Bad service is one of the strongest negative signals in 21,656 labeled Reddit paragraphs about Orlando theme parks. Good service has no detectable effect.

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