LightningLane Premier Pass: Impact on Regular Guests

Disney's new Lightning Lane Premier Pass for Walt Disney World and Disneyland is Disney's latest way to sell exclusivity. With a daily charge more than the price of a one-day ticket, this is a premium product for a premium price. While Disney's profits will love the new revenue stream, is it going to alienate even more guests? Even though Disney keeps building the narrative that it's expensive and confusing to visit, it's unlikely that standby lines will be noticeably longer because of the new product.

Same Offerings, Higher Price

Overall, the Premier Pass doesn't represent a new service being allocated to the park. The number of people that can ride each ride is essentially fixed. There are small variations based on breakdowns, guests taking extra time to load, or the number of ride vehicles being used. But the availability of a Lightning Lane Premier Pass does not make a difference for that capacity. So, regardless of how many people buy the pass, the same number of people will be able to ride the ride each day.

What impact will the Premier Pass have on riders? Essentially, it lets a few high-paying guests cut the line. Some of these guests would have been riding anyway, but some would not have. With the reduced wait time, the guests with Premier Pass are certain to take advantage of the product by going to a majority of the attractions with a LightningLane. And for each extra person that gets on the ride from the LightningLane, one fewer person from the stand-by queue will be able to get on.

Essentially, the LightningLane Premier Pass will re-allocate seats on the ride from the stand-by queue to the LightningLane. Disney isn't making any new attractions or capacity. The park ends up offering the same service as a whole and can charge guests more money for it.

Guest Impact

So, how does this impact individual guests? Disney put two restrictions on the Premier Pass that will drastically decrease the impact. The first is the high price, which discourages too many guests from wanting it. The second is limiting the number of Premier Passes available each day. Disney hasn't said publicly how limited the passes will be, so let's make a couple assumptions. We'll do some rough math and estimate how many more LightningLane uses there will be with Premier Pass.

The price of a Multi Pass and Single Pass is roughly a tenth of the price of the Premier Pass. Let's assume that the number of people with a Premier Pass is about a tenth of the other LightningLane options. And if we use round numbers, about half of the queue (50%) has been dedicated to LightningLane recently. So as a worst-case estimate, 5% of the queue will be reserved for those with a Multi Pass.

Why do I say worst case? The people who don't purchase Multi Pass or Single Pass because of the price are unlikely to be the people who purchase Premier Pass. Most of the people using Premier Pass will come from people already taking advantage of a Lightning Lane offering. For our second assumption, let's say that using the Premier Pass will let them get in roughly double the LightningLanes. That means that half of what these people are getting is a benefit they would have had without LightningLane, so it's only a partial increase for them. We'll cut the 5% roughly in half, and say 2% more of the capacity will be dedicated to LightningLane.

Now, what does 2% look like? Millenium Falcon has a capacity of 1800 riders per hour, so Premier Pass will dedicate 36 more seats per hour to Lightning Lane. Divide those 36 seats by the 1800 riders per hour capacity, and this will increase the stand-by queue by about 1.2 minutes. Disney's posted wait times are typically within about 10 minutes of the actual wait time. The 1.2 minutes will look like noise - a regular guest wouldn't be able to notice the difference.

So... Is Premier Pass Good for the Parks?

This is definitely good for Disney. Most guests won't notice a difference in wait times because of Premier Pass. Guest satisfaction is unlikely to change much. But for those 36 seats per hour at $300 per premier pass, Disney can make an extra $15,000. Multiply that out for all the users throughout the day, every day of the year... Disney could make tens of millions off this. It definitely looks like a short term gain for Disney.

The long-term gain is less certain. As Disney keeps adding ways to pull money out of guests' wallets, Universal is keeping their park philosophy simple. In the years that come, Disney is going to keep building a reputation that it's for the wealthy, while Universal will keep pulling in people who just want a simple vacation. The idea that "Disney was fun, but it sure cost a lot" is going to hurt attendance long term. We've seen some of that recently as park attendance has dropped, but per-guest spending has risen. It'll be interesting to see how public perception changes over the next year.