Expectations management (Part V)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

A giant nighttime crowd at the foot of Disneyland’s Main St, USA, looking toward the castle. Image: Mike Saechang https://www.flickr.com/photos/saechang/29066900230/ CC BY-ND: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/
Image: Mike Saechang/CC BY-ND 2.0

This is Part V in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems. In Part III, I described how every fix for long lines just made the problem worse, creating complexity that frustrated first-time visitors and turning annual passholders into entitled “passholes.” In Part IV, I look at the legal and economic dimension of different pricing models for managing aggregate demand.

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Pluralistic: 07 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 06 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 05 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 04 Aug 2021


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Pluralistic: 02 Aug 2021


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Managing aggregate demand (Part IV)

Amusement parks, crowd control and load-balancing

This is Part IV in this series. In Part I, I opened the with news that Disneyland Paris is getting rid of its Fastpasses in favor of a per-ride, per-person premium to skip the line, and explored the history of Disney themeparks and what they meant to Walt Disney. In Part II, I explored Disneyland’s changing business-model and the pressures that shifted it from selling ticket-books to selling all-you-can-eat passes, and the resulting queuing problems. In Part III, I described how every fix for long lines just made the problem worse, creating complexity that frustrated first-time visitors and turning annual passholders into entitled “passholes.”

Continue reading "Managing aggregate demand (Part IV)"

Pluralistic: 01 Aug 2021


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