It’s not the typical way you see Disney Parks operate. Usually, a new ride (or a modified attraction) are handed from Walt Disney Imagineering — the entity that designs and implements Disney Park rides — to parks operations and maintenance. And usually those attractions are in pristine, perfect condition. After all, a broken ride is not a good time for fans clamoring to try out a fantastic new experience.
But typical is not how they are opening Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, the controversial attraction replacing Splash Mountain. The ride is controversial because Splash Mountain was the most popular ride at the Disney Parks according to polling, but now it’s gone due to racial issues. The powers that be deemed the attraction problematic during 2020 and now it has been replaced by a ride called a “necessary downgrade“. Not only is the ride perceived as a downgrade by many, but it also just doesn’t work. The attraction has very frequently failed to run during cast member previews, media previews, celebrity experiences and annual passholder previews. We’ve seen fire alarms going off, celebrities stuck in logs, and plenty of animatronics failing badly.
Now, the company appears to be accepting its fate of opening an attraction likely to fail for the foreseeable future. Tiana’s Bayou Adventure will open with two options for riding it. Guests can opt to try for a lottery system whereby they get on their mobile devices at a particular time (twice daily) and try to score a pass to ride the attraction later in the day. If they fail to get in with that “virtual queue,” the next option is to pay money to ride the attraction. Just like with recent openings, there are no standard lines for guests to wait in like normal. And for Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, that’s helpful to Disney because they can hide when it is broken down more easily.
And in the likely event it is broken often, they’ve added a new feature to the MyDisney App to handle the problem. Which, by the way, indicates the problems are unlikely to be worked out anytime soon. Otherwise, why would you got the trouble of adding a new system to the code of your Parks app?
When Tiana’s Bayou Adventure breaks down, the virtual queue now says “Boarding Paused’. This lets Passholders know that the boarding group process has stopped. — Mickey Blog
The new MyDisney App status for broken rides with lightning lanes.
Where this gets really hairy for Disney is with the general public paying good money to ride the attraction. It’s going to be harder and harder to convince folks to part ways with their hard-earned cash if there’s a fear they won’t get to even ride the log flume because it’s down so much they’re adding new “market tested” phrases for describing its broken status. Not good, Disney. Not good.
Save your dollars for an Epic Universe vacation. New rides that actually work!!!
I sure hope that Universal is putting good backstage security into Epic Universe, because if things continue down this path I can imagine current Disney mgmt. sending saboteurs in to make U’s rides as fault-prone as Disney’s–and I wish I didn’t have to imagine that, but the current circumstances force me to.