How Well is Disney's MyMagic+ Doing?

The other day I asked the question, “How well is Disney doing?” Today I ask the question, “How well is Disney’s MyMagic+ doing?”

From the conference call Bob Iger and Jay Rasulo hosted last week for the 1st quarter results, we have a very interesting response to that question. The question posed was: “Can you give us any indications of how the roll out is going on revenue and customer behavior? Because per caps are really good this quarter. So what’s going on with MyMagic+?”

Here’s what Bob Iger had to say:

“I can’t quite quantify it from a financial perspective yet–it’s still early–and we’re still rolling out facets of it. What I can say is that what has been rolled out has been a real success–both for the guest and for us. So to give you a for instance:

“Our parks people in Walt Disney World believe during the peak holiday season that we were able to accommodate about 3,000 more additional guests in the Magic Kingdom per day thanks to Magic+.

“One of the most attractive features–and one that I think will have possibly the biggest benefit is the FastPass+, which is the ability to reserve three times on three attractions per day, either before you visited the park if you are a resort guest, or on the day you enter the park if you are a same day or a single-day ticket holder. What we are seeing there is substantially higher utilization of that product among our guests than we saw with the traditional FastPass–by the way–by a wide margin.

“And since the goal of this was to make the guest experience better, enable the guest to experience more, to do so more efficiently, and essentially to be able to customize, we think that these are very, very good signs for us because clearly, guest satisfaction is very, very important to the value equation for us–both in how they spend their time when they are with us, and a determining factor in terms of whether they come back.

So this is all very good. So I would say the biggest impact is first, the ability to accommodate more people–just because it’s simply more efficient; and secondly, enabling the guest to have a substantially better experience than they’ve had before, because they are doing more.”

Jay Rasulo went on to acknowledge that even though the expected start up costs of MyMagic+ was a drag on revenues, the revenues were still showed as being very high for the resorts.

I’m really surprised by that report. That 3,000 guests were able to take advantage of that service is impressive. And for the most part, blog readers seem to be responding positively to the service once they’ve tried it.

Also impressive is one of the first StoryMaker devices being made available to the public. If you loved Dug in “Up” and the fact that his dog collar could translate his barks into English, well you’ll love the new “Bark-O-Lator!”

This device is near the Dug and Russell meet ‘n’ greet at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. There are two similar Bark-O-Lators. Press the button and bark into the device. The machine then translates what you said back into English. As it works currently, it’s pretty cute. The translations received are random, but fun statements. However, in the near future, your MagicBand held up to the Bark-O-Lator will translate into statements that are customized to your experience. And that’s when it’s really cool.

Other earlier articles I’ve done already note that many of these devices are in place ready to be activated in the near future. That’s when I think it’s going to be really terrific. Indeed, that’s when you’ll finally see the magic in MyMagic+.