Hi there, I wanted to share some thoughts about a recent trip to the Disneyland Resort in California. I travelled with a family of 4 from the UK and stayed at the Pixar Place hotel from August 18th through 23rd, and visited Disneyland on the 19th, 20th and 22nd, and California Adventure on the 21st. We loved it, but thoughts on some struggles below.
Lightning Lane Multi-Pass.
This was the most unsatisfactory part of our trip. I felt I spent more time on my phone than with my family - opposite of what I wanted to achieve on my vacation. When trying to book, some rides had waits for several hours, or had booked out for the day. This left me feeling like I wasn’t sure what I’d paid the extra for.
After returning to the UK, I was looking at Disneyland Paris and noticed they offer a different scheme, Premier Access, which has two offers: one much like Lightning Lane Single Pass, and the other offering the ability to visit an attraction using the fast lane at any time, without booking, once for each eligible attraction.
Legoland offers a variety of tickets, including a virtual line at the same wait time as the physical line, a 50% reduction of physical line, and no wait time. We visited Universal Studios Hollywood while in California and purchased the VIP package, and had an excellent day.
I understand that there might be a desire to not create tiers or classes of guests but I would certainly pay more for an experience that allow me to plan less (i.e. be on my phone less) and wait less. That you have such an offer at your other resorts should suggest you should have data to compare guest experiences along with profit impact.
Lack of vegetarian food.
My wife and daughter are vegetarians and both struggled to find food they wanted to purchase and eat. They ended up living on Mac and Cheese or Grilled Cheese at the parks. For a family park, the restaurants didn’t seem to offer a variety of child-friendly meals, or regular meals at a smaller portion. This was noticeable for our experience, and while I might expect it at a smaller park, I think Disney resorts could be doing better. Alien Pizza Planet for instance doesn’t offer one vegetarian pasta dish, or offer a kids portion of pasta. This feels like a miss, and an easy one to address.
Family rooms.
My kids are 9 and 6, and don’t really want to share a bed anymore. I’ve stayed at Legoland in the UK a few times, and they offer bunk beds, along with additional cabin and sofa-beds. They are also in nooks in the room, meaning you can put the kids to bed, and stay up a while. This was not possible at the Pixar Place, with two queen beds in an open plan room. Overall, this makes it feel like a regular hotel room, rather than a family room, or a Disney experience.
Elevators in Pixar Place Hotel.
I would encourage you to visit the hotel, dressed as a guest, and experience the elevators at various times of the day, especially heavier traffic times around park opening, closing and after fireworks. I was told one was out of service and it was otherwise fine, but this felt like not going deeper to understand the problem. Some might be physical changes, some might be programming of the system.
This was something a number of other guests mentioned to me as an annoyance with their stay. Issues include:
- Not being able to see where an elevator is while waiting, therefore not setting an expectation that one is coming, or how long it will be.
- This lead to people calling the elevator more than once, and being assigned a different shaft, contributing to back-pressure, later stopping on floors that didn’t have anyone waiting and further slowing down the trips.
- This also led to one morning, a group waiting deciding to take the emergency stairs (which don’t have an re-entry mechanism, which I would have used when going from the 1st to pool levels for example)
- Waiting for an elevator, and when one stopped the car being full
- Only 1 elevator seemed to be in use on 8/22 which made things worse.
There were also a number of smaller things I wanted to share. The above were things which had a material impact on our trip. The following were more “paper cuts” we experienced.
Park experience
Haunted Mansion virtual queue.
We abandoned our virtual queue twice for the Haunted Mansion as the physical queue was snaked up and back from Tianna’s place, making the virtual aspect redundant. It seemed to me that virtual queue tickets were being released before the physical queue line had diminished.
Star Tours variation
We visited the Star Tours attraction multiple times over the 3 days we spent in Disneyland, but seemed to not get the variation I had expected. I have heard there are about 40-50 combinations, yet we seemed to get the same a few times. This is what I remember experiencing:
- Start: Darth Vader, probe droid (multiple)
- Middle: Mandarin and Grogu, Cassian Andor, Ashoka Tano
- End: Hoth (multiple), Kashyyyk
Soarin’.
Doing a quick search, this looks like it’s provided by Brogent, which also powers Legoland “Flight of the Sky Lion” in the UK which is factors of times a more immersive and enjoyable experience. I believe Legoland California uses the same technology for a Lego Movie experience. I’d encourage you to visit these attractions and consider if you could repurpose Soarin’. Given the franchises you have, there is huge potential for this ride that I don’t think you are getting at the moment. This has the potential to be the next Star Tours
Ride breakdown
I understand that rides breakdown, but it seemed to happen a lot. It happened to us on Goofy’s Sky School, Grizzly Bear, and Luigi’s Rollickin’ Roadsters.
Renovations
Maybe it was the time of year we visited, but it seemed there were a lot of attractions down for renovation, which was disappointing.
- Animation Academy
- Monorail
- Railroad
- Mr. Lincoln
- Space Mountain
- Splash Mountain / Tianna’s
Weather.
It was very hot for our visit (8/18-8/22). We had gone to Universal Studios Hollywood on 8/9, and there were misters all around the park. I noticed some at Rise of the Resistance, but I couldn’t see any elsewhere. Consider getting some for the hotter weather. Some rides would also benefit from more shade. For example, Mr Toad had a metal frame, but no cover, which should be simple to install.
Technology
Mobile merchandising.
This didn’t work after multiple attempts, with no error given. I ended up standing in a physical line which would have been shorter to do in the first place.
SMS.
I couldn’t receive SMS for restaurant reservations on my UK number. Why not use WhatsApp, email or the resort app?
Pixar Place
Pool experience at Pixar Place.
The tiles around the pool were very slippery, if it’s too late to install non-slip tiles, you might consider non-slip mats. My 6 year old fell over and I saw others also. Also the side tables around the fire pits are not flat. This might be ‘fun’, but isn’t practical to put drinks or food on.
Construction at Pixar Place.
I understand there is renovation at the hotel but on 8/22 this started at 6.30am! This sort of thing should really be within certain hours and start much later than 6.30am.
Great Maple
We visited Great Maple on our last morning before heading the airport. This seemed to be the only restaurant we visited where we had to ask for table water, the service was slow even though it didn’t appear busy, and the kids’ options seemed limited, not even offering pancakes. We ended up asking for a full size pancake meal which thankfully our server said we could order as a single pancake (which wasn’t shown as an option).