Planning: Staggs Mulls...

Meanwhile, the crowds expected to descend on Captain EO through the spring will give fresh motivation to Disneyland's planners and executives who want to add more capacity to the crowded theme park. TDA continues to dig deeper into plans to carve out expanded space around the perimeter of the park and bolster overall park capacity by adding at least several new major attractions.

During Tom Staggs well publicized two day visit to Anaheim last month, a major stop on the Disneyland tour was an afternoon visit in the rain to the Festival Arena in the back of Frontierland. It was there that Tom got a chance to physically see the relatively large open space that could serve as the gateway to the first big expansion of the park since Toontown nearly 20 years ago. While Parks & Resorts bigwigs like Operations chief Al Weiss nodded in agreement and rattled off some figures, Tony Baxter gave his sales pitch to Tom on the creative ideas to expand the park to the north, as the rest of the TDA executives smiled at Tom from under their umbrellas with visions of high capacity flume rides and people-eating E Tickets dancing in their heads.

Part of the developing master plan for Disneyland, and something that is now quickly gaining support from the TDA team, includes a Disneyland Paris style arcade on the east side of Main Street USA. This additional walkway could then be used to alleviate the chronic problem of gridlock and overcrowding that happens nightly on Main Street during parades and fireworks. Since the whole Disneyland expansion plan is fueled by a desperate need to add to the overall capacity of the popular theme park, the expansion of Main Street to the east to allow for increased traffic flow is making a lot of sense to both the Imagineers and the executives.

Tony Baxter knows that plans can change, and funding for smaller projects can dry up in mid-stream, which is why he is pushing for a huge scope for the Disneyland expansion plans. If the budget is big enough, in the hundreds of millions of dollars, the funding will need to be approved by the Board of Directors and thus be harder to raid during the inevitable budgetary problems from fiscal year to fiscal year. That's how the DCA makeover plan safely secured such a huge budget, by grouping several big projects all into one and forcing the Board to dedicate the big budget up front.

That's also how some recent projects were scaled back at the last minute, or put on hold altogether, like the original plan Burbank and WDI both had to use Disneyland's Main Street Cinema to help launch its “Mickey Mouse Initiative” of reinvigorating Mickey's rather staid corporate image. Burbank got cold feet literally days after the project started, and the original month long refurbishment of the Cinema turned into a two week project to simply replace the floor and hang new curtains. Even projects that seemingly came off flawlessly, like the newly refurbished Mr. Lincoln show, had some of the budget pulled during the middle of the construction, leaving the lobby pre-show without the original animatronic figure from the World's Fair on display in a corner as Tony had once planned.

The rest of Tom's official Anaheim visit was very tightly scripted and well-rehearsed, right down to two days of sugar-free and gluten-free catered meals served to Tom in accordance with his notoriously healthy diet. Tom's staged visit to the Candy Palace on Main Street USA on the first day was even a victim of his dietary demands, as the Candy Palace manager and chef had to rush out to purchase big bags of sugar-free chocolate and organic almonds in an attempt to create a bitter Chocolate Bark recipe that Tom would be able to sample as he helped with the cooking, all while Disney's publicity cameras clicked away.

Needless to say, don't look for Chairman Tom's Sugar-Free Organic Chocolate Bark to be on sale in the Candy Palace any time soon. The remainder of the big batch of unappealing Chocolate Bark was thrown out just as soon as
Tom's tour moved on up Main Street and a few of the Candy Palace CM's could taste just how bad the leftovers were.

Tom also was shown areas of Disneyland where new investment has already been approved, albeit on a much smaller scale than what's being proposed for the back of Frontierland or the eastern half of Tomorrowland. The big Star Tours refurbishment beginning late this summer was presented, as well as Tony Baxter's current project of reinvigorating the Rivers of America with reworked scenery and additional animatronics. A pair of animatronic bobcats up on a ridge, some new Indian Scouts staring down passing Davy Crockett Canoes along the rocky rapids, and Mike Fink parking his keelboat out front and moving in to the old non-burning settlers cabin are some of the changes headed for the May debut of the refurbished river rides.

The plan now also includes adding some real animals in amongst the new animatronics, with the Indian Village at the big bend in the river planned to get a small themed paddock next to the teepees with a few live Pintos allowed to graze there and watch the tourists go by on the passing canoes and boats.

For Tom's first official visit to Anaheim, no detail went overlooked by TDA planners who wanted to put their best foot forward in an attempt to keep their property front and center with the Burbank bosses. Tom seemed to leave Anaheim genuinely impressed, and the TDA team was surprised by how friendly and engaging Tom was compared to the rather icy and famously disinterested Jay Rasulo. But the challenge now for TDA is that Tom will be visiting Anaheim a few times a year with his family in tow as his young children are already big Disneyland fans living less than an hour up the freeway in west LA.


Parking: Kalogridis Detours...

It's beyond the two Anaheim parks however where George Kalogridis and his executives have plenty of work cut out for them, and nothing like the glamorous and high-profile attractions to be added inside the parks. We've detailed for you in last year's updates the horrendous problems caused by a lack of parking spaces and surface street logistical problems, mostly driven by a visitor demographic that has changed dramatically from the tourists on multi-day tickets that the DCA expansion was designed to attract and instead now tries to accommodate hundreds of thousands of Annual Passholders who too often arrive in cars by themselves and only stay a few hours at a time.

To George's great credit, one recent Friday evening he drove out of his assigned TDA parking space and went up Ball Road to try and park his car in the Mickey & Friends parking structure along with the rest of the Disneyland visitors. As anyone who has tried to park their car at Disneyland on a Friday evening knows, George spent plenty of time in gridlocked traffic, a long idling line for the ticket booth, and finally some time in an overcrowded tram loading area.

Needless to say, George wasn't impressed with his parking experience, and this wasn't even a busy Friday evening in summer or at Christmas or during the popular HalloweenTime promotion. It was only a relatively quiet mid-winter evening, but it was enough for George to be unhappy about. Note to George; If you really want to see ugly, try that same stunt on a late Friday afternoon in October.

The parking problem in Anaheim seems to grow worse by the week, and a temporary stop-gap measure to open up a few thousand more spaces in a new Toy Story themed lot on the old Strawberry Fields in a few weeks will barely help. If anything, it will only cause more headaches as they try and bus thousands of people per day up Harbor Blvd. to the East Esplanade, a move that has kicked out the taxi cabs from their custom built driveways there and moved them over to Downtown Disney.

TDA knows these huge satellite lots almost a full mile from Disneyland are wildly unpopular with the people forced to park there, no matter how efficient and friendly the CM's staffing the lots and buses may be. To try and make the big new Toy Story lot more convenient for people, they will attempt to sell theme park tickets before people board the buses and hope that people perceive that tactic to be a time saving tool. It won't do anything for Annual Passholders who don't need to buy tickets though, and they often make up the bulk of the people parking in those satellite lots as they arrive later in the day.

Anaheim's parking department will also be beefing up staffing in those lots, christening some Cast Members as “Parking Concierges” who will be tasked with answering questions and helping with confused visitors who feel that Disneyland must be very poorly managed to make paying customers park so far away.

The answer to this long term parking problem is obviously just to build more spaces in the form of a second large structure on the east side of Harbor Blvd., a plan that has been publicly shown on Resort expansion maps ever since the old Grand Hotel was purchased by Disney and imploded on that site back in 1998. The land purchases by Disney on the northern end of that property we'd told you of last year have been finalized, and additional adjacent land is also being eyed by Disney's property development team.

The grand plan being hatched by TDA, in partnership with some pro-Disney forces in Anaheim city hall, is to build a massive new parking facility north of GardenWalk with direct access to and from the Santa Ana Freeway. This 10,000+ space structure would also include a transit depot on its southern flank for the monorail system Anaheim wants built by the middle of the decade to connect the new ARTIC high speed rail station with the Resort District and the Convention Center. Visitors either arriving to this giant facility via private car off the freeway, or via monorail from ARTIC, would then be whisked on moving walkways across a sweeping bridge over Harbor Blvd. and deposited near the current tram loading area.

The city of Anaheim plans on launching a city owned website detailing this grand vision later this spring, and Disney's team of lawyers and developers are also working on finalizing the plan before going public with it and publicizing it as a jobs generator for the local economy. You can bet that some of these same folks have taken a keen interest in the foreclosure auction planned next month for the struggling GardenWalk mall across the street from this planned parking/transit facility.

George Kalogridis arrived in Anaheim as the new President well after the DCA expansion was planned out and kicked off with over a Billion dollars in funding, and he just gets the pleasure of being there for the upcoming ribbon cuttings. The DCA makeover is so massive and funded at such a huge scale, that it goes well beyond the scope and power of whomever is sitting in the 4th floor Presidential Suite in TDA at any one time. But it's this parking plan to the tune of a few hundred million dollars that TDA does have direct ownership of, and it gives George an opportunity to make his mark in Anaheim and burnish his career.

If Matt Ouimet was known for salvaging Disneyland's reputation from the epic failures of Cynthia Harris and then shepherding the 50th celebration to wild success, and Ed Grier was known for successfully fending off sleazy condo developers in the tourist zoned Resort District, then George Kalogridis could go down in history as the President who solved the Anaheim parking crisis and built a massive parking/transit system designed for decades of future growth. If George gets the parking problems licked by the time his current contract is up in 2012, he may get a chance to stick around after that to kick off the next big wave of theme park expansion in Disneyland, one that will be far more glamorous than big cement parking structures with moving walkways.

Wish George luck with the parking crisis the next time you are bused in from Garden Grove for your visit to Disneyland.

http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al022310a.htm

Tout ceci laisse bien songeur...
Halalala quelle dommage que de telles attentions ne soient pas d'actualité dans notre dlrp !
En tout cas j'ai hâte d'en savoir plus sur les futures expansions du bon vieux Disneyland de l'oncle Walt!
Un John Lasseter débridant Tony Baxter, je n'attend que ça !

Si à Paris on ne réclamait pas sans cesse de royalties, le parc Européen aurait également tout le loisir de pouvoir se développer comme il se doit aussi, mais bon nous ne sommes qu'européens...pas américains...

C'est vrais qu'avec presque 100 millions € / an on pourrait en faire des belles choses!

Le gros probleme de DLR est effectivement qu'il est completement encerclé par du bati ... ce qui est loin d'être le cas de DLP ...

Lorsque j'y suis allé en 1992, le parking était encore comme sur cette photo (prise en 1960) , depuis DLR n'as pas vraiment changé , par contre pour les alentours ...

Build it, and they will park...

With the last big push of Annual Passholders descending on Anaheim before the final wave of summer blockouts kicked in last Friday, the overburdened parking operation was once again taxed to its limit over the past few weeks. Luckily, that second big parking structure we’d told you was planned for the Pumbaa parking lot is picking up speed through the approval process. The money to pay for it is already sitting there, so now it’s just down to the details on timing and aesthetics.

The Disney engineers have reworked the southern flanks of the planned multi-level structure to accommodate the city-wide people mover system dubbed ARC (Anaheim Rapid Connection) that Anaheim insists it wants to build, but that likely won’t make its current 2016 opening date (that was already pushed back from 2014). In an attempt to play nice, Disney has agreed to allow the city to use the vacant lot and small business park it owns across the street from Pumbaa as a maintenance facility for the elevated ARC system.

The plan now is to try and move forward with building the structure itself, which would add approximately 6,500 parking spaces to the Disneyland inventory, and use the reworked designs to allow the city to add the ARC station in either with the structure or years after it opens. If ARC ever opens at all.

Whether or not ARC gets built, the thousands of people parking each day in the new structure would enter Resort property via a sweeping skybridge over Harbor Blvd. that would land in the current bus loading zone along Harbor Blvd. That rather drab and uninspired sea of shuttle buses, infamously designed in the late 1990’s by a snooty Boston landscape architect who was proud to admit she’d never been to a Disney theme park, would be replaced by a small collection of retail and dining establishments, essentially expanding the Downtown Disney concept eastward.

As arriving visitors descended from the broad skybridge over Harbor, they’d be deposited in a far more attractive garden gateway to both theme parks, while all of those current shuttle buses would be relegated to an arrival plaza located on the bottom level of the new structure across Harbor.

And if that concept for the new structure makes it through final approvals, all arriving visitors on the east side of the property would then be processed through this new structure and directed over the skybridge, whether they were arriving by private car, shuttle bus, or people mover. The opening of the Toy Story lot, with 3,600 new spaces, has given TDA breathing room as only on the busiest of days when no AP blockouts are in effect do they risk running out of parking now. But with a major expansion of DCA in the next two years, the clock is ticking.

http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al070610a.htm

The future is alive

With all of this good news pouring in to Anaheim, and Tom Staggs becoming a familiar face in Anaheim and logging as many visits to Disneyland in his first six months as Jay Rasulo had done in his entire six years in the same post, there’s little wonder why the mood is so giddy back in the TDA building. George Kalogridis has taken some very positive steps to change the Cast Member environment in recent months, in addition to being a welcome change by simply taking regular strolls out in the theme parks he manages. George has developed a good working relationship with both Tony Baxter and John Lasseter, two chief executives who visit Disneyland regularly both on business and for pleasure, and it’s easy to see that the park still sparkles with the beefed up maintenance budgets TDA originally gave it for the 50th Anniversary but that continue through its 55th.

The snazzy upgrades Tony is pouring into major and minor attractions all over the park, from Snow White’s Scary Adventures to the Rivers of America to the Indiana Jones Adventure, are keeping him busy while the bigger plans for major Disneyland expansion continue to brew in Glendale. (And you can bet Tony’s originally modest plan to add the Hatbox Ghost back to Haunted Mansion in ’09 will get a major budget boost now that the high-profile Guillermo del Toro movie has gotten the greenlight.)

Those plans to add more capacity to Disneyland in the form of new attractions once the first phase of DCA expansion is done continues to move forward, and expanding Frontierland beyond the Big Thunder Ranch area is still a leading contender (area shown above). However, the swiftness with which World of Color changed crowd patterns between the two parks is being noted by those TDA planners tasked with the Disneyland capacity expansion, and they will be watching this fall and winter to see if that pattern holds up.

That type of logistical capacity is watched very closely by Disney, as the goal is to balance the daily peak crowds effectively, which is why the underutilized Frontierland area is such a favorite right now. 2011 was once thought to be a small incremental step for DCA towards its final relaunch in 2012, but with Star Tours 2.0 and the Soundsational parade and Little Mermaid and the rebuilt Paradise Pier area all opening next May, the summer of 2011 could build on the strong World of Color success and be a truly blockbuster year for Anaheim.

Now if they can just figure out a way to get all those people through a DCA main entrance that will be in the middle of a complete demolition.

http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al080310a.htm

En lien, un sujet est désormais ouvert dans la section Imagineering du forum, laissez parler votre créativité!

http://www.disneycentralplaza.com/imagineering-f9/disneyland-park-vos-idees-pour-les-futures-attractions-t17368.htm#719345

Horsing Around

Back over at Disneyland, planning continues for the follow-up act to DCA’s 1.2 Billion extreme makeover. We’ve detailed before that two main concepts have been in the running here, another makeover for Tomorrowland that brings back a PeopleMover concept and repurposes the rotating waste of space that is Innoventions, and a big expansion on the northern edge of Frontierland. Tom Staggs may have sent much of WDW’s Fantasyland remake back to the drawing boards, but after several presentations and a few walking tours he is letting both TDA and WDI move forward with their Disneyland expansion planning.

It helps immensely that Staggs visits Disneyland quite regularly with his young family, and so he is familiar with the Anaheim property and its leadership team. We’ve told you how he's a very different type of Disney Parks leader than Jay Rasulo was, as Rasulo could go for more than a year without stepping foot in Anaheim, and then only for a scripted media event where he showed absolutely no interest in the actual parks. John Lasseter’s giddy focus on absolutely anything related to Disneyland continues to help the cause here as well.



As of this fall, it’s that Frontierland expansion that is gaining traction to be the first out of the gate, so much so that TDA has recently commissioned work on the feasibility of moving the park’s Circle D horse ranch (shown above) off-property so that the Disneyland expansion can take up all of the space currently used for horse corrals and animal care facilities. In order to preserve the animals appearing daily in Disneyland in Frontierland and on Main Street however, a new piece of land will need to be found nearby where a ranch could be set up and the animals shuttled in trailers to and from the park each day.



Currently in the running is some vacant land sitting just south of the Toy Story parking lot, although the residents living in the apartments nearby probably won’t be big fans of that move. There is also some space on the opposite side of the Santa Ana Freeway, on land currently surrounded by industrial parks where the smell won’t be as big of a problem.

Also to be ironed out is what exact form the small collection of attractions here will take, as TDA has been wanting another water-based family thrill ride for Disneyland, while Imagineers keep sketching wagon trains or stagecoaches. What may also weigh into all this is the Lone Ranger film that's in the works at Disney, apparently with Pirates director and star (Gore Verbinski and Johnny Depp) attached.

There are quite a few hurdles to clear, both logistical and financial, before bulldozers start to move in behind Frontierland, but the need to expand Disneyland’s overall capacity continues to be at the top of the Anaheim executives to-do list and it will be a major part of their planning here in fiscal year 2011.


Pumbaa Parking Pause

Since the parking troubles have cleared up for both the Hallowen parties, and average busy weekends, the TDA planners are trying to figure out the impact that the new Toy Story parking lot has on the Resort. That parking lot, which generally gets high reviews for easy accessibility and a faster way to get to the parks than the grimy parking structure and the over-burdened trams, has yet to actually fill up all of its 3,600 spaces on even the busiest days. But just taking a few extra thousand cars out of the parking structure seems to have made a big improvement in the overall ebb and flow of cars and traffic around Disneyland.

It’s for that reason that the big parking structure we told you about last year to be built on the Pumbaa parking lot has been put on hold again. TDA has amassed a surprising list of land parcels surrounding that Pumbaa lot, and eventually the 8,000 space structure will be built. But for now, TDA is happy to bank the $200 Million they had approved from Burbank and wait a bit longer. The uncertainty of where all the funding will come from for Anaheim’s people-mover system that will have a major station in that new structure hasn’t helped push the project forward either. So, for now, TDA has pushed the new structure on to the back burner and is happy to wait a bit longer.

http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al101910a.htm

Hi, DCP is a French forum. Thank you for your understanding;)

Bon, en même temps ça fait un bail que Al Lutz tourne autour du pot. Depuis des années on entend parler d'extensions pour le Disneyland Park, ici comme sur Blue Sky Disney. Mais toujours rien de concrêt sur le contenu...

Oui mais là ça se précise quand même!
Quand au contenu, on peut penser qu'on se dirige vers une simple extension du thème de Frontierland et non pas la création d'un nouveau land avec un nouveau thème...

Moi, je croise les doigts: Western River Expedition! Western River Expedition! Western River Expedition!

Ah non, ils ont assez de futures attractions eux. Place à Disneyland Paris maintenant.

WDI aurait récemment reçu l'autorisation de développer une attraction pour Disneyland basée sur Tron Legacy.

Disney Imagineers said to be working on a 'Tron Legacy' ride
by Leigh Caldwell (RSS feed) on Nov 8th 2010 at 12:00PMwww.gadling.com/media/2010/11/tronlegacy1108lc.jpg" border="0" alt="" />

The next Disney movie to get a ride at Disneyland may be more futuristic than fairytale. The blog Blue Sky Disney is reporting that Disney Imagineers have been given the green light to develop a ride treatment for the upcoming movie "Tron Legacy."

Disney Parks have gone a little Tron crazy this fall, with a Tron-wrapped monorail at Walt Disney World and a nighttime elecTRONica party at Disney's California Adventure.

Last week, Disney added a new "Tron Legacy" scene to the World of Color show at Disney's California Adventure, the first addition to the show since it premiered earlier this year.

Slashfilm is giving further credibility to the rumors, reporting that Disney Imagineers - the folks that design Disney's rides and attractions - visited the Tron movie set in Toronto to study the sets, props and concept art being used on the film.

So, while Walt Disney World adds princess castles and The Little Mermaid ride during its Fantasyland expansion, Disneyland may be looking to Tomorrowland for the next big changes at the California theme park.

http://www.gadling.com/2010/11/08/disney-imagineers-said-to-be-working-on-a-tron-legacy-ride/

L'esplanade entre Disneyland et DCA pourrait enfin apparaitre telle qu'elle avait été prévue par WDI (fontaine et végétation) avant les coupes budgétaires de Paul Pressler à la fin des années 1990...

Escaping the Esplande

The end result will be well worth it though, as anyone who has poured over the intricate models and sketches at WDI can attest. And with DCA getting a much more dramatic entry to rival Disneyland’s iconic and charming entry across the way, the Imagineers have recently been selling an interested TDA on the idea of sprucing up the sprawling Esplanade space between the two parks.

While not nearly as disastrously designed as the adjacent shuttle bus loading area, that central Esplanade had the fountains and lavish furnishings cut out of its budget midway through the project by Paul Pressler in the late 1990’s. It ended up as a basic brick plaza, with its only real design flourish being an inlaid travertine compass in the center that the Custodial department dutifully surrounds with a bevy of ugly plastic warning cones at the slightest hint of precipitation, owing to its slippery when wet surface.




The proposal gaining steam now is to install a slender, majestic fountain in the very center of the plaza where the compass is now, and add additional landscaping to soften the perimeters and the boxy ticket booths flanking each side. The timing of this work is part of the debate, as TDA simply can’t gamble with yet another headache construction project until the DCA entry is heading into the final stretch by late 2011 or early 2012. Regardless of the decision to be made on the Esplanade, Disneyland Resort President George Kalogridis has already approved a nice chunk of money this year to replace the industrial signage and furnishings in the adjacent shuttle bus area with more attractive looking signage and equipment.

While the plans for the 6,000+ space parking garage on the Pumbaa parking lot remain on hold due to ongoing struggles getting the high speed rail station and accompanying people mover system built in Anaheim, the sprucing up of the shuttle bus area is seen as a stopgap measure to erase one of the most glaring errors from that 1990’s design blunder.

http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al010411a.htm

Alors que Disney n'a toujours pas évoqué officiellement le futur de Tomorrowland et du nord de Frontierland, le Président de Disneyland Resort a évoqué de possibles futurs évènements qui ne seraient éventuellement réservés qu'aux membres D23 (et/ou Club 33): "dine with an Imagineer" et le fait de pouvoir revivre d'anciennes attractions/restaurants... Pas vraiment plus de précisions pour l'instant!

The second announcement was decidedly vague, with hints at new high-end special events for guests wanting Club 33-style exclusive access and events. George asked the audience if they'd like to dine in the Haunted Mansion with Disney Imagineers, or once again experience classic attractions like America the Beautiful in Circarama or dine at the Tahitian Terrace.


http://micechat.com/blogs/dateline-disneyland/3078-d23-expo-recap-parks-resorts-walt-disney-studios-disney-legends-archives-more.html

Getting to know you...

We’ve been telling you in past updates how TDA has been working on plans to manage what is really an embarrassment of riches for them; the giant population of Annual Passholders who have been holding steady around the 900,000 mark. That huge demographic is not without its challenges, as many use the Resort in ways that it wasn’t designed to handle. When the overall Resort facility was created in the 1990’s it was based on a very typical 20th century model that assumed most park visitors would arrive in the morning, stay most of the day, and depart gradually through the evening.

While Disneyland still pulls in millions of tourists annually from around the world who visit the parks that way, there is a huge swath of Annual Passholders who have created their own way of popping in for just a few hours, sometimes in numbers so large it simply overwhelms the Anaheim and Resort infrastructure. But overall TDA is now comfortable with working with the current number of Annual Passholders so long as that number stays under the one million mark. What they’d like to do instead of getting the number higher, however, is cultivate a better relationship with some groups of AP’s who may have stopped visiting after just using their pass once or twice.

The first test of this new relationship-building program will happen later this month, when Disneyland will invite thousands of Annual Passholders to a special after-hours party, with their valid AP their ticket in. Now scheduled to take place Wednesday, October 12th and Monday, October 17th, these parties will be held just after the park closes to regular guests at 8 PM. From 9 PM to Midnight, Main Street, Tomorrowland and Fantasyland will be open and all attractions will be operating.

The highlight of the evening is a special performance of the popular new Mickey’s Soundsational Parade during the party. That parade has tested extremely well with Disney’s customer research group, and at night the snazzy built in lighting effects on each float really make the show sparkle. It will all be a throwback to the special AP parties Disneyland used to host regularly back in the 1990’s, and it’s by invitation only for select Annual Passholders.


What’s most interesting here is how they have pulled together the guest list for these first two events, after they mined the Annual Passholder database for specific characteristics. Rather than reward their best customers who visit the most often, the invites to these two parties will be going out to passholders who bought their pass within the last year, but only used it once or twice and who haven’t returned to the property for at least the last four months. Conveniently, this would be a demographic of locals who haven’t seen the new Soundsational Parade and who haven’t been on the new Star Tours ride, both of which will be offered at the parties with short waits and small crowds.

Once the parties are over, you can bet Disney will be tracking every one of the passholders who accepted the invitation and went to the test party. In addition to the obligatory customer research teams asking people questions with their touch pads during the parties, TDA is going to be tracking the use of the passes of these partygoers over the next few months and contrasting them to a similar group of people who only used their pass once or twice in the last year but who weren’t invited to the party.

The hope is that this special party experience will remind them why they have the pass in the first place, and that they’ll head back to Disneyland at least one more time this fall or winter. If it pans out the way TDA hopes, and both spending and visitation increase from those invited to the party, you can expect to see more of these events over the winter for people who aren’t using their pass much.

The rest of you, don't worry. The second prong of this AP cultivation program is coming later this year and is aimed at the opposite end of the spectrum; the super fans who use their pass to visit the park three or four times per month and often just swoop in for a few hours on Friday night or Sunday afternoon and rarely spend any money beyond a churro or a cocktail at elecTRONica. It’s that type of pass usage that can really tax the Resort infrastructure when so many people show up for short periods of time, often driving in alone or with just one other person and putting the Resort’s parking, transportation systems, main entrance complex, and surface streets all into crisis mode.

The parties aimed at this other demographic have already been hinted at during the D23 Expo presentation. Rather than just offer up existing rides and parades that the frequent visitor would have already experienced multiple times, the hook here will be to offer up a themed night where an attraction from yesteryear would magically reappear for the evening and offer up an experience no regular Disneyland guest could have.


This is when they would recreate the Tahitian Terrace restaurant for an evening with lots of temporary props hiding the vague Aladdin theme, and have a Luau dinner show before releasing the crowd to experience the other four Adventureland attractions they’ve done a million times in the past. Or, build a temporary outdoor version of the CircleVision Theater in Tomorrowland and show America The Beautiful throughout the evening while the band plays retro hits at Tomorrowland Terrace and the nearby rides operate.

Like the first round of AP events in October, the invitations to these parties will go out to carefully screened passholders who fit a precise pattern of pass usage and spending patterns. But unlike the first round of free parties in October, these specialty themed events are slated to come with an up charge to defray the costs of all the extra work it would require to pull off successfully. Of course you can also wonder if there will also be plenty of ultra-limited, uniquely themed and oh-so-pricey merchandise to be had.

The thought here is to not only eke out a small profit, but also to satisfy the demand for the park enough that this very enthusiastic demographic may then cut out a few return visits over time. After you’ve gone to an elaborately themed dinner party inside the Haunted Mansion, would simply riding the attraction with the tourists still be interesting? TDA hopes not.

Much like the first round of less-interested guinea pigs this October, TDA will be monitoring the pass usage of these theme night party guests to see if they cut back on their visitation after the parties, or if they just keep showing up the following Friday night like they normally do. It’s hoped these themed events will maintain and even strengthen the fans intense allegiance to Disneyland, but perhaps dial back their constant yet short-term use of the place.

It’s going to be an interesting experiment, and really only a tiny percentage of Annual Passholders will get an invitation over the next few months, at least during this initial testing phase. But you have to hand it to TDA for really thinking outside the box in an attempt to try to manage and control a very large, diverse and ultra picky group of customers.

http://miceage.micechat.com/allutz/al092711a.htm