Category — w. Most Recent Stuff

Routinely around this time of year I get comments from people trying to book one of my recommended December weeks that say something like “all the Disney World hotels are booked, so how can these be lower-crowd weeks?”

The short answer I always give is that this happens every year, and that Disney hotel occupancy is not a crowd calendar.

Quarter to quarter, Disney’s average occupancy is between 80 and 90%–it’s been around 90% for three quarters in a row.

The difference between 80% and 100% occupancy is about 5100 more rooms filled per night—or, at an average of 3 people per room, about 15,000 more people.

Fifteen thousand more people divided among 4 theme parks, two water parks, Universal, Sea World, Disney Springs, days off, etc. just don’t much matter to a set of theme parks that have a base average of more than 140,000 visitors a day anyway.

(This is the same reason that the cheering competitions, runDisney events, etc., don’t much matter to park crowding. Fifteen thousand cheerleaders or runners and family members may seem like a lot to you…but translate into less than 10 percent more people on property.)

Here’s the longer answer.

WHY THE DISNEY HOTELS ARE NOT A CROWD CALENDAR

Crowds at Disney World don’t come from the Disney hotels, which are almost always close to full (my 80-90% occupancy point above). They come from hotels outside the parks.

On an average day in 2014, there were 141,000 people in one of the four Disney World theme parks. (Math applied to this.) You can convert those into required hotel rooms by making assumptions about

• People per room (e.g. 3) and
• Rooms occupied by those not in a Disney theme park that day: people in a hotel room for a Disney World vacation but taking a day off from the four Disney theme parks and instead going to a water park, Downtown Disney, Universal, taking a day at the pool, shopping, or skipping the parks on their arrival night)—I’ll use 25% as my assumption on this.

So divide the 141,000 people in the parks on an average day by three people per room and you get 47,000 required rooms; shift this by another 25% for the folk on a Disney-oriented vacation but not in a Disney park that day and you get 63,000 required rooms.

Disney World itself right now has “only” about 25,500 rooms available, and probably can’t hit much above 95% occupancy for any sustained period (at 95% occupancy rooms are booked 19 out of every 20 nights) except in the rarest of circumstances, because there aren’t enough one night stays to fill in the tiny gaps that exist between 95% and 100% occupancy.

At 90% occupancy (Disney has been running near this level for almost a year now) it can serve 23,000 of the 63,000 needed rooms—just a little more than a third.

Occupancy at the Disney hotels doesn’t flex up and down much with crowds. Rather, Disney runs its price seasons and its deals to hit a fairly high level of average occupancy year round. Hotels fill up in the highest-crowd times, but they also fill up during times when savvy Disney World visitors (the most likely to occupy a Disney space—especially DVC owners) know are great times to visit—like early December!!

In other words, the crowds don’t come from Disney World hotels. They don’t flex enough. Rather, they come from off-property folk. So full Disney World hotels don’t necessarily mean high crowds. (They can mean that—it’s just that they don’t necessarily do so.)

Want a real crowd calendar?  See this.

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TURNING DOWN NEW MAGICBANDS AT DISNEY WORLD

If you are booked in a Disney-owned resort, you have the opportunity use MagicBands.

These wristbands can play the role of room key, park ticket, identification for FastPass+ return, link to your room account for charging, identify you to PhotoPass, and serve many other functions on your trip.

Until recently, while you didn’t have to use them (you could use standard credit-card shaped RFID cards as your room key, park ticket, etc.), you would get MagicBands created for you whether you wanted them or not.

If you wanted to, you could customize their colors and names and have them shipped to your home, like the ones below for our upcoming Port Orleans Riverside trip…

…But even if you didn’t want them, they’d still be made and waiting for you at resort check-in, in gray with the first names on the reservation.

Recently, Disney World has started offering folk who have gotten a MagicBand in around the last 12 months the opportunity to turn down a new one. (The last 12 months because the batteries do run out.)

So here’s how to decline MagicBands if you don’t want a new one.

First, go to the My Disney Experience MagicBand customization page, just like usual.

If anyone in your party is eligible to skip getting a new MagicBand–that is, they’ve had one issued in the last year or so–the option to decline will show up.  Note the link circled in red in the screenshot below:

Curiously, for this upcoming visit to the Beach Club in November, Disney’s systems did not recognize me (which is keeping me up a night just a little), so note that I don’t have the option to decline–since it did not recognize me, it does not know that I already have 41 MagicBands from 41 different Disney World rooms, 15 from the last 12 months, and six more booked… (see the lamp at the top of the page).

So while you, too, can worry about why Disney has turned its back on me, the real point I am trying to make–and I do have one–is that if there’s a member of your party who is not known to Disney to have gotten a MagicBand in the last 12ish months, they will not be offered the option to decline, the way Annie and lovely wife Amy Girl are.

If you click the “Decline MagicBand” link, this is the screen that pops up:

Click the green “Decline MagicBand” button and you’ll be returned to this page:

Note that there’s now the label “Declined” occluding the MagicBand, and the link on the right has shifted to “Change Selection.”

Yes, you can change your mind. Just click “Change Selection,” and you’ll get this pop-up:

Just as you can keep changing the names and colors of the MagicBands you want, you can keep changing your mind about whether you want them at all until the system cuts you off when it’s time to ship.

WHO MIGHT WANT TO DECLINE A MAGICBAND

The best reason to decline a MagicBand is if you already have ten or more.

Disney’s systems tend to bust if you have more than ten MagicBands active, so if you are the sort who, for example, tries to keep your resort reviews up to date based on recent experience, then you either have to go into your bands and de-activate so that you have fewer than ten, or, more simply, decline new MagicBands.

See the image on the side for all the bands I’ve had to deactivate. The ones with the orange bar through the middle are deactivated.

The other reason to decline is if you are happy with what you have, and need no more.  If you need no more MagicBands, you might as well avoid the waste of having one created for and shipped to you.

There’s no material incremental environmental impact from not having a MagicBand created and sent to you.

The carbon footprint of your travel to Disney World will dwarf by orders of magnitude the waste you avoid by skipping a new MagicBand. (The only truly sustainable vacation is drinking homebrew in your backyard.)

But avoided waste is avoided waste…

Me? Well, I still have some room on my lamp…

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Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

BOB HOPE AND THE OPENING OF THE MAGIC KINGDOM

By Jim Korkis

Comedian Bob Hope was a guest on a pre-recorded 90-minute special in “living color” on NBC titled The Grand Opening of Walt Disney World, which aired on October 29, 1971, to publicize the opening of the newest Disney theme park.

Hope entered the Contemporary Hotel via monorail and launched into his monolog.

“It’s really two buildings leaning against each other. And I want to congratulate the architect … Dean Martin. I have a lovely room with complete privacy, except in the bathtub which Donald Duck shares with me. Have you ever tried bathing with a duck who was playing with his rubber man?

“I ordered lunch from room service. Snow White brought it in and I was afraid to eat the apple. I don’t dare drink the water because that was delivered by Pluto.

“This is the biggest vacation-entertainment complex in the world. And to think it all started with a gentle mouse, a bad-tempered duck and seven mixed-up dwarfs. It’s a fantastic achievement. They took a swamp and turned it into a Magic Kingdom. It wasn’t easy. Have you ever tried to relocate 8,000 angry alligators?”

“Walt Disney always believed in the beauty and natural wonders of the world. But he felt as we passed through that we should try to add a little wonder and beauty to it. Maybe you’ll understand that Walt’s dream was just a beginning. The dream doesn’t stop here. This is the start of it. I think you’ll want to tell your grandchildren you were there when it happened.”

Near the end of the program, Hope returned with an even more moving tribute:

“Walt Disney World is the culmination of a lifetime devoted to bringing joy and excitement and laughter to children and adults in America and throughout the world. There is a spirit here everywhere. All of this is Walt.

“This is what Walt wanted for all of us … an escape from our aspirin existence into a land of sparkles and lights and rainbows. Walt Disney loved America. He loved its children and their moms and pops. Walt Disney loved America because his dreams came true. The entire world owes Walt a great debt. He achieved much, but perhaps his greatest accomplishment is that he made children of us all.”

Tom Nabbe, who was in charge of the monorails during the opening of Walt Disney World remembered:

“For the filming of the opening special, we drove Bob Hope into the Contemporary Hotel concourse on the monorail to do his bit. I was standing on the platform waiting for him when one of the co-ordinators came up to me. These were the days when the monorails had individual air conditioners in them and they made quite a noise.

“So this guy says, ‘Tom, the noise is drowning out Bob’s monologue. Can you do something about it?’ And I went over and hit the power button. Then I picked up the phone and called the monorail roundhouse and said, ‘You’d better get over here because we’ve got to haul Bob Hope out of this building in fifteen minutes and you need to re-set the rectifiers because I just turned them off.’

“And they got over and were standing by so that the minute Hope finished they could re-set the rectifiers. The only way I could shut off the air conditioning units on the train was to kill the power to the train which I did. Then I had to get it started back up so we could take Hope on his merry way back to the Polynesian.”

Bob Hope loved the many worlds of Disney and often appeared at Disney events like the opening of the Disney MGM Studios in 1989. The Bwana Bob merchandise cart at the entrance of Adventureland was named in honor of Bob Hope’s 1963 comedy film Call Me Bwana.

*  *  *  *  *

Thanks, Jim. Strange to think that we are just about five years away from the Magic Kingdom’s 50th anniversary…

Come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including The Vault of Walt, Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South?, and The Book of Mouse, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.

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DISNEY WORLD NEXT WEEK: AUGUST 29 TO SEPTEMBER 6, 2015

The material below details operating hours, Extra Magic Hours, parades, and fireworks.

The same stuff is in the image, but organized by park, not by topic. For more on September 2015 at Disney World, click here.

Note that typos happen, and schedules change! If something seems odd, or if you want to double check, use the calendar links near the bottom to get the latest official Disney World scoop.

OPERATING HOURS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD 8/29/-9/6/2015

The Magic Kingdom will be open 9a-11p 8/29 through 8/31, 9a-10p 9/1 and 9/2; 9a-11p 9/3, 9a-10p 9/4, and 9a-12MN 9/5 and 9/6

Epcot will be open from  9a-9p every day

Disney’s Hollywood Studios will be 9a-9.30p every day

Disney’s Animal Kingdom will be open 9a-5p 8/29 through 9/5, and 9a-6p 9/6

EXTRA MAGIC HOURS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD 8/29/-9/6/2015

Saturday 8/29 Morning:  Hollywood Studios Evening: Magic Kingdom

Sunday 8/30 Morning:  Animal Kingdom Evening: none

Monday 8/31 Morning: none  Evening: Hollywood Studios

Tuesday 9/1 Morning: Epcot Evening:  none

Wednesday 9/2 Morning:  Animal Kingdom  Evening:  none

Thursday 9/3 Morning: Magic Kingdom Evening: none

Friday 9/4 Morning: none Evening: Epcot

Saturday 9/5 Morning:  Hollywood Studios  Evening: Magic Kingdom

Sunday 9/6  Morning: Animal Kingdom  Evening: none

PARADES AT WALT DISNEY WORLD 8/29/-9/6/2015

The Magic Kingdom:

• Afternoon Festival of Fantasy Parade: 3p every day
• Evening Main Street Electrical Parade: 9 and 11p 8/29 through 8/31; 9p 9/1 and 9/2; 9 and 11p 9/3; 9p 9/4, and 9 and 11p 9/5

FIREWORKS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD 8/29-9/6/2015

Wishes at the Magic Kingdom: 10p every night

Illuminations at Epcot: 9p every night.

Fantasmic at Disney’s Hollywood Studios: 8.30p 8/29 and 8/30; 8.30 and 10p 8/31; 8.30p 9/1 through 9/4; and 8.30 and 10p 9/5 and 9/6

SHOW SCHEDULES FOR WALT DISNEY WORLD 8/29/-9/6/2015

See Steve Soares’ site here. Click the park names at its top for show schedules.

LONG RANGE WEATHER FORECAST FOR WALT DISNEY WORLD 8/29/-9/6/2015

See this for forecasts.

DISCLAIMER

Everything is subject to change and typos! Check the Disney Calendars for updates and official schedules. These calendars can be found by clicking the following links:

• Magic Kingdom Calendar
• Hollywood Studios Calendar
• Animal Kingdom Calendar
• Epcot Calendar

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For the first page of this review of the Disney World Swan and Dolphin, see this.

REVIEW: THE POOLS AT THE DISNEY WORLD SWAN AND DOLPHIN

The sister resorts Swan and Dolphin share all amenities, including a band of pools that sweep along a beach and connect the two resorts.

While no single pool in this collection is stellar, as a suite they offer pretty much anything any guest would want of a pool.

Moreover, the sweep of pool after pool after pool after beach after pool is quite compelling–making this overall the third best pool complex at Walt Disney World (Four Seasons is first, then the pools shared by the Yacht Club and Beach Club).

There’s five pools here and a beach with an extensive play area. On the map below, they are not all labeled, but are at center right, connecting the two resorts in a curve around a small lake.

Starting with the pool closest to the Swan, and working our way around…

The lap pool nearest the Swan has no particular kid appeal, but is a fine spot for adults to sunbathe.

It has a small bar with seasonal hours…

…and a hot tub.

At one side is the Swan gym, which is also where you will find towels.

Next begins a beach that stretches all the way to the Dolphin.

It includes a playground (note at the right edge the hammocks)…

…volleyball net…

…and rentable Swan boats.

In the evening you can make s’mores here.

Night at the beach.

Next is the Grotto pool.  This serves as the main family pool, and bridges divide it into three visually distinct areas.

The area closest to the Swan…

…the middle, with a “grotto” and waterfall…

…and water slide.

And the end closest to the Dolphin.

The Grotto pool at night.

There’s several hot tubs near the Grotto pool–images of two of them are below:

At the Dolphin side of the Grotto pool is a small gift and pool toy shop, where you’ll also find the pool towels.

Beyond the Grotto pool is the semi-circular Spring pool.

The Spring pool at night.

Near it there’s a splash pool for little ones.

Finally, there’s another lap-style pool close to the Dolphin.

Here you’ll also find a substantial pool bar and grille, the Cabana Bar and Beach Club.

A closer shot of the bar.

No individual pool here except the Grotto pool is spectacular…but the sweep of pool, beach, pool, pool, pool, pool, along with all the other amenities, is really something!!

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Welcome back to Fridays with Jim Korkis! Jim, the dean of Disney historians and author of Jim’s Gems in The easy Guide, writes about Walt Disney World history every Friday on yourfirstvisit.net.

THE ORIGINAL FIGMENT AND DREAMFINDER

By Jim Korkis

While Dreamfinder and Figment were there at Epcot at its opening in October 1982, the attraction they were famous for, Journey Into Imagination, did not officially open at the Imagination Pavilion until March 5, 1983.

For more than fifteen years, Dreamfinder delighted guests of all ages both in the attraction itself as an audio-animatronic figure, and also as a walk-around character carrying a mischievous Figment puppet who might snatch a hat from a guest and fling it in the air.

For years, Dreamfinder and Figment were considered the official original spokes-characters for Epcot. Yet after 1998, Dreamfinder disappeared and Figment almost vanished as well.

Who were Figment and Dreamfinder? The little purple dragon, Figment, was the physical representation of being “a figment of the Imagination.”

(c) Disney

Dreamfinder was his husky human companion and friend with a full red beard, long blue coat, black top hat and broad smile (supposedly modeled after the physical appearance of Imagineer Joe Rohde).

Figment and Dreamfinder were actually born in a concept for a planned-but-never-built section of Disneyland to be called Discovery Bay. In that area there was to be Professor Marvel’s Gallery of Illusion, “a fascinating visit with the foremost collector of the exotic, weird and whimsical from all over the world” according to a press release from October 1976.

Entering through a sideshow wagon, guests would find themselves in a Carousel of Progress revolving theater where an audio-animatronic Professor Marvel would display all manner of oddities that he has collected including his collection of dragons.

A small statue of the magnificent white bearded and mustached Marvel was built with a black top hat, gold vest, red tie and monocle. Cradled in his right arm was a small green dragon that Marvel bred as a hobby.

However, not long after the press release, every available resource of the Disney Company was redirected to both the Epcot and the Tokyo Disneyland projects,and the Discovery Bay project was shelved.

As Imagineer Steve Kirk remembered, “I was in my office. (Imagineer) Tony Baxter was in with the Kodak folks as being potential sponsors for some kind of Epcot pavilion. He ran into my office in the middle of this meeting and said ‘Can I borrow the Dream Keeper?’

“And he grabbed the statue and took it in to them to show. They said ‘that’s great, do we get the dragon, too?’ The only issue was that, at the time, the dragon was painted green. Figment was green. And Kodak thought that represented a little too much of a Fuji Film (Kodak’s chief competitor who used the color green prominently on its packaging) connection, so he turned purple as a result of that.”

Tony Baxter recalled that “[Dreamfinder] was a Santa Claus-type who is wise and older and knows all the great things, a great thinker. But we needed a child-like character that had like a one second attention span and was a little crazy.”

To provide the voice for Dreamfinder, WED hired actor Chuck McCann who based the voice of Dreamfinder on actor Frank Morgan as the mighty Wizard in MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz.” Actor Billy Barty provided the voice of Figment.

Actor Ron Schneider appeared as Dreamfinder with a Figment puppet on opening day where he was interviewed by Bryan Gumbel on the NBC Today show. (Schneider’s story is here.) Later, Steve Taylor became Schneider’s understudy and then took over the role for almost fifteen years when Schneider went on to other projects.

Taylor was significantly shorter than Schneider so it was just assumed that like Figment, the character could be any size he wanted. That’s the true power of imagination.

*  *  *  *  *

Thanks, Jim. Figment and Dreamfinder more or less disappeared after a highly controversial refurb of the ride in 1998.

Come back next Friday for even more from Jim Korkis!

In the meantime, check out his books, including The Vault of Walt, Who’s Afraid of the Song of the South?, and The Book of Mouse, and his contributions to The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, all published by Theme Park Press.

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!