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BUS-330 Week 3 Disneyland Fastpass Case Scenario Disney operates…
BUS-330
Week 3
Disneyland Fastpass Case Scenario
Disney operates theme parks throughout the world, and in each park it wants to ensure that its
guests have a magical experience. Waiting in line for the attractions is surely not part of the
memory that Disney wants guests to keep. Disney could avoid lines by letting fewer people into
the park, but it would either lose revenue (not good) or have to charge more (which risks ill will).
So lines are a fact of life and the question then turns to how to better manage them.
In the old days, Disney would have guests queue up in first-come-first-served order for each
attraction. The most popular attractions could have lines that lasted more than an hour during
busy times of the year. To make lines more enjoyable, or at least less irritating, Disney tried to
provide some entertainment while guests waited, such as showing Disney programs on
televisions. But there is only so much you can do to distract a 4-year-old child who is cranky
because they are not actually inside the Pirates of the Caribbean.
But why do the guests actually have to stand in the line? That insight led to the development of
Disney’s Fastpass system in 1999. With the Fastpass system, a guest didn’t physically enter the
line for an attraction but, rather, received a reservation for an interval of time to enter the
attraction later on, say, 1.5 hours later. If the guest returned at that time, they could enter a short
line dedicated to Fastpass users that put the guest on the attraction within a few minutes. More
recent versions of this idea, such as Fastpass +, allow users to reserve their arrival window as
much as 60 days in advance.
The actual implementation of Fastpass required Disney to make some important and
complicated decisions. For example, say an “experience” (i.e., ride, attraction, or show) can
serve 20 guests per minute, which is 1200 guests per hour. Guests can arrive at the experience
and wait in a first-come-first-served queue. Alternatively, some guests are given a Fastpass
arrival time window. For example, a family might hold an arrival time of 10:10 a.m. to 11:10 a.m.
for the Pirates of the Caribbean. If they indeed arrive during that interval, they wait in the
Fastpass queue, which gives them priority for entering the experiencethey might still need to
wait a bit, but they would wait only if a bunch of other Fastpass-using guests arrive at nearly the
same time during that window.
Question 1:
Keeping the number of guests in the park constant, by adding FastPass, does the average number of guests served per attraction change?
For which types of attractions does it change the most (e.g., the busiest or the least busy ones)?
Explain using your own words.
Question 2:
Disney needs to decide how many FastPass tickets to issue for each time window. What are some of the trade-offs associated with this decision? For example, what are good and bad issues about increasing the number of tickets available?
Explain using your own words.
Question 3:
Is FastPass fair?
Explain using your own words.
Question 4:
Should Disney charge for FastPass?
Explain using your own words.
