The Return of the Great Guest Migration

Migration. mi?gra?tion – noun. movement from one part of something to another.

Migration. We know the topic. Birds flying south for the winter, The Great Migration of Wildebeest across Africa, the Chunyun travel season (the largest human migration in the world), all fascinating topics. But how often do we sit down and talk about migration in theme parks? Frankly not often enough.

But it’s a fascinating concept to watch take place within a theme park. And it’s one of the exciting concepts we’re going to talk about today.

*waits patiently as half the readers depart*

Still with me? Great.

Making broad assumptions about who is deciding to stick with me and read this, I think I can safely say we understand the concept of Guest flow. When it comes to park design, we discuss Guest flow with a passion, making sure Guests can circulate through a space unencumbered, get from point A to point B efficiently, and hopefully avoid getting lost while circulating.

We discuss Guest flow, yet we don’t always spend the same amount of time discussing its cousin migration, and its friend Guest distribution. They’re all related, but as designers, one of them usually takes priority for us: Guest flow. That is our Marcia.

After that, I’d say often we are more likely to focus on Guest distribution, thinking through our designs to not clump our E-Tickets in one area of the park. Which leaves migration often left on the table. That’s our Jan. But there is a reason for that.

While we focus on whether or not Guests can move through the park’s spaces, rarely do we look as deeply as how Guests move through our parks, frankly because we cannot necessarily control it. We want Guests to circulate through the park, guided by our strong master planning, but ultimately traveling on their own with a sense of freedom and discovery.

(Ironically, this is the opposite of how we treat them once they enter an attraction.)

It sometimes feels as though we assume Guests will enter a park and distribute themselves freely across the park, always wanting to be away from crowded areas. But deep down, we really know that isn’t the case. Spend any time in a park and you’ll see that how Guests move about a park is sometimes predictable, in larger groups, moving together through the park as the day goes on. Hence, migration.

Operators, such as Disney, have spent decades looking at ways to better encourage equal Guest distribution, and in recent years have found some success in this area. However, as expected, 2020 seems to have changed this progress, and more than previous years, seems to have brought about the return of the Guest migration across a park. And that is what we will discuss today.

As expected, we’ll have a bit of history, a heavy dose of opinion, and a dash of nostalgia to round everything out. In a way, today’s discussion is a bit of a lament, a modern trip down nostalgia lane that provides a window back to a past era of the theme park experience (rose colored glasses not required).

Once upon a time, a visit to the Magic Kingdom was much more freewheeling. You showed up, decided what to ride, where to eat, and just went through your day doing those things. Character meet and greets were sporadic, entertainment was unexpected, and outside of major holidays, crowds were manageable for the capacity of the park.

The major rides had long lines, sure, but there was always something to see that didn’t have a long line. A show, a character experience, an A-Ticket attraction, something was always accessible if you went looking for it. This has waned over the years as attendance increases seemingly outpaced the park’s ride capacity increases, but even up to the last decade there you were still able to have leisurely visits to the world’s most popular theme park.

To the subject of our conversation today, Guests, for the most part, migrated around the park in predictable ways. It was a literal migration, as a majority of Guests (after the E-Ticket run at park opening) would start in one area of the park, visit the experiences they wanted to see in that land, followed the neighboring attractions, and then move on to the next land. You could watch them go around the park, often in a counterclockwise journey.

(The Birnbaum’s official guides famously attributed this to a majority of Guests being right-handed, making them most likely to head to Tomorrowland first from the park’s hub. The truth behind this? Unknown. But in Disneyland in the late 80s Tomorrowland was the top land in the park thanks to Space Mountain, Captain EO and Star Tours, so starting in Tomorrowland was a common occurrence.)

It was easy to predict this Guest migration, and it could be easy to influence. But it was not ideal. Outside of being able to phase the day’s staffing, Disney didn’t necessarily want Tomorrowland to be 1 hour+ waits in the morning and walk-on in the afternoon. Disney wants more even distribution of the Guests, and a more equal and even utilization of capacity across the park.

To this day, castle parks with lands “outside the berm” such as Disneyland and Hong Kong Disneyland will open those lands later in the morning than the rest of the park, showing that there are sometimes literal physical barriers to encouraging Guests to fill up every area of the park at rapid speed in the morning.

We saw Disney take efforts to control this in the 80s and 90s as Disneyland and the Magic Kingdom reached new heights of attendance. A new E-Ticket in a quiet corner of the park could help better incentivize Guest distribution, live entertainment scheduled for the afternoon, could pull Guests back to and area of the park they had already visited, or distribute them right out of the park in the case of the 3:00 parade. 

(Live Entertainment was always a major tool to break up the mass migration and distribute Guests across the park more evenly and I have to say one park that uses their entertainment scheduling to reallocate Guest distribution really well is Hong Kong Disneyland.)

Much of this knowledge gained by Disney’s years of park operations has become a staple of theme park design. As I alluded to above, when designing parks, we balance the major rides across the park, strategically place theaters, schedule entertainment, and sometimes even design a park for limited seasonal operations by designing areas of primary Guest migration and distribution, making other areas of the park easy to close off.

Even with entertainment, and new E-Tickets, Guest migration inevitably makes some areas of the park more crowded than others at various times of the day. And while this migration of Guests around the park was part of the park’s normal operation, Disney was looking at ways to better balance the distribution of Guests. They were also always looking to increase revenue, and that lead to the creation of something that would break up the migration.

Thus, entered the scheduling of your day at the park. The forefather of this? FastPass.

FastPass allowed you to grab a guaranteed return time for a top ride, all you had to do was go to that ride to get your ticket. Disney wanted Guests to use FastPass to spend less time in line, and more time with food and beverage and retail. Guests wanted to use FastPass to ride more rides. Naturally, Guests won.

Now they could, technically, be in two lines at once. So, overall, wait times got a bit longer. Attendance grew year on year, with minor exceptions, and Guests now had perks like Dining Plans for staying in Disney Hotels, so table service restaurants became more popular. Reservations, called “Priority Seating” in the early days, became de rigueur. Guests wanted to be sure they met characters, so meet and greets went from sporadic activities to guaranteed attractions.

And then, as the park experience just seemed to be perpetually more crowded and pre-planned, Guests didn’t necessarily wander the park waiting for their FastPass. They clustered around the ride they were waiting for, creating pockets of crowds waiting for rides, just not in the queues.

The migration had been broken, literally. Now areas of the park were always crowded, as the rides dealt with FastPass riders (distributed in hourly numbers, across all hours of operation) and the Guests in the standby line (which now almost always seemed to exist and never cleared out). But there still wasn’t equal distribution of Guests across the park.

While other castle parks removed rides from FastPass to normalize the lines again on lower attendance days (or even used it seasonally), the steady buildup of regular Magic Kingdom crowds necessitated more FastPass, more planning. Thus, Disney created FastPass+. Now there were more attractions available to be pre-booked.

But it wasn’t just planning for attractions. Ahead of their visit to the Magic Kingdom, Guests could make FastPass+ reservations for 3 attractions of their choice, pre-plan their table service dining, know where and when they could meet their favorite characters (and book those experiences as attractions), and plan out their entire day from the convenience of the Walt Disney World app.

“Could”. They had to. A visit to the park had gotten more complicated.

Now, FastPass+ did succeed in one primary goal at in the Magic Kingdom, more even distribution of Guests around the park (but this was not necessarily true at all the parks however). With so many choices available to book via FastPass+, Guests could be enticed to book and then visit a wider range of attractions across the park. It brought an element of Guest migration back to Disney’s control, allowing Disney to distribute them to a wider number of pre-booked attractions at predetermined times, more evenly spread across the park.

But with the even distribution of Guests, and the higher crowds, the entire park now had an even-feeling of crowds everywhere. You couldn’t escape to a less crowded area of the park that had shorter waits; it didn’t exist.

And then, 2020. After a several month closure, the Magic Kingdom reopened, with a seemingly old-fashioned, low-tech experience. There is no FastPass. There is no scheduled entertainment or character meet and greets. Guest can more freely move about the park at their own speed once again because the schedules and pre-planning have stopped.

And in this, it seems that the Guests are back to a normal migration pattern. It seems Guests are back to starting in Tomorrowland. As the day goes on, Tomorrowland thins out, Fantasyland is crowded in the middle of the day, then the crowds descend upon the trifecta of e-tickets on the west side of the park: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, Splash Mountain and Pirates of the Caribbean, towards the end of the day.

Watch the app, watch the wait times. It’s not perfect, but I’ve been watching this for the last few months of park visits. It’s fascinating. Guests are back to moving through the parks in waves. Parts of the park get more crowded, and then less crowded, as the day goes on. When the line for a ride swells, you used to be able to assume it would just stay there at that elevated wait time. Now you can wait for it to drop once again (side note to show I’m not totally against technology: the app is very helpful for this) if you are willing to circle back around to it at a different time. 

Guests are migrating again, and I believe it comes down to the fact that they are not being told to be somewhere specific, at a set time to experience a pre-chosen attraction that they booked 180 days ago. They can pick which attraction to do, and simply get in line for it. They can decide “I’m hungry, let’s join the walk up wait at Liberty Tree Tavern”. They are flowing around the park at their own pace. The pre-planning requirements for a visit to the Magic Kingdom have faded away.

Except, ironically, to get in the park.

When 2020 started you could show up to the park without a reservation, but you better have made reservations for activities ahead of time if you wanted to do anything inside the park. Now as 2020 ends, you can’t show up to the park and get in without making a reservation ahead of time, but once inside, you can do anything as you want to, including get walk up seating at table service dining locations day of.

A visit to the park today is more comparable to a visit of yore (with a few exceptions). And there is something enjoyable about showing up, and not worrying if there were any good FastPass+ reservations available before you came. Most of the waits for the park’s rides fluctuate enough that at some point in the day you can ride any ride you choose with a reasonable wait. And if you pay attention to this, the best part about the Guests migrating about the park in consistent ways is that you can avoid it, go to different areas, and escape the crowds of the park.

It isn’t perfect mind you. There are some quirky attraction waits now, mostly because of the restricted ride (or ride vehicle) capacity. Then there are the queues spilling into the walkways: they look terrifying and long, even for reasonable waits. Areas of the park can feel like Christmas Day crowds even when other areas of the park are empty because of new pinch points. There are capacity restrictions for retail shops, and one-way traffic has found its way to new locations, no longer limited to the counter service restaurants.

But some of these issues are relatively superficial. Posted wait times are down, even in proportion to the crowds, and often the waits are shorter than the posted time because of the constantly moving lines. For areas where the waits can’t be diminished, including counter service locations, you can use mobile ordering to select your meal ahead of time. With the reduced capacity in the park (and thus reduced demand on the system), Disney seems to have worked out the right balance of “spur of the moment” and “pre-planning” regarding mobile ordering.

Halloween crowds seemed to break the park, but so far crowds seemed to have leveled out once again for Christmas. It’s manageable and pleasant. I would expect the number of total park experiences enjoyed by the average Guest is up compared to what it used to be pre-COVID.

Now the big question: is it a positive that the theme park Guest migration has returned? For the Guest experience, I say yes.

The Guest experience of the park has gone back to an older style experience. Guests don’t have to rush across the park to hit their reservation times. It is a much more relaxed pace in which to experience the park (once you get past the shock of what a 40-minute line can look like these days).

Now, to the follow up question: do I believe all Guests realize the benefits? No.

I do believe, however, the reduced stress and planning for a visit is having a positive impact on the Guest’s experience at the park. But I think for many Guests, the believed perk of “I am guaranteed these three rides” via FastPass+ outweighs the negative impact the pre-planning has on their day at the park, because they don’t always realize the rest of the negative impacts that come with 60,000 other Guests pre-planning their day at the park.

Clearly some Guests know how to ride other rides while awaiting their FastPass+ return time, but there are still too many that would “wait” for their return time to enter right at the start of their window. I saw it all the time working in the park. Guests get caught up in waiting for their return times and lose the sense of escapism and discovery that wandering a theme park is supposed to create.

(It still isn’t perfect: next time let’s discuss what happens at Hollywood Studios in the 10 minutes leading up to the afternoon-release of Rise of the Resistance boarding groups.)

Ultimately, the improved Guest experience is a moot point because of the reasons it is here: COVID-19. Disney didn’t choose to remove the pre-planning aspects to improve the Guest experience of the park (although it has), they did it because the capacity in the park is currently capped at 35%.

Now, do we care? We should. If we are truly Guest experience designers, we should look at anything that improves the overall experience and see how we can capture it for future designs. I am not the average Guest any longer, but for the scenario we are in, this is the right answer.

The ability to wander the park, pick rides as you want to do them, as you get to them, is less stressful. It reminds me of days you can still get at some of the other castle parks around the world. And theme parks are supposed to be fun, not stressful.

It is not 100%, but Disney put the stress at the beginning of the experience, which is the right place to put it, as it is a much more limited moment in time than the time spent in a park, and it won’t have as long-term of an effect on the Guests if it goes wrong.

With limited capacity, Guests must have a reservation to get in the park, so it needs to be as easy to do whatever they want once within the park. By controlling who gets into the park, Disney doesn’t have to limit where they can go once inside the park (imagine the negative Guest reactions if they had to control where you were able to go in the park at any given time.)

So, can we learn from this migration and take that knowledge back to our designs? To an extent, yes. We already do this when we plan for the capacity demand fluctuations at food and beverage. We have learned to do this for large scale entertainment such as parades and shows, creating dedicated parade routes and viewing areas to migrate Guests to certain areas of the park at key times without blocking Guest flow.

But, for new items, I think we can take this knowledge back to our attraction and entertainment menu planning/scheduling (especially as we introduce more world-building, interactivity/AR and LARPing opportunities to our parks).

Migration can also show us what not to do during design. Think about the parks with the physical barriers of the train tracks (or coasters, etc.) that guests must pass through when circling the park. If a barrier impedes rapid migration around the park, it takes longer to hit that all important metric of Guest distribution. And we don’t want to stop Guest migration or Guest distribution.

But maybe we do want designs that let us control the migration. We don’t want to impede flow, but maybe we want to be able to open an area later (or close it earlier). Epcot used to have the perfect, but subtle, control over its Guest migration: Future World for rides and primary attractions in the morning, and then World Showcase for entertainment and dining in the evening. After decades of being conditioned to this, I am still unable to hang out in Future World after dusk.

(It is a balance that has been slightly thrown off in Epcot in recent years, but that can be a future discussion).

I think there are many aspects to park design and operations that are going to change based on COVID-19. But now down to the ultimate question: will these changes that brought back semi-normal Guest migration stick around?

My opinion: no. Ultimately, the quick-queues, ride reservations, and pre-planning will return. The perceived value of those to the average Guest is too high, even with the negatives they create. The perception of “avoiding” waiting in line is easy to sell to Guests (even though the waits are later made up in other areas) when you consistently have moderate to heavy attendance at your park. Parks with regular seasonality to their attendance could do this. Magic Kingdom likely cannot.

But right now, this is what it is going to be. There is only so much Disney and other theme parks will be able to increase park capacity until they can increase ride capacity, especially at a park like Magic Kingdom where the queues are already out in the walkways. They will run out of physical room to create queue space for rides that operate at reduced capacity if the in-park capacity gets too high (which we started seeing for Halloween crowds).

So, it is a balance right now. A balance that, with the return of the mass Guest migration, ultimately creates an improved Guest experience. Knowing that at the right time of day you can find shorter lines and have easier access to rides helps to offset other negative experiences right now, including lost entertainment, closed theaters, etc. I lament some of the entertainment cuts to the park, but for the average Guest, getting to say, “I rode more rides because of shorter waits” will increase their overall park satisfaction much quicker than bringing back the streetmosphere actors (even though the parks are not the same without them).

This change isn’t going to stick around forever. When travel restrictions lift, and Disney needs to create incentives to get Guests to travel to the parks again, reservations, FastPass+ and other upsell “perks” will return, offered by Disney to help fill up their thousands of hotels rooms once again. The parks will go back to requiring more patience, and a lot more planning, for each visit. But until then, this leisurely Guest experience is a welcomed change.

So, I’ll enjoy it while it’s here. Even if it is here for the wrong reasons.