Visitor Patterns in Walt Disney World Resort - Book Report/Review Example

Visitor Patterns in Walt Disney World Resort 1. Introduction The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida in the United States is one of the most visited locations on the Earth. The resort consists of four theme parks, numerous hotels, water parks, a permanent Cirque de Soleil venue, and various other attractions that appeal to a wide variety of travelers. Although it appears to some to be a resort that is geared to children, the wide variety of opportunities on the grounds provides for almost any type of entertainment that a traveler may wish. Visitors of all age categories and through a wide variety of travel patterns visit the area in order to get top service and to experience resort vacations that have seemingly endless opportunities. The following report will examine the patterns of visitors to the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida. The company has created methods of exploiting visitor patterns and changing them in order to keep visitors and their money on Disney property. This has changed the visitor patterns to other resorts in the Orlando area, forcing them to resort to new marketing approaches to compete against the Walt Disney Company. 2. Resort Overview The Walt Disney World Company has resorts all over the world. They have theme parks in Anaheim California, Paris France, Tokyo Japan, in Shanghai and in Hong Kong. The company owns a cruise line with a fleet of four ships. The resort in Orlando is unique in that its size is an impressive 43 square miles which is twice as big as Manhattan. Beyond the four theme parks there are 2 swimming parks, a sports complex, 5 golf courses, over 100 restaurants, 36 hotels, 1 campground, a shopping area, 4 interconnecting lakes, and 8 convention areas. The resort employs 63,000 people, does 16,000 loads of laundry per day, dry cleans 30,000 cast costumes and the monorail system has traveled enough miles to go back and forth to the moon over 30 times. The company owns the land and is a city unto itself with its own law enforcement and fire department under the name Reedy Creek (Sehlinger and Testa 2011, p. 3). Accommodations at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida start at $48 per night at the campground with rooms extending into the thousands for deluxe suites at the various high end hotels. Families can stay at a value hotel starting at $85 per night. Vacation packages can include both tickets and dining packages. A family of four staying at a moderate priced resort with tickets and a dining plan will pay about $3400.00 for their stay. One of the options for staying at the Walt Disney World Resort is Shades of Green which is focused solely on active military and their families so that they have a deluxe stay at a reduced cost in order to honor their service (Disney World 2013). The Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida has created one of the most delightful experiences in the world where guest service and a variety of experiences have been offered to visitors from around the world. The company is fiercely competitive and has devised a series of ways to keep travelers on property so that their money is spent exclusively on their resort. Some of the amenities that can be put into a travel package are dining options, tickets that include visits to water parks and Disney Quest, their arcade experience, and even wedding packages that can accommodate any princess and her prince on their special day. The Animal Kingdom Lodge has views where exotic animals can be seen from the balconies of the rooms (Sehlinger and Testa 2011). As a cultural iconic region in which consumerism and tourism meet in an exploitive and almost dysfunctional way, Disney World is, according to Ryan (2002, p. 193), “a cultural fantasy landscape which provides a highly valuable synthesis of entrepreneurial and ideological narrative under post modernity within tourism, leisure and management”. Disney World sells its nostalgic connection through the character of Mickey Mouse and all of his companions, a whole list of Princesses that appeal to the female gender, and through memories of an idealized childhood that is then packaged and sold at high price tags. It is the ultimate example of consumerism as memory and emotion are exploited in order to create fetishism, belief systems, and childhood connection in adults as well as inspire a sense of magic for children. 3. Resort Visitor Patterns Visitors to the resort tend to gravitate towards the time periods that best suit their needs. Older adults will visit during non-peak periods while those with children will come when school is not in session. Holidays create opportunities for visiting the resort as well as summer vacation. There is a peak during college spring break. The highest peak is experienced during New Year’s Eve, with Christmas coming in second and Easter coming in third (see Figure 1). Figure 1 Annual Attendance Patterns at the Magic Kingdom (Sehlinger and Testa 2010, p. 32) One of the patterns of visiting the resort is based upon the average number of days that are available to children in most schools. Most school systems in the United States have 185 free days that are outside of the regularly scheduled period in which children are in school. One of the trends, however, is for parents to take their children out of school in order to attend in a lower attendance period at the resort. As shown in Figure 1 September and October are low attendance periods while June, July, and August, the time that most US students would be out of school, are high attendance periods. 4. Attraction Visitor Patterns Visitor patterns for theme parks are defined by a unique set of concepts through which the patterns are controlled. A theme park is designed on the premise of the design day and the design hour. The design hour is the primary measure on which a theme park is designed. The size of the park, the fundamental offerings such as restaurant availability and even restroom capacities are determined on the design hour and the expectation of visitor patterns per day based on the hourly measure (Rutes, Penner, and Adams 2001, p. 116).. Each of the attractions has their own unique visitor patterns for traffic within the parks. The Magic Kingdom has visitors traveling down the center of the park and then dispersing mostly to the left into Adventureland, but with a lesser but still significant number of people dispersing to the right into Tomorrowland. The traffic will navigate back to Main Street during the parade times, but then disperse in a more radiating pattern. Epcot draws people into the center first where the large, golf ball shaped ride called Spaceship Earth pulls people into a clogging line that sometimes creates a problem at the beginning of the day. The rides are in the front of the park in Future World, with the World Showcase around the lagoon creating a three mile walk for guests in which they can see snippets of views of different locations around the world. Animal Kingdom is built in such a way to disperse the crowds in a variety of directions, leaving less crowding and a more diverse set of methods through which to navigate the park. Holly wood Studios is small and easy to navigate, making it easy to see and get through in a day. The parks are generally seen in order of development with park attendees going to the Magic Kingdom first, then Epcot, followed by Hollywood Studios and then Animal Kingdom Park during their visit to the resort. This means that the Magic Kingdom is typically busier at the beginning of the week with Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios a bit busier near the end of the week (Ketterman 2008). The park utilizes sensory methods in order to create traffic patterns within the parks. The smell of cookies baking down the center of Main Street USA in the Magic Kingdom draws people down the center of the park and towards the radiating regions where the rides are housed. In line people will feel the breeze of a softly blowing air conditioner that is very subtly blowing in order to create some relief and a sense of coming towards the end of a long line (Ketterman 2008). The parks are designed to move people, creating patterns of visitation at each of the various attractions within the attractions so that ease of movement is insinuated in a complex world where movement is mostly restricted. 5. Visitor Demographics In 2010 there were 16,972,000 people who visited the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando Florida (Jeffers 2010). The motivations for attending the park are based on emotional responses to the concepts that evoke the nature of childhood. This means that the resort appeals to adults as much, if not more, than children. Baker –Sperry (2007, p. 718) discusses the concept of satisfaction with experience in relationship to the ideal versus the actual. In associating with fantastical representations of childhood, adults re-experience the ideal through idealized memories which may or may not represent the truth. These utopian memories are chased so that a repeated visit to the site which represents this conceptualized memory often occurs. In other words, people re-visit Disney World in order to capture reminders of memories of childhood which may be illusions that have been created to capsulate an idealized period of time. Specific demographic information is very well guarded at the Walt Disney Company in order to keep their competition in the dark about the state of their attendance. The most astounding statistic about the attendance of the park is that 75% of the people who come each year are not coming for the first time but are repeat visitors (Kusluvan 2003, p. 498). People come to the parks in order to re-create their experiences or to fulfill dissatisfaction on what they believe might have been a better experience. Sometimes there are those who are want the utopian experience and in trying to seek out this sense of perfection, they repeat the experience until they get it right. 6. Changing Visitor Patterns One of the ways in which the Walt Disney World Resort has worked to create an exclusive set of patterns for visiting the resort is in setting up services and experiences so that there is little reason to leave the resort during visitor stays. Where once the Walt Disney World Resort was a starting point for visitors so that they could go to a number of different attractions in the area, the Walt Disney Company has created an isolating experience where rental cars, taxi cabs, and other means of transportation off of the resort are no longer necessary. The company has long had a bus system on which visitors could ride from their resort to any of the attractions on the vast property. The company instituted a new program in which the Disney Magical Express gives free rides to people from the airport to their hotel on Disney World property and back again at the end of their stay (Zibart 2010, p. 49). This reduces the need to rent a car and produces an isolating element to the resort stay. Patterns of visiting the Orlando area are based upon Walt Disney World Resort stays, which changed dramatically when they opened their fourth park, The Animal Kingdom. Ford, Sturman, and Heaton (2012, p. 75) writes that the five day stay, which was a staple for resort stays at Disney World, was suddenly less one day to travel to other area theme parks which include Universal Studios theme parks and Sea World. This meant that Orlando area attractions had to change their marketing approach and no longer depend on the Walt Disney World attractions as a way to feed their own visitor patterns. 7. Sociological Concepts The concept of Disney World is contingent upon acceptance of the experience. Those who go to Disney World without the enchantment and nostalgia that connects the visitor to his or her past will leave unfulfilled and without the intended result. On the other hand, those with the idealized memory of Walt Disney characters and the way in which they affected their childhood intact will likely leave feeling like they have connected with that memory. Disney experiences require a previous membership in a culture that understands the meaning of the various symbols that define Disney and support the need for membership in a club that is almost exclusive for having had positive Disney experiences in childhood (Klugman, Kuentz and Project on Disney 1999, p. 4). Jackson and West (2011, p. 6) discuss the culture of Disney as based on the art of the environment. They state that the parks are “symbolic landscapes built as storyboards for psychological narratives” (Jackson and West 2011, p. 6). The senses are inundated with created stimulation in the form of physical sensations from thrills, scents that remind the individual of pleasant or exciting memories, sights that are fantastical, and sounds of pleasure and excitement from the attractions and the people in attendance. The rides are not a necessary component to the experience as the environment has been constructed to convey social meanings that the attendee can explore and enjoy. Disney World has a strong service culture. The mission statement of the Walt Disney Company is as follows: The mission of The Walt Disney Company is to be one of the world's leading producers and providers of entertainment and information. Using our portfolio of brands to differentiate our content, services and consumer products, we seek to develop the most creative, innovative and profitable entertainment experiences and related products in the world (The Walt Disney Company 2013). Disney’s service is based on managing the context. The perspective that they take on this concept is defined by the 1:70 rule. This rule suggests that it takes only one bad encounter with an employee to wipe out 70 good experiences that may have occurred in the past. The service is not limited to creating experiences, but in anticipating and attending to needs of their guests. An example of this type of anticipation can be seen in the job description of those who are hired as street sweepers. A street sweeper’s job is not to merely sweep up the visible debris on the streets, but to give information to guests. This means that street sweepers are trained on all the aspects of the park. This type of culture creates repeat visitors and patterns of rotation in which the guests return to experience the same level of social experiences through interactions with employees. 8. Conclusion The Walt Disney World Resort is a worldwide phenomenon which is unique even to its own line of products. The 43 square mile ‘city’ of resorts and attractions provides for exclusion to the rest of the Orlando attractions through manipulation of services to the guest that causes them to keep their spending within the boundaries of the Disney World area. While Disney World demographic information is not released to the public, it is known that 75% of the guests are returning for a second or more experience and that the fantasy of the culture of Disney promotes a belief in a utopian experience. In order to support that utopian idealized experience the service in the resort area is kept at a high level. The nature of training supports high levels of service so that it is understood that without that service, the experience can be ruined and the guest may not return. Supporting the overall experience of the guest is the highest priority for the resort. Visitor patterns for the resort are often based on either holiday periods or summer vacation time when children are out of school. This does not mean that the resort is restricted to children, but that the higher attendance is during these time periods. The focus on children is extended into the adult experience as they are reminded of a time that is remembered through an idealized reinvention of their history. This connection to nostalgia is an important aspect of the psychology of the themed environments and is central to the attraction that they hold for guests. The nature of Disney World is to sell fantasy. They create an environment in which visitors are manipulated into following intended patterns and are satisfied through exemplary service and extraordinarily well constructed experiences that are created through a culture of childhood memory and the idealized family environment. What Disney is really selling is the hope of joy, but they create this hope through patterns of visitor attendance that is closely controlled and manipulated to keep guests on property and immersed in the Disney experience. 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