I spent a few weeks turning 604 Walt Disney World trip reports into a guest journey map. Eleven stages, from booking a hotel to flying home, each one rated bad, neutral or good by the person who lived it. Almost every stage came back positive. Rides scored +65, resort stays +62, dining +51. Cast members, fireworks, characters, all comfortably in the black. One stage went negative: park entry and crowds, at -6. It's the only part of a Disney trip that guests, on balance, do no

Last year a run of articles reported that Walt Disney World had gotten noticeably emptier. Most of them leaned on the same kind of evidence: third-party wait time trackers showing crowd levels at multi-year lows. Disney, meanwhile, was describing attendance as broadly stable. Both things looked true at once, which is what made it interesting. A posted wait time measures how long a queue is, not how many people walked through the gate. There are several reasons those two numb

What 19,460 restaurants show about specialization, and why the first version of this chart was wrong.