This was a very busy week of announcements, with Shanghai Disneyland and Disney Springs reopenings headlining things. We’ll start with the quick takeaways from the week before diving in to discuss things in more detail.
Related Posts
Below are some posts on the reopening. This post is mostly to supplement that first post, which contains actual (but with huge caveats) predictions. The reamidner of posts are previous updates or discuss related issues.
Quick Takeaways
While I’m a bit biased, I do think the rest of this post is worth a read, but I totally understand the amount of fatigue we’re all dealing with. So I’m happy to start with the hard facts you can take away from this post…
Shanghai Disneyland is reopening May 11 with a variety of special protocols. This will mean the park is reopening after a closure of 107 days. (Link to full post.)
Disney Springs (the shopping, dining, and entertainment district at Walt Disney World) is reopening May 20 with some special protocols. Florida entered Phase 1 of its reopening on May 4.
No dates have been given for Disneyland or Walt Disney World parks to reopen, and Disney representatives have emphasized they still have not set a date.
The Tokyo Disneyland closure has been extended indefinitely.
Disneyland Paris began cancelling reservations into mid-July.
Now, let’s dive in. We’ll start with the good news, particularly the fact that on May 11 we’ll finally have a Disney park open somewhere in the world.
Shanghai Disneyland Reopening May 11
We’ve covered this in more detail in two posts. First, our Shanghai Disneyland Reopening & What it Might Mean for US post discusses the reopening procedures and how much we should / shouldn’t read into the reopening when trying to sort out when the US parks will reopen. The other post explains that Americans currently cannot travel to Shanghai Disneyland from abroad.
Fresh off the presses this morning, the entry passes for the reopening days at Shanghai ran out within minutes. The park will be using these passes to control capacity, which Bob Chapek said will be kept at “far below” the 30% (24,000 people) of the park’s full capacity (80,000) that the Chinese government is allowing. This allows Disney to test its new procedures with smaller crowds.
I’m not going to repeat our entire post on the reopening here, but I’ll discuss the reopening protocols quickly and then explain quickly how much I think this bears on the US parks reopening.
The protocols for Shanghai Disneyland will include: increased sanitation and social distancing protocols, face masks required for guests and CMs, limited attendance, temperature checks at entry, no parades or fireworks, and some interactive spaces and theaters shows remain closed.
None of these is particularly shocking. We discussed how similar changes might impact touring strategies in the US parks, but more importantly the entertainment changes are part of why we continue to wonder whether visiting Disney parks in 2020 makes sense at all.
Now, there’s an instinct to say “great, Shanghai was closed 107 days, so the US parks will be closed about that long.” That would mean a July reopening for US parks. Not so fast.
For starters, Hong Kong Disneyland closed the day after Shanghai, but a reopening isn’t yet scheduled. Disneyland Paris is expected (not confirmed) to remain closed through summer (much longer than 107 days), in accordance with a large gathering ban in France.
“The US isn’t France!” but it also isn’t China. All the Disney resorts are in different markets, political situations, and positions on the epidemiological curve. I see little value in focusing on that specific 107-day number.
But one takeaway from the Shanghai reopening is that there will be signs before the parks reopen. In the post on the reopening, we noted that there was three weeks from the first reports of the parks testing new procedures until the actual reopening date.
Disney Springs Reopening May 20
Disney Springs was announced to be reopening on May 20. This follows the beginning of Florida’s Phase 1 of reopening on May 4, which allows retail and dining to reopen. The announcement can be found here.
As one might expect, the district is reopening with limitations on capacity, increased sanitation, and a mask requirement for guests and workers.
One thing to remember about Disney Springs is that unlike every other Disney shopping district, Disney Springs is not directly adjacent to its attendant parks, nor is it dependent on those parks for business.
While I’ve been intrigued by whispers of these shopping districts reopening, I suspect Disney Springs (and maybe Downtown Disney in California) is really the only one that could operate for any extended time without theme park guests.
The shopping districts in Tokyo, Shanghai, and Paris are remote from the cities and exist basically just to serve the theme park and hotel guests. For what it’s worth, Shanghai’s Disneytown reopened March 9, about two months before the park reopened.)
But this does show that, at least on this limited issue, Disney’s thinking is more in less in line with what Florida authorities are thinking—it’s safe (enough) to reopen the shopping and dining district.
Note also we’re looking at roughly three weeks from the announcement that retail and dining could reopen before Disney Springs reopened. That’s time that allows them to recall employees and test any new procedures that need to be tested.
No (Real) Updates on Disney World Parks or Disneyland
After several weeks of nothing-burger news being blown out of proportion, I was happy to finally see real updates dominate the headlines this week. But we still got plenty of non-updates about the US as well.
Disney Parks Blog Post from CMO
The first one, somewhat surprisingly, came from Disney themselves. Amidst an earnings call where they announced the Shanghai reopening, explained US guests should expect similar procedures, and declined to specify a reopening date in the US, Disney also released a blog post from the Disney Parks Chief Medical Officer.
The post is worth a read, but it seems like it was mostly Disney trying to seize rumor mill amidst the Shanghai reopening. It’s “yes, we’re thinking about all these things, no we don’t have any concrete updates to share besides Shanghai.”
I say it’s worth a read because (1) it is from Disney itself and (2) I’ve gotten so jaded about the reporting on this issue that I’m sure some of you are wondering “well what things are they thinking about?”
While the blogs (including this one) have covered phased reopenings and virtual queues ad nauseum, you might not have heard these things were in play yet. So read that post, and then read our post about what certain changes might mean for park touring.
Task Force Phone Calls (June 1 Not a Set Date)
After a busy week of listening to Orange County task force calls last week, I took this week off. One important tidbit reported by BlogMickey is that on one of these calls, the Disney representative reiterated that Disney World does not have a reopening date, and June 1 is not a set reopening date.
Again, this accords with what we’ve come to expect. June 1 has never been a set reopening date, and (as we’ll discuss in a bit), reservation systems are a bad place to look for guidance.
I wrote last week about how this task force and Disney might not be on the same page because they cover wildly different operations, but this week I wanted to write briefly about the other side of things.
The Florida economy depends heavily on tourism, and Disney and Universal are at the center of that. While I think I was right last week that restaurateurs don’t need Disney chiming in about their restaurant protocols every few minutes, the flip side is that many of these businesses are eagerly awaiting Disney World to reopen to bring back business.
To that end, it’s not surprising to see them asking for reopening dates, and I imagine Disney’s position isn’t enviable. They want to reopen safely, and they’ll probably bear more of the risk than small shops (who obviously are suffering more now), but they’re under continuing political pressure to “rescue” central Florida’s economy.
Changes to Reservation Dates
Another big non-update this week was that Disneyland is now only taking new reservations for July 1 and beyond. I really don’t think these dates matter…at all…
Whether it’s hotel reservations, dated tickets, FastPass+ bookings, or dining reservations, there are tons of system reasons Disney might not want to book these normally heading into the reopening.
The biggest reason is simply that Disney doesn’t want to overbook and then have to cancel reservations. If their parks / restaurants / hotels / rides only operate at reduced capacity, Disney is in a bad position if they have to randomly pick guests to have cancelled reservations.
So, taking new reservations starting July 1 might as well mean reservations prior to July 1 have hit expected reduced capacity. Or who knows, maybe the hotels won’t be open before July 1 even if the parks do.
One common refrain in the earnings call on Tuesday was “pent up demand.” Regardless of whether you think that demand is huge or small in light of the epidemic, Disney CEO Bob Chapek seems to believe that the demand will be sufficient to get the parks to their reduced capacity when they reopen.
If a phased reopening—with severely reduced capacity to start—is expected, the amount of advance reservations required would be small, and overbooking remains a concern. So every change to FastPass+ space or available hotel reservations dates is the product of a variety of factors, only one of which is when the parks might actually reopen.
Disney Reservation Survey For June / July
Finally, there are reports of Disney surveying guests with upcoming reservations about the situations in which they’d keep or cancel their trips.
As with the above date discussion, I don’t recommend reading too much into this. As with reservation systems, survey takers have a certain set of goals that complicate reading too much into things.
Let’s (hypothetically) say Disney already knows they won’t be open on June 15. They might still send a survey to someone with a June 15 reservation because they’re attempting to evaluate public perception from a range of guests. That June 15 guest data point is still valuable to them in that regard.