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Wanna do Disney? Hate lines? Try Hire-a-Handicap!

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by Batman, May 15, 2013.

  1. joe_schmoe

    joe_schmoe Active Member

    With technology today, and especially at Disney, who for years developed ideas that became mainstream, that this abuse was happening. I mean, they know pretty much how long a line wait time is, so why wouldn't they just make the handicap wait that same amount of time before boarding, or even use cameras to display when they showed up and who the last person in line was at that time.

    Years ago when we went to Disney World with my grandmother, she was in a wheelchair and yeah we got to go to the front of a lot of lines, but there are a few that the wait is still pretty long. Still, the wait was usually indoors, so I'll take a half hour wait indoors over the same wait standing somewhere.

    Also went once between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Right around those holidays is busy, but we picked a week that the park was dead. Rode Space Mountain five times in one hour.

    Now I'm a journalist who can hardly afford to drive out of town, so my Disney days are long gone.
     
  2. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    I remember Adam Carolla talking on his podcast about doing that with his family. He said it was totally worth it, but he was pissed at his wife because she sat down with the kids to eat while the guide was still on the clock.
     
  3. StaggerLee

    StaggerLee Well-Known Member

    Not totally true. They are not ending their program, they are altering it. It was being abused and they addressed it. Disabled guests still won't have to wait in long lines, but they also won't just be able to go to an attraction and get right on it. Instead, they will be given a ticket with a time (similar to Fastpass) to come back and get on the ride through the FastPass line.

    Frankly, I have no problem with it. Full disclosure, I am a Disney travel agent as a part-time job/hobby, and I get a ton of requests from people about the "magic pass to skip lines" because their kid is disabled/autistic/on the autism spectrum. Most only want it so they don't have to stand in line with other people, they want to be able to skip past everyone through the back door.
     
  4. PCLoadLetter

    PCLoadLetter Well-Known Member

    Because that would be a pain in the ass, and the workers just want to get the handicapped person on and off the ride.
     
  5. Batman

    Batman Well-Known Member

    I worked on a rollercoaster at Six Flags as a teenager and, from the grunt level, there is a certain annoyance factor to it. Your primary goal (besides safety) is to keep the line moving. On rollercoasters, there's also a safety system that prevents you from moving two trains into the same section of track, so depending on the ride design a delay on the platform can cause a train to stop short or slide through brakes and cause a problem.
    Handicapped folks take longer to load and unload, can really nuke your capacities for an hour. Seeing one of them come up the exit ramp usually made us groan a little inside, the same way we all do now when someone calls on deadline during a busy Friday night to ask about a high school football score from 200 miles away.
     
  6. If all you get is a FastPass, then disabled guests are treated just like everyone else.
     
  7. Jake_Taylor

    Jake_Taylor Well-Known Member

    Yeah, but he's literally a millionaire.

    We're heading to Disney World next month and as much as a lot of the shit down there seems to cost I can understand why people with the money would think "hell, what's another couple of grand if it's going to make an already expensive trip more enjoyable."

    My wife's going to a conference down there so we are getting reimbursed for a lot of the travel costs, otherwise I can hardly imagine doing it.
     
  8. StaggerLee

    StaggerLee Well-Known Member

    Yep, and isn't that what disabled people have been striving for all these years? Oh, the irony.

    The difference is, disabled guests have an unlimited number of those "FastPasses." A regular guest will only have three (or four?) FastPass opportunities in a day.

    For what it's worth, I've traveled to Disney with a person confined to a wheelchair. We didn't get a GAP card, because she didn't want to have a different experience than the rest of the guests. We did our normal touring (wake up early, get there before everybody else, leave a crowded park at lunch) and the only issues we ran into were the switch-back queues, and for those they automatically waved us into the Fastpass line (or a more direct line if FastPass was switch-back).
     
  9. PCLoadLetter

    PCLoadLetter Well-Known Member

    Exactly.

    I worked at Disneyland during college breaks. Depending on the design of the ride, it could be pretty damn hard to get a handicapped person on and off the ride without having the whole thing shut down because of a station backup.

    When a handicapped person came up to the ride, we would immediately start staggering the cars to give us the largest possible time window to get that person on and off the ride without causing a backup. We also wanted to get them on as quickly as possible because they would typically be blocking the exit until they got on. We didn't care a bit about whether it was fair to other guests waiting in line because we had far more immediate concerns to deal with.
     
  10. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    Fastpass during the offcseason basically means no wait.

    And not every ride has Fastpass, right?
     
  11. 93Devil

    93Devil Well-Known Member

    We do Disney for $3,000 for four days and five nights on site, with airplane and food.

    Grabbing a guide at $250 an hour means about 40 hours of guide time, because you are there for way more than six hours a day, so my $3,000 just turned into $13,000.
     
  12. StaggerLee

    StaggerLee Well-Known Member

    Right, only the big ticket rides (Splash Mountain, Space Mountain, Soarin', Test Track, etc.) have FastPass.

    To be completely honest, those are the only lines anybody looking to get an edge will want to skip anyway. I guarantee nobody was pulling out their GAP card to get into Stitch's Great Escape.
     
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