Same
I’ve even started taking a photo of the sku # in case I might decide, when I get home, that I really need it. Never have. Outta sight, outta mind.
I’ve bought more coats in the decade before covid than t-shirts and my main suitcase came from Disneyland.
You’re not wrong!
We did package delivery once in February 2020 and vowed never again. It took forever to get to the resort and I had to keep checking with the shop to see if it had arrived – then didn’t have a way to let you know when to come get it. It was too big a PITA for me.
This is definitely Me. And I’ve decided I’m glad they stopped doing resort delivery
It’s one of the reasons the gift shops are jammed with people at park closing. And there are probably people who want something but change their mind about purchase at park closing because the shops are crowded or lines are long at that time.
I voted for monorail upgrade, both waterparks being open, and the merch delivery.
Monorail upgrade: I can’t believe I rode the same monorail cars in 2025 that I rode during my last visit in 2001. Replace those babies and make them shiny and new. Update the track where necessary. Refurb the whole system so it can run another 50 years.
Both waterparks being open: I don’t think I need to explain this one.
Merch delivery: Put it back to the way it was in the early 2000s. Buy some merch, have it sitting on your bed ~24 hours later. If you buy anything within 24 hours of checkout, it gets delivered to the front of the park instead and you can pick up on the way out. Free of charge, of course.
I voted for merch delivery, but it needs to be included in the cost of the resort. I feel like we have come to accept the rates Disney charges for being in the bubble, but the cost of merch delivery was built into those rates. I understood why they cut it after the pandemic, but it needs to come back now, gratis. And same situation with Magical Express, honestly.
I kind of agree with you…BUT…those are ultimately things that Disney had to make the experience magical enough to ensure they are filling up the rooms. But after they eliminated them (and thereby indirectly driving up revenue…by indirectly, meaning, cutting a cost versus charging extra for something), they found that people will still come in droves. So what motivation would Disney have in bringing back Magical Express?
The package delivery thing I think is a tad different, because, as discussed, I think it legitimately is both a benefit to guests just as much as it is a driver of increases sales for Disney. Win-win. So, they should bring that back without charging, IMO.
If we want to see Disney bring back “magical” things such as Magical Express, they would need to see a fall-off of guests such that it is costing them more to not have Magical Express than it costs them TO have it. (ETA: And…the question is, would bringing back ME result in enough people saying, “Oh, I wasn’t going to go, but now I will!”)
Oh I fully understand why the company wouldn’t bring it back for free. Revenues must always increase. But for the consumer, that doesn’t change the fact that these services were never “free” to begin with.
Well, maybe. That’s a matter of perspective.
It is like with DVC. If you buy direct, you have access to “Membership Extras” which those who buy resale do not get. But the fine print basically states that those “Membership Extras” aren’t really something you are paying for. They can take them away at any time. Those are offered as “Incentives” to hope you pay the big bucks. But they don’t consider it something you are paying for as part of buying DVC direct.
So, from Disney’s perspective, ME would be something that was an incentive, and not really “something you are paying for.” What you are paying for it the privilege ( 
) of staying on property. The fact that ME was included is a perk in the moment in hopes you will actually “pay the big bucks” of staying on property. For Disney, it was cutting into profits, rather than something you were paying for. Much how them offering free dining, or room discounts cuts into profits.
I think I would be really mad if Disney raised resort rates to add merchandise delivery. I used that service once, maybe in 2007? I am at an age that I don’t buy merch, I am looking to give old merch away.
I think it was in the hopes you would never leave their property and financially what you would spend on property would be more than the cost of the service. But then Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash was used by more and more guests and surveys told them guests were spending money off property.
My perspective is that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Any cost of a service provider must be included in the price they charge to the consumer. They may temporarily provide an incentive to juice sales, but over the long term that cost will have to be made up for. So in a long-term, stable system, an “included” incentive will be priced in, whether the consumer knows it or not.
I can’t imagine why they would ever bring it back if they aren’t hurting to fill rooms.
Maintaining so many buses just to drive around property has to be expensive enough, without adding that long haul ride to/from MCO.
Agreed, my poorly worded point is that cost was already built into the rate when they took it away and needs to be given back.
Caveat: It’s been many years since my economics classes in college so maybe my argument below is flawed.
I think WDW is going to charge the hotel room price to consumers that maximizes WDW’s profit and that is unrelated to WDW’s costs, but rather is based on the supply and demand for WDW’s hotel room product. In order to increase demand, WDW could add additional perks like DME to the hotel room product and that increased demand could potentially allow WDW to raise prices, but that price increase would be again based on the supply and the newly increased demand (and is unrelated to WDW’s cost of providing DME).
Edit to add: And I think the reason DME is never coming back is because DME will not drive additional consumer demand for on-site hotel rooms enough to allow WDW to make more profit. Mostly because of @PrincipalTinker point about guests using Uber, Lyft, etc to go off property.
That’s really great Disney legalese, but the reason they offer those incentives is to sell the product. And when they strip away those “incentives,” we get less value for our dollar.
I’m not particularly interested in the corporate justification. Corporations have mastered the art of dipping their hands into our pockets; their interests and mine are increasingly misaligned. I feel okay expressing my discontent with the value Disney offers for my dollar, and I do believe we are reaching a point where the company will need to reevaluate the services they offer for the premium they charge.
I don’t disagree. BUT, using the DVC example again, you are told up front that those “Membership Extras” can go away at any time. So if you are using the existence of those extras as a financial justification, and they they go away, that’s on you…not on Disney.
But, Disney isn’t stupid. They aren’t going to take those extras away willy-nilly. They know that while they COULD, it would be shooting themselves in the foot to do so. More likely would be that Disney will dynamically change the extras, rather than making them just go away.
Another thought about DME, which of course is moot since it’s not coming back. I wonder what the rate of no-shows was for ME and whether that affected the decision to cancel it. We used it a few times, but sometimes would bail and call Uber or whatever if the line looked long or it was a very late night. It didn’t take many long wait/multistop rides to make me think twice about using ME. And then when they started charging for parking, we discovered that if you had signed up for ME that might sometimes indicate you didn’t have a car. If there were a lot of rides booked that were not taken, I’m sure that would have felt like wasted resources.
Correct in a technical sense, but in an equilibrium state, supply, demand, price, and cost will all have a relationship. If not 1-to-1, it will still be correlated.
One way to illustrate this is that if the market price for a hotel room is $100 a night and Hotel 1 and Hotel 2 are identical in every way except that Hotel 2 serves “free” breakfast that costs them $5 per room per night, but which is worth $20 per night to the customers, they could charge $105 per night and still break even but not charge more than $120 without losing more customers than it’s worth. If charging less than $105 causes them to lose money, they would not offer breakfast.
In practice this gets convoluted by multiple factors that go different ways. And remember that increasing occupancy may be worth additional costs per room.