Featured Image Courtesy: The Walt Disney Company
The Walt Disney Company is having an especially difficult time with their international theme parks and resorts. While Walt Disney World is doing great in terms of pandemic profit, and Disneyland is okay, the non-domestic locations are a different story. Just yesterday, That Park Place ran an article about Disney’s sudden loss of Shanghai Disneyland revenue for a few days over a COVID issue in China. Now, Disneyland Paris is joining the foray of problems as workers are striking and picketing at the resort.
Back in mid-October, Inside the Magic was reporting on an issue in which workers at Disneyland Paris had stopped coming to work for a hotel there. While the article labels cast members as being the problem, that’s not actually the case. In that situation, it was a third party contractor that saw workers stop coming. Their assignment was to keep the rooms clean, so without their appearance, guests at Newport Bay Club Resort were left to sleep in the lobby.
Image Credit: Twitter user @mataclanes & @ES92
Now, however, more picketing and striking is occurring at Disneyland Paris, and it’s starting to be a real downer for the start to the holidays. Disney had hoped to reverse course for Disneyland Paris after a series of rules during the pandemic have left the European park significantly less enjoyable than its American counterparts. Now, you might think that’s a fair trade off: less to do but more safety. For Disney, however, that’s beside the point as they simply need something to bring in the tourists. That’s difficult to do when all your theaters are essentially closed or so limited in capacity as to be nearly closed. The cascade effect of having most of your theaters shut down is that lines then become much longer for normal attractions. And this has not been helped by the roll out of paid FastPasses at DLP which mirror Disney World’s changes but with higher costs attached.
The introduction of Mickey’s Dazzling Christmas Parade is hopefully going to stop the bleeding at Europe’s only Disney Resort. For a holiday-specific feature, it certainly appears to have been an expensive endeavor. The only way guests are going to come to enjoy such treats, however, is if Disney can figure out a way to keep cast and contractors happy and on the job. Historically, that’s not been easy near Paris.
