How Disney is turning up the heat on bad behavior at its parks

The New York Times published a column recently dubbing 2022 “The year we lost it.” The column cited a litany of bad behavior in public — on roads, in stores, on airplanes, in school board meetings, at the Oscars (especially at the Oscars!). 

It missed one area that has stood out to us: Disney parks.

The past year has seen an unusual amount of bad behavior at Disney’s theme parks, with many incidents shared widely on social media. A whole family joined in one spat in the Magic Kingdom, and most heartbreakingly for me, one anonymous cast member on a Reddit board said they had gone backstage to cry 10 times this year — more than they had in the rest of their 10-year Disney career prior to this year. The cause of their distress? Being berated and screamed at by guests.

Disney has felt it was necessary to add a section on courtesy to the Getting Ready for Your Visit to Walt Disney World Resort page, next to information on Theme Park Reservations, Health & Safety and the Mobile App.

The area states: 

Be the magic you want to see in the world. You must always remember to treat others with respect, kindness and compassion. Those who can’t live up to this simple wish may be asked to leave Walt Disney World Resort.

Walt Disney World website

We teach little children to treat each other with respect, kindness and compassion. But somehow now we have to remind grown-ups that brawling in public—in a family theme park, no less—is poor form. 

There isn’t one single reason for our bad behavior. Certainly this is a particularly angry period in our country’s history. Personally, I think people stayed home for so long we have forgotten how to behave in public. 

But I would like to suggest another reason why it seems to be boiling over at Disney parks, in particular: Disney has made the supposedly magical experience of visiting its parks so expensive, and so much more difficult to maneuver, that it has basically created a perfect storm of stress and impossible expectations. 

Before COVID you could book a Disney World vacation that would include a dining plan, so you paid one price for room, tickets, and food. You could decide on a whim what park you wanted to visit, and if you decided to park hop, you could do it any time. And you could use your free FastPasses to cut down the wait in some lines. It was all reasonably easy, even if you’d never been to the parks before. 

Today, there’s no dining plan, so the bills keep piling up once you get here. You can’t underestimate the stress of every quick service meal for a family adding up to $60 or $80, never mind the cost of snacks and sit-down restaurants. You need to make park reservations and may not be able to change them at the last minute if you change your mind. You can’t park hop until after 2 p.m. Oh, and you need to buy Genie+ and/or Individual Lightning Lanes if you want to reduce your wait time on rides. And don’t think those package prices have gone down now that they don’t include meals and FastPasses. Many veteran park guests report their package prices going up for 40% or 50% compared to pre-COVD prices. 

So Disney has created an atmosphere in which it is more expensive to visit, and more complicated to navigate. I can’t count the number of times we’ve seen people go up to the Lightning Lane and be turned away because they didn’t know how to use it, or even that they have to pay for it. 

And heaven help you if you don’t have the My Disney Experience app or aren’t tech-savvy. We’ve also seen many people, primarily older, who have been stopped at the turnstile because they bought tickets but didn’t have park reservations. Thankfully, these days cast members will help them make reservations, rather than just turning them away. 

This reliance on your phone is another potential stressor. For us, Disney has always been a place to escape from the real world. The sign over the Magic Kingdom spells it out: “Here you leave today and enter the world of yesterday, tomorrow and fantasy.” What is your phone, if not a tether to today? Whether it’s your work email or news alerts or social media, if you have to be on your phone to navigate your vacation, the troubles of today are all too close at hand.

All of this is on top of the natural stress of a vacation in Florida, including blistering summer heat and overtired children.  

This doesn’t excuse bad behavior at Disney parks or anywhere else. All of us should be able to roll with the frustration that comes with waiting in line or spending more on food than we had expected. But when “the most magical place on earth” becomes a toxic stew of stressors, some people are going to snap. 

Disney has it in its power to turn down the heat at least a little bit. I’m not even suggesting they cut prices, considering the parks are propping up the rest of the business right now. I’m just asking Disney to make things easier and less stressful for guests. Start with eliminating the park reservation system and allowing park-hopping any time. Perhaps consider bringing back some form of the dining plan, so guests can get that all-inclusive feel again.

When Disney asks us to “treat others with respect, kindness and compassion,” I would suggest they owe their guests the very same courtesy.