Your trying to justify price increases as often as they’re doing it right now. Haven’t they increased like 2-3 times in the past like 4 years?
I understand price increases must happen at some point, but it seems that price increases right now were being done to bend the park goers wallet a little further to see if it’ll break. And it won’t. Chapek and gang seemed to want to keep pushing that idea to see how far it could go before backlash.
It doesn’t seem like recent price increases were a necessity, but rather a tactic to add some extra bucks in some pockets.
price increase is an annual thing, thats nothing new, even when renewing my AP, i already expected to pay $50-$70 more on renewal
and they didnt increase prices for a year or two there when the parks were closed
im looking at it at the business pov, they were paying unemployment and benefits to a lot of employees while the park wasnt operating (2 years?), thats a lot of cash going out with none coming in and as i posted before, they were doing refurbishments while they were closed too (more cost)
also, depending on how you look at it, increasing the price is a way to keep the parks at a lower capacity but it just seems like disney has hardcore fans who just arent deterred by higher prices, they’ll be in the parks when they want to (look at when they opened the ap sals again, long waits and it sold out quick, so demand is just very high)
i mean what could they really do to lower the crowds? they were being sued because the reservation system hindered keyholders and now its mostly available
they cant cut reservations ons for regular guests because then its unfair to those who go once a year and those fans will be the one alienated
its really a no win situation for either side
i admit, i have the benefit of going whenever i want and the lawsuit benefitted me because now i can reserve even on the same day and get in and i dont have a family of 4 to think about but i do know how others feel and it sucks
in a perfect world, tickets would be cheaper, there would be no reservation and parks arent crowded but thats a utopia right now
since we are still recovering from the pandemic, i think most are trying to do what they didnt get to do for a while there so that could easily be the result of huge crowds, before the pandemic, crowd levels were low even in the summer (i even remember a discussion here when GE opened and we thought it would be super crowded but wait times were so low) so i think eventually once things settle, it’ll go back to that
but for now, people are going crazy going out there
