Featured Image Courtesy: Disney Food Blog
I’ve written before about the realization that Genie+ Lightning Lane passes may not save Disney World guests much time, if any at all. That’s not a good look for Disney when you consider that the cost of Genie+ is basically a $15 up-charge on daily ticket prices. A family of four paying $15 per day in a four-day vacation is looking at approximately $250 in additional cost for their trip… so getting almost nothing in return is a tough sell.
During the Q4 Earnings Report for The Walt Disney Company, CEO Bob Chapek commented on Genie+, and it doesn’t seem that guests are buying into the proposition. According to Chapek, only about one-third of all guests are purchasing the Genie+ service. That was spun as positively as it can be with the following statement:
The majority of Genie and Genie+ users said it improved their overall park experience with nearly one third of park guests upgrading to Genie+.” — Bob Chapek, CEO The Walt Disney Company
There’s a linguistic trick being used here to hide the underperformance of Genie+. Notice how Bob Chapek lumps both the free Genie+ service (that every guests receives) in with the premium Genie+ service when talking about user perception of the product. It’s almost impossible for those two groups to be lumped together and Disney to get a result that says the service(s) are not an improvement. He then transitions to a Genie+ exclusive statement (the paid service), which makes it seem like it is also being viewed as an improvement — but in reality he said no such thing. It’s a clever slight of word.
If Bob Chapek could have said that Genie+ users rate it very highly, wouldn’t he have said that explicitly?
The problem for Disney is that FastPasses have always been free at Walt Disney World, but now they’re not. Genie+ is the thing that charges for FastPasses, which are now called “Lightning Lane” passes, almost assuredly so when a guest complains about paying for them, Disney can say “but we’ve never offered Lightning Lane passes before.” It’s the exact same thing under a different name. And honestly, FastPass is trademarked and a far superior marketing term, so Disney didn’t just spend the money to rename everything and relabel everything for the fun of it.
Image Courtesy: Disney Food Blog
The thing that investors should be taking note of when it comes to Genie+ is that only one-third of guests are buying it. That’s a problem for Disney because the purpose of Genie+ is to allow them to ostensibly raise ticket prices without having to actually raise ticket prices. In other words, they’ve reached a point where the normal ticket is becoming out of reach for many of the guests they say they care about, so to raise the ticket price more they are doing it as a premium offer for a service that was included in every ticket before… but no more. If you run the math though, Disney could have simply raised the ticket price of every guest by five dollars and they would be making the same amount of money that Genie+ currently brings in. And in doing so, they would have not raised the ire of customers in such dramatic fashion.
After all, how many tweets, how many YouTube videos, how many comments, were all made very negatively about Genie+? How has that hurt Disney World’s perception? And was that worth revenue equal to only five dollars more per ticket per every guest?
