This was the first visit back as an adult and we brought our teenage son for his first visit. We were there for 3 days. By the end of the third day the cost and mediocrity had left such a bad taste in our mouths and our son was so nonplussed, we were tripping over ourselves to get out of Disney and to some extent California.
Where to start. Hotels- pay the premium for a GOOD local hotel because afternoons are best spent resting there and indeed the evenings, Why? Because the parks are exceptionally crowded and loud and a great deal of time will be spent in line for rides. Ride waits of up to two hours were not uncommon. Your patience and fatigue will be lowered and raised respectively. You will likely want to walk back to the hotel a couple of times for breaks. Wait times of two hours tell me there are too many tickets sold for too few rides,
Food… After you realise the food offerings, expectedly expensive, are not only terrible quality, but to add insult to injury are offered through venues a number of which have been farmed out to mediocre commercial brands like Dole, Dreyers and Starbucks with a Disney markup, you may not feel like indulging in them, Nothing kills the Disney holiday spirit faster than seeing naked corporate branding. Non branded food was also absolutely terrible quality.
Visitors should find some of the best food offerings in California, but where visitors to Disney want to find Willy Wonkaesque offerings, they will only find cheap rubbish reheated and repackaged. For this reason alone you may also want to leave the park for lunch outside. Alternatively, to the parks credit, you can bring your own F&B, but how many can haul this around or want to is another matter.
Thinking about the charming architecture and effort to create atmosphere in each of the sections, it’s a very special kind of incompetence that Disney management does not only miss that exceptional F&B is s draw, but frankly necessary part of the branding.
Lines and extra costs, Faced with long wait times (compounded by some rides being broken) , you will be presented with the pressure to buy express lane passes called Genie +. These are not only are an extra 35 dollars each, but are limited in use effectively to one ride per hour, that is you can only book one ride per hour. In addition to that (and what really left sick in our mouths) was handing over MORE money for a couple of “premium” rides. Yes, that’s right, your park tickets do not give you access to all the rides! Astonishing. That’ll be 26 bucks each please!
Insofar as the rides… the parks in general seem exceptionally dated and not nearly enough to impress a child of the 21st century unless they are very young, It was extraordinary. There really aren’t so many rides and what rides there are fairly unimpressive and have very short ride times compared to wait times,
Thinking about the Disney of the 70s and 80s and probably 90s, how they managed to take such a wonderful experience and completely car crash it is a very, very special kind of mediocrity. If I was a a shareholder, I would fire absolutely everyone responsible for this disaster, my advice is to go to elsewhere.