjoyed this feature because it reduces the burden on customers having to get out their credit cards or IDs. All purchases are just tracked using the wrist band and then you pay in one go during check out — simple and efficient. Besides, the wrist bands are yours to keep as memorabilia too!
• Fast Pass + feature: The Fast Pass + feature allows customers to book up to 3 rides per day in advance where they can avoid wait times. This is useful because the wait times can be long during holidays, weekends and pretty much all the time for the most popular rides. I think it was a nice feature to be able to research and decide on which rides you would want to pick on certain days and time. I also liked how Disney provides you the option to pick Fast Pass + entry times when you book in advance (up to 30 or 60 days in advance), so you just show up at those times and are allowed to enter. You can even enter 10 minutes in advance or 15 minutes after your Fast Pass + timeframe. Cool stuff…
• The Disney smartphone app: The Disney smartphone app is pretty awesome — it gives you live updates on ride wait times so you can plan ahead in advance. It also provides you with your daily itinerary, your Fast Pass Selections and helps you make restaurant reservations. The app overall is super easy to use for newbies (like me), experienced users, and for visitors across all ages.
• Bell services: This might sound ordinary to most folks, but I liked it regardless. We ended up dropping our bags at the bell service and headed out to get lunch. Once we were done lunch, we were asked to go to our room and push the “luggage” button on our phone and voila — our baggage arrived in 10 minutes. Maybe it’s me and I am not used to such level of service, but regardless I found this to be a nice and subtle way to welcome travel weary visitors.
• Checking in/out: We had signed up for the Disney Magic Shuttle from/to the airport. Signing up was super easy, just had to show up our wrist bands and we were good to go. We were asked about our flight details. I wondered why at that time but the morning of us flying out, we received a checkout mail to actually see our boarding passes for our return flight. In the checkout mail, we also received the total incidentals for us and the card it will be charged to without us having to pay for it through an online account.
• Attention to detail: Finally, I was blown away by the attention to detail given to the rides along with their safety measures. We had the opportunity to visit Epcot and Animal Kingdom and the areas of the world depicted there were so genuine that we felt we were actually in those countries. To make it authentic, we noticed that the Disney employees working in specific countries of the World Showcase were ethnically from that country. I also liked how under each Disney employee’s name tag, it showed where the person is from — I like to see where folks are from.

I would venture to suggest a couple of areas of improvement —

• For some of the popular rides that have a long time (e.g., the Avatar Flight of Passage), allow folks to sign up for certain timeframes to sign up for (morning, afternoon , etc.). That way Disney can control the crowds a bit
• Also for some of the rides that are expected to have long wait times, have more access to restrooms and other amenities (e.g., water and fans where it can get stuffy)

Overall, thanks to Disney’s planning and attention to detail, I turned from that of a skeptic to actually loving the place. I can’t wait to go back, tour the remaining parks (hopefully next year!) and relive the Disney “experience” 🙂