Last week I hit my limit with Disney. With no advance warning, they opened Disneyland Annual Pass sales. Various social media sites picked up on it abd reported it, but I was working that day and therefore not on social media.
At 7pm the day sales started, I tried to purchase two SoCal resident annual passes. I was put in a virtual queue that was “longer than an hour”.
In the end, it was 15 hours. Finally my turn came, I put my APs in my basket, hit purchase and for some reason they required me to enter my date of birth to complete the transaction. Mind you I’m logged into my DL account, and part of my stored account info is my date of birth, and I’m buying adult passes with jives with my account.
Entering my date of birth caused the system to crash and empty my cart. This went on for 40 min, eight attempts. Attempting to call customer service during this process consisted of listening to an excessively long prerecorded announcement, then when you pushed 1 as prompted to speak to a customer service rep, you’d get disconnected. Until I finally got a message that the Socal AP was sold out.
Called customer service afterward and finally got a human- snarky, then <shrug> “sorry for the inconvenience“
The issue itself- wasting 16 hours on an attempt to purchase APs only to have Disney’s IT fail- was maddening. The customer service resonse was the final straw.
There been a lot of building dissatisfaction for me with DL- cuts in entertainment, forcing people onto attraction lines, Genie+ being a PIA to use and manipulating standby lines to ensure long waits, frequent ride breakdowns, all of which contributes to the sense of overwhelming crowds (because everyone’s trying to do the same few things), combined with the new <shrug> attitude towards the quality of the customer service experience.
I am pretty cost insensitive- but when you grab for more money constantly while making the littlest things huge hassles, at some point I’m out.
I reached that point last week. I cancelled every upcoming dining reservation I had, including a Club 33 reservation for four, and a tour. I unsubscribed from Disney Plus. And my plan is to rent my DVC VGC reservations this year rather than go myself. PS if anyone wants to do a quick overnight stay in the Christmas season, PM me.
Its pretty hard to push me to this point but Disney its just awful from a customer service perspective right now and all I can do about that is vote with my wallet, my letter of complaint from last week has gone unanswered. Another shrug. Not unexpected, which is the crux of it and why I’m tapping out.