Disneyland Digital: How Modern Technology Enables Disney to Manage the World's Best Amusement Park

This story could be limited to one of the most boring phrases in the world - “they released a mobile

application".If we were not talking about one of the most amazing experiences in the world, the Disneyland theme park, created by the company of the same name in 1955 and which has become one of the most visited and coveted attractions in the world.

The best queue park in the world

Disneyland - it's six amusement parks, the mostthe closest to us is in Paris, the largest in Florida, and the youngest in Shanghai. These are millions of visitors a year, more than 700 shows and attractions, 600 thousand photos and 150 thousand actors daily. And this is just one of The Walt Disney’s four businesses. The other three are media, studio content development, and streaming services, which include Hulu, ESPN +, and now Disney +. Moreover, the latter threatens to become a serious competitor to Netflix when it takes its content from there.

Last year, the company earned $ 59.4 billion. More than a third of this money was brought to her by amusement parks, and their share in the revenue structure is growing. Disney zealously cares that the audience can get in real life the experience that films and cartoons of the company show her. To leave the amusement park, a person feels as if he personally lived this story. So, Disney even has a whole structure - the Research Hub - which, in particular, studies how people interact with robots (there is material on N + 1 devoted to one of the studies).

Millions of children around the world dream of falling into a fairy tale called Disneyland. But, until recently, the reality inside this tale did not look like the dream usually looks like.

Huge lines at the entrance.


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Queues for tickets.


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Queues for rides.


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The lines of those who managed to ride the rides and now would like to eat.


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And, of course, the queues of those who would like to bring something from the park as a keepsake.


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To the hotel for registration, of course, also queues.


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You can only imagine how many resourcesyou need a colossus like Disney to turn the tide in millionaire parks around the world. But despite the fabulousness of the product, Disney is not at all a visionary, and the company approached the solution to the queue problem thoroughly.

Learn from the best

How Disney called for technology to helpin solving an offline problem, told Yasunori Inukai, Digital Director of The Walt Disney, at the Customer Experience Management Summit in Vienna. The Ukrainian audience was told about it by Yulia Shtypula, Head of Customer Experience at FUIB Bank within the framework of Retail Environment conducted by idnt.


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Yulia Shtypula, Head of Customer Experience at FUIB Bank

To deal with the queues at each stagevisiting the park, Disney identified competitors in this segment and looked at what they were doing. In amusement parks, the company competes with Legoland, where gamification has been implemented for a long time, there are face recognition, QR codes, etc. The Hilton hotel chain has long invented a digital key for accessing rooms. No one handles better food and merchandise delivery than Amazon and UberEats.

As a result, it was enough for the company to developthe only application where you can buy a ticket, pay for a Fastpass and stroll to the attractions at your leisure, check in at a hotel, order food and souvenirs. After launching the app, Disney was able to eliminate the Fastpass vending machines and now have new souvenir and food outlets. Users no longer began their visit to the park with a rat race, were no longer angry from hunger, and were finally able to finally relax in a fairy-tale world.

Disney had thoughts of improving something else. For example, to come up with a more convenient service for photographs, but it turned out that the four parks of the company are already included in the top 10 attractions of Instagram, and here you can not try. In hotel experience, no one will surpass the leading hoteliers of the world, and visitors are already satisfied with the whole trip. Some other innovations on a Disney scale will cost a lot of money, but will not make the experience of the guests of the park much better. Therefore, we decided to stop at this for now.

From math to magic

Further at Disney, they asked how else can technology be used to give visitors to the park a qualitatively new experience and make it unforgettable.

The company recently opened two more newtheme parks at Disneyland in California and Florida - based on Star Wars and the world of Pandora. And these are also perfect copies of the worlds in the movies. They feature Disney's latest technology developments.

Star Wars has a huge Millennium Falcon. Of course, you can touch it, go inside and even fly, but the sensations of reality do not end there.

Using Disney Play technology - which was designed to work on content - you can crack a drone, scan a QR code, get a key and start a secret transmission station!

Disney theme parks employ actors(in English - cast). And these are not just animators dressed in costumes of cartoon characters - everyone lives the role of their character from the inside. They know the history, behavioral characteristics, and favorite phrases of their hero. A unique outfit is made for each new actor. And now 1,400 of these actors work at the Star Wars location. Using Bluetooth and streaming technologies, they receive data about how the guest spent time in the park. So when actors interact with visitors, they can not only tell their story, but also ask them about something more personal. For example, how the flight went, etc. Together with technology they create a grand show and an incredible experience.

The world of Pandora in Orlando is riddled with technology. Inside the park, the visitor enters the same world from the Avatar that physically surrounds him.

In these videos, you can see how far the technology has gone into creating robots for the park. The shaman from Pandora is just space!


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Inukai says Disney has managed to achieve thisthe result, because the company well understood that digital is not its essence, the main thing is the offline experience of visitors to the park and the desire to improve it. And the second thing is that great design is something that a person does not notice, because he dissolves in his experience. The same thing must happen to technologies in our lives so that they are truly comfortable.