If you're not familiar with it already, this is the system that lets you survive those "Crowd Level: 10" days. You stick your park ticket in a machine, it spits out another ticket with a time window that allows you to the front of the line. You then waltz off to find your smoked turkey leg or to trade pins or to ride something with a shorter line, returning later to smirk at schmucks in line while you cruise past them with your FastPass.
I wonder if Disney has ever tracked the amount of money that FastPass has made them. People standing in line spend zero money. People strolling through the park do - a T-shirt here, a Mickey-Mouse-shaped popsicle there - it must add up. The guests love it too. No one wants to stand in line. One of the most common complaints on Tripadvisor about Disney is how much standing in line your near-$100 ticket just bought you.
FastPass is a win-win system. Disney wins, guests win.
In Disneyland Paris, FastPass only kinda sorta worked. Return windows were shorter (15 minutes instead of 30 or 60). Rides broke down right when your return window opened, meaning you just wasted your precious FastPass on NOTHING.
Worst of all, the lines for FastPass were ridiculous. It was possible to stand in a 15-minute line to get a FastPass, so that you could later criss-cross the park to stand in line for another 30 minutes to get on a ride.
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| See the hundred people here? All waiting to get a FastPass. And how many of them got it? About 15, since the ride broke five minutes after this photo was taken. They closed the FastPass station, but didn't tell the people who were standing in line. D'oh! |
Once you got through the line to a machine, even getting a FastPass presents problems. In the US Disney Parks, you put your ticket in, you get a ticket out. Simple self-service.
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| Simple interface at a US FastPass kiosk |
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| Cast member helping a guest figure out how to scan his bar code. |
One of the major problems in Paris is that there are at least THREE kinds of tickets being scanned by machines. Magnetic stripe tickets, bar code tickets, full A4 size printed-at-home tickets. Why DLP allows this I have no idea. But there were two kinds of scanner in each machine, and people couldn't figure out where their ticket should go.
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| I really think the bar code drawing tells me to put my ticket IN the slot. But no, you're supposed to slap it parallel to the surface of the machine. NOT intuitive. But it also needs to accommodate guests who printed their tickets in A4 paper at home. |
According to another blog this two-reader system was supposed to be an improvement. But people ran the magnetic stripe backwards, stuck their bar code ticket IN to the machine (kinda like the drawing suggests) rather than putting it parallel to the surface, didn't know what to do with their printed-from-home tickets. The instructions were non-existent or confusing. The printers were slow. Rather than taking a few seconds a ticket, it was taking 15 or 45 seconds a ticket. And with guests like the lady in front of me running 16 tickets at a time for her group, we were all in for a long wait.
Why Disney doesn't just issue one type of ticket is beyond me. Print-at-home tickets also exist here in the US, but are traded in for standardized tickets in Anaheim at the gate.
With design the devil's in the details - always. There's no reason FastPass can't work more smoothly, even with three kinds of tickets. Even creating a better graphic instruction and slapping on a sticker would help here.
If Disney does track how much money is spent when people have FastPasses, this would be an interesting question. How much money is not being spent at Disney when people are standing in FastPass lines?
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