Disney's FastPass: A Complicated History

It was made a couple of years ago, but Defuncland's "Disney's FastPass: A complicated history" is an incredible documentary that I watched this year. You don't need to know too much about Disney for it to absorb you in. [Defunctland]: ▶ this video

> Concentrated harm and distributed benefit is a recipe to have a few vociferous complainers and many silent beneficiaries A fascinating example of this with queuing humans is the Disney Fastpass system (1). I think the real design goal to avoid "complainers" is to try and optimize the wait time for your resource to avoid a bimodal distribution and try and spread it out for the average rider, rather than make wait times worse for the majority of people but better for the people who game the system. (1) ▶ this video , yes this is an 1:45 long video on the history and a simulation of Disney parks, but its worth the payoff.

Real life queues can be scary too. I think of how complicated Disney's fast pass system got ▶ this video . Luckily with software it is way easier to get more servers than it is to build more theme park rides.

Uh, so... That's basically Disney World right now. You must reserve your visit to the park, and there's a paid system (Genie+) to compete for ride times without waiting in line. And there's a really good video someone did on the evolution and systems engineering behind the Genie+ / FastPass system: ▶ this video

I don't get it either. My understanding is that with a queue, we are trading our time to get what we want. Is he saying instead of trading time, we should fork out cash to jump the queue? Here is a TWO hour long documentary on Youtube that talked all the machinations/tweaks Disneyland made to queueing. TLDR, you have to stay at a Disney Hotel to really jump the queue, buy some crazy app, and make reservations months in advance. It is really stupid. ▶ this video

People who do not understand the role of balking and price information act at their own peril. This economic backpressure is something that executives hate - it keeps line from going up - but people who actually do the work love, because it keeps workloads manageable. If you ever wanted a feature-length explanation of queueing theory and how ignoring it makes everything worse, well... here you go: ▶ this video . The context is Disney parks and Fastpass, but the lessons are applicable to basically any business. Everything is a queue.

After I took my kids day after thanksgiving for the first time last Friday, I was wondering why this problem simply exists. And how is it possible to pay such big amount of money for outdated experiences that we had. There is a nice analysis of everything that Disney tried as far as controlling lines: ▶ this video As a person that came from USSR, I see that many of the issues are created by removing money as a control mechanism of supply and demand. If you pay entrance fee and then remove fine tuning for each ride, the result is long lines. My personal opinion is that pay-per-ride is a much better model although I can see how many may disagree. From my childhood in a country where money did not have much meaning, I learned that all-you-can eat mode for a price of entry will be filled with schemes, long lines, and tricks to game the system.

For anyone interested in the Fast App discussion from this article, I highly recommend this video from Defunct Land -- ▶ this video The video not only does a deep dive into fast pass, but also does a statistical model break down to reveal that the modern implementation of fast pass is actually not what you might expect and serves to increase wait times for rides!