Thanks for the thoughts. The foreign tax etc. compliance seems most logical. Although given it is still a service that can only be used at WDW, basically the same as a hotel room or meal, I’m not sure I understand the difference if one can still book those remotely. And what would be the difference compliance wise from an App vs. website booking for any of this? Very odd.
Hopefully the theories that it opens up eventually to the most used countries happens.
So if they can redirect to the website for ADRs they could do the same for the website.
And yet we can mobile order from the app AND pay for it.
None of it makes sense.
I know…
I don’t know the answer, but I would imagine there could be laws / taxes specific to allowing in-app purchases. And even if there could be such laws or tax levies (even if there aren’t) that still requires hiring a tax and compliance lawyer to determine whether there is one that is applicable, and building in the functionality to levy the tax if needed. You have to build in that person’s fees into the number of customers you collect LL revenues from, before you even get to covering the cost of LL itself and profit. If there are thousands of users in a country, it probably pays for itself. If there are only a handful, maybe not.
I know nothing of laws and taxes but….could Disney possibly allow those outside of US and Canada to make selections but not pay until they arrive? If they don’t pay the LL’s are cancelled.
If they are using essentially the old fast pass system, why are they requiring the use of the app only? I seem to remember being able to book fast passes in advance on my laptop prior to 2020…
I had my call with Disney, and honestly it was a waste of time but it was always going to be.
She told me it was because of payment security. I politely told her that was total BS because we can mobile order and pay from the UK with no issues. But that’s what they have been told to say.
She said they have had a lot of feedback from British guests and they were listening, and there is the possibility that it might change in future.
What else? I told her that it made me want to spend more time at Universal because they don’t make us feel like second class citizens, and she said that was never Disney’s intention and they hope it doesn’t put British guests off coming. And again, that it could change and that it was for security reasons.
She was unable to give any assurance that there will be Lightning lane slots held back to book day of.
Thank you for taking the time to talk to them, even though their response was canned BS. I truly hope they resolve this soon so international visitors aren’t at a disadvantage for LL selection.
Yup. Their answer makes no sense. Really unfair to international guests.
Thanks to our punitive cancellation penalties people will still go this year. I just hope they see a massive drop in bookings though.
I can’t bring myself to “heart” this. But thanks for posting.
You’re welcome.
I know it sound like it must be something like this - but this is fake news / a red herring - probably put about my Disney in an effort to look like their hands are tied. Their hands are not tied.
Why do I say this? I guess its laboring the point but I think its worth putting it down in text.
As others have pointed out, the app (and website) accomodates ADR, hotel and other purchases online and remotely from the Disney USA region. We can place an order for a ADR, preauth, etc. and complete the process. Its a reservation - and we can pay on delivery of the service or pay the forfeiture cost. So in this case - I could reserve a table at Space220 for next week, add my VISA, it all gets confirmed. And when I am a no show as I am in the UK and havent left the country, i will be charged the no show fee in USD. The tax component of this, is all Florida and Federal taxes as if I were paying for a meal in person. So if we correlate this scenario to prebooking a LL, the only real difference is they “might” make you prepay (in theory - wont know til 24 July). In that case we would then have the situation like a prepaid hotel room in the USA being bought from the UK - again, same thing - local taxes etc paid in USD would be charged.
As mentioned by others and myself - the logical thing to expect, given the potential for high volume cancels/no shows for LL asking for a refund - is that Disney adopt a similar reservation system as ADR’s that caps at say 2-24hrs before as a no show policy and only then charges your card. This would save both Disney and its customers a world of pain as they clearly do not want the Customer services traffic, or complaints, or ill will around the new system.
If we look at cross-border sales in general - typically the tax incidence for the supplier falls within the location the service or good is provided/sold - not the place you make the order. If i buy something on ebay USA, it charges local taxes etc and I pay on paypal in USD. Then its all good until it hits the UK border - at which point ADDITIONAL tax is added by the customs services which I would pay on delivery. This is because its a local tax to the buyer, no the supplier. If I am going to New York from the UK and buy a non cancellable hotel room on Orbitz, or buy digital tickets to a Mets game, I pay online the full price in USD with local taxes included. It’s my understanding that the latter case is what we are talking about here - the tax and compliance part of this is irrellvant insofar as sales are concerned because to Disney its just the same ole same ole.
Regardless of all this, physical Disney stores and Disney+ channels operate in the UK and EU just fine and have already dealt with any local compliance issues related to provisioning services and goods. So they have been through this learning curve and done all the use case reviews for this as parts of its other business lines. It is not new ground they need to cover even if there were a EU based issue.
Similarly, there seems to be a “economics dont justify it” argument for Disney not sorting this out. This is like saying “the international customers are not worth it”. And yet we are talking about the highest-yield per visit customers on their books - the “whales”. Also Disney are not short of money, and will never be short of it as they can dynamically price park (ang genie+) tickets to compensate for losses in general. Many times on blogs and podcasts you will hear the pundits comment on how dynamic pricing moves around, and genie/LL prices “still havent hit a point that stops people buying them so Disney will still raise them”. This is a known thing they do around film, resort and other losses too - cover them with the cash cows of parks and cruises. Its actually a super smart business methodology, and all credit to them.
All the above just meant to clarify that there does not really seem to be any real reason to justify continued geofencing of the app LL sales after 24 July (but probably good reasons in the old “buy it at 7am” system).
As Nicky_S points out - website surely must be the way to go on this as a workaround.
I’m sure there is a reason, and it is probably related to money. Whether it’s a sufficient impediment that they won’t work around it, particularly if enough people complain, is the question.
Frankly that’s of little consolation to anyone with a trip booked. We don’t know if or when they might do something to help, and we can’t cancel either. They have international guests over a barrel with this. We don’t even have the option to use our tickets another time.
Disney is a $180bn company. It has all the resources it needs to make this work. Claims about taxes and regulations and so on are nonsense.
There are times when Disney makes incredibly dumb business decisions. Sometimes these cost it tens, even hundreds of millions of dollars.
This is one of those decisions.
I have said before that the Universal value proposition is so much better than the Disney one. And when Epic Universe opens it will be the end of Disney for a lot of UK visitors.
Disney is pricing itself out of the market while continuing to reduce the value, entirely ignoring the massive competitive threat on its own doorstep.
And wait until Brits discover Japan.
I’m not trying to console. I think it’s perfectly appropriate for people to feel upset and want to complain about it. It sucks.
I’m not even sure how much it was a calculated decision or just that they set it up and didn’t set up the systems for overseas. Pretty sure that’s how we got blocked from buying MBs- & it gets written up as lovely lovely you can buy you MB when you arrive- now along with your LL bookings.
So mad for anyone who’s going this year
I’m always fascinated when this happens with big companies. DW said to me ‘they clearly haven’t thought about this’. But there’s no way that’s the case.
This - as you say - is an absolutely enormous company, and huge decisions like a new queue-jumping system will have been through dozens of senior meetings to get approval. I don’t work for a company anything like Disney’s size, but Lord knows I have to jump through enough hoops to get things approved.
So they will have thought about international guests. That means either they decided it was a problem but didn’t care (which would be odd, given the bottom-line implications), or group-think kicked in and they convinced each other it would be fine and international guests wouldn’t mind.
The business psychology is amazing. And incredibly annoying.
I get the feeling this system change/rollout was probably managed by the same exec/PM who did starcruiser…
No doubt there was testing and validation of the system change, but more than likely just for USA based test cases as a local test / quick look. I say this having worked in I.T on projects in the past in Texas and Chicago for large american companies and seeing what they did and didnt do.
Since this system interacts with park systems directly to allocate times and tickets, I would guess the testing was mostly operational - e.g. cast members walking around testing if they could book LL from the resorts or onsite for the top rides as a sample and giving the thumbs up. The rest of the internal testing would be automated at best.This is even if they thought that was required - as this was a working system that was just given a new name and a new “days in advance” essentially. I almost get the feeling someone took the current genie+ system, and changed a parameter in the code that said 0 for days allowed in advance, to 7, and then said it works great… Kept it that simple. And then people built up their plans in the organization based on that and started the branding and PR work, along with operational changes. Having never really looked at everything fully. Its a really common thing - lack of regression testing.
I need to also say that the other argument raised here is around Security (as per the CS call mentioned above). Again - this is complete horse manure as far as I can see. Are we seriously to beleive that Disney I.T. regard the USA as the only country in the world which does not present an online threat via its app? Having worked with a couple of PEN test companies, I can tell you that they usually use multiple channels to test vulnerabilities (include physical access) and when testing online do it from multiple locations (either actual or spoofed) as bad-actors generally mask their locations entirely through multiple hops. Frankly - the idea that this one part of the app (buying a LL) is a security issue compared to the rest of it seems ludicrous - and given that the app is probably the less hackable element out of systems in Disney’s estate (websites, supply channel interfaces - like UPS etc, email / CS systems, payroll systems etc) I cant see why it would be a focal point. Anyone serious uses large scale servers and multiple points of entry to try to gain credentials then access. Not sure they are saying someone could steal credentials via MDE - but given it would be fairly slow, awkward and cumbersome - they would no doubt take an easier route in instead of faffing around. Overall though - the risk from the app being compromised from within the USA is no different from the risk of it being compromised from outside the USA - as locations are masked and bad-actors can move around anyways. So I cant see how Disney I.T. would support the security argument.
Disney frankly dont really have a leg to stand on in my view, and yet to hear anything that makes me think they cant turn off geofencing on the app (which is all we a really asking for end of day).