Things may be changing for the Park Hopper Pass option at Walt Disney World. Unfortunately, it seems not for the better for the guests.
The good folks over at WDW Magic are reporting that one of their sources close to Disney Parks’ plans is telling them that the system for park hopping is about to undergo a serious change. According to the alleged leak, Disney World would switch one of the last remaining non-reservation systems at the resort so that Park Hopper tickets no longer allow a guest to simply go to a theme park of their choice after 2PM. Instead, they would need to go back onto their screen and set up a reservation in the same way that guests already have to reserve a theme park prior to their first entry, usually in the morning.
Currently, park hopping is allowed at 2pm without a reservation, as long as the guest has a valid ticket and a reservation for the first park of the day.
In plans being considered, a guest would be able to make a reservation for secondary parks at other times and not be restricted to 2pm.
Do not let the time restriction removal fool you. This is not in any way a positive for consumers and Disney World guests in my opinion.
The issue is that if park hopping becomes restricted to a reservation system on technology, we’re again stuck with this terrible situation in which a guest cannot easily decide to go to a park that is less crowded. The reason is that you’ll need to lock in that park switch in advance, so good luck figuring out on the day of your visit that you need to go to Epcot instead of Animal Kingdom for example. The other reason this is a negative change is because Disney will be able to restrict park hopping much more based on crowd levels. What a joy it will be to try to park hop to Magic Kingdom around 5 PM to have some fun before the fireworks only to find out your Disney World app won’t let you go anywhere except Hollywood Studios that evening.
It gets even worse if you’re a Disney World journalist or an Annual Passholder. For those trying to cover news at Disney World, it’s going to be far more difficult to park hop to a spot that has something going on in the afternoon or evening. For Annual Passholders, the freedom to jump from park-to-park without having to do all those reservations is being taken away.
Yes, it will make it slightly easier for Disney to control crowds. Yes, they can further monetize it for multiple park hops per day. And no, none of this is good for the quality of services at Disney World. Here’s to hoping that it never happens.
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Are they purposely trying to drive folks away and possibly drive more people to Universal? We enjoyed the park hopper option when our children were younger. For about 6 years, we park hopped hitting 2 or 3 parks in a day. Sad day for sure if this comes to fruition.
They have excellent marketing … for Universal.
The news just dropped about Chapek’s extension. I’m now sitting here eagerly waiting for a TPP/WDW Pro’s article to drop :D