Walt Disney World fans are a passionate, protective, and nostalgic bunch. When the company makes dubious decisions, we let them know. Unsurprisingly, there have been a plenty of controversial changes over the last 50+ years. This list rounds up some of the most polarizing recent ones from the last decade-plus.
It should be pointed out that just because a decision is divisive doesn’t mean that it’s wrong. Sentimentality can cloud judgment, and goes hand-in-hand with a resistance to change. Some fans skew towards skepticism and cynicism when it comes to current management, operating with a baseline assumption that everything done in the past was better.
The converse is also true. Other fans are pro-change and reflexively defensive of every decision Disney makes. They’ll use quotes like “keep moving forward” or sentiment about the parks not being museums to justify even the biggest blunders. Of course, neither perspective is correct–but that isn’t really the point of this post. Rather, it’s that it takes two to tango, and decisions often become controversial by virtue of the ensuing fan fallout and debate.
We’ve actually taken a different approach to creating this list, which came to life by happy accident. Not to get too into the weeds, but I made an accidental click on the website backend, and sorted every post ever by the number of comments. I started browsing the DTB Archives from the last nearly 15 years and during that stroll down memory lane, found that a lot of the most popular posts were actually the most unpopular decisions.
So much so, in fact, that this is actually part 1 of 2. It turns out that this is like Wicked or Avengers Infinity War (or perhaps a weird mashup of the two), and simply too much for one post. Sure, I could’ve made tough choices, but I’ve already consolidated several entries and there were some real gems–including controversies I had long forgotten. (This approach also means this list isn’t Walt Disney World’s most controversial changes from the past 50 years, but more like the last 12-13, which is when this blog started covering news.)
Anyway, let’s get on with the list of Walt Disney World’s most controversial changes…
Ride Reimaginings – When I first started reviewing the DTB Archives to make this list, it was mostly filled with ride reimaginings. I quickly realized that: 1) that was its own separate post, and; 2) it’s a post that’s almost entirely different from my personal list of Worst Attraction Replacements at Walt Disney World.
We actually just experienced the latest instance of this last month, with the announcement that the Monstropolis mini-land and Monsters, Inc. Door Coaster was confirmed as replacing Muppet Courtyard and MuppetVision 3D and the Muppets taking over Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster and replacing Aerosmith. Both of these reimaginings or replacements would make sure a list.
The last decade are full of such controversies. Along with that, pretty much any changes at EPCOT make the cut, not to mention the bombshell that Splash Mountain was being replaced by a Princess and the Frog attraction. Years later, there are still fans who haven’t come to terms with all/any of those changes. But that’s another topic for another post!
Oversized Stroller, Smoking & Loose Ice Ban – To this day, the loose ice ban at Walt Disney World and Disneyland remains my favorite policy change. Not because I’m anti-loose (or dry–can’t leave it out) ice…but because I didn’t know this was a widespread issue. This did occur not too long after Frozen Ever After opened, so perhaps the new ride attracted Kristoff’s fellow ice harvesters and they were soliciting in-park?
Seriously though, I can only envision the Facebook groups of loose ice enthusiasts doing who knows what to necessitate this ban, and then the fallout in those fan circles. I wish I could’ve seen it. Everyone else wanted to talk about the oversized stroller and smoking bans, but I was all about that loose ice. Disney doesn’t just ban things on a whim or for no reason, so what happened to cause this?! I still wonder what the whole story there was.
Anyway, ice obviously wasn’t what made this controversial (at least not in mainstream fan circles). It was the smoking and strollers. People were upset that they could no longer use wagons or novelty strollers (there was a cottage industry of Cinderella Coaches and Star Wars X-Wings that had popped up), and others were angry that they could no longer light up in the parks.
This controversy died down pretty quickly. Guests with oversized strollers downsized, smokers adapted to the new locations outside the parks, and loose ice enthusiasts…well, I’m not really sure what they did. Perhaps there are ice-ficionados on some corner of the Disney internet still yelling: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take this anymore!”
Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance Virtual Queue – Ah, the halcyon days of late 2019 and early 2020. It’s easy to forget because of well, you know, but the period from December 2019 through March 2020 was wild at Walt Disney World. Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance opened and, quite frankly, Disney had no clue how to handle its mixture of popularity and unreliability.
Rise of the Resistance also changed one of the core competencies of this blog, as we lived a stone’s throw from Disney’s Hollywood Studios then, and were in that park at least 3-4 days per week doing field testing. (I also joke that the reason I’ve never had COVID is because I got stuck in that queue so many times and developed super immunity to all of the world’s viruses.)
The decision to have a virtual queue for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance was, itself, controversial. But beyond that, the policies and protocol being a moving target just exacerbated everything. Walt Disney World fans crave consistency and predictability–even in scenarios where they would otherwise be the “winners” over other guests. The first few months of the Star Wars E-Ticket were anything but consistent. Changes were constant and confusing.
Disney’s Hollywood Studios was a mess. But if I’m being honest, it was a beautiful mess from a researcher’s perspective. The park kept moving forward its opening time, and the rest of the park was delightfully uncrowded at 7 am. I lost count of how many times I rode Slinky Dog Dash during that stretch. To this day, I’ve probably still ridden at sunrise more than any time of day. There were countless mornings when I was done with Disney’s Hollywood Studios and hopped to EPCOT for that park’s rope drop. What a time to be alive.
Hotel Parking Fees – Most fans point to the post-closure and phased reopening changes as a paradigm shift at Walt Disney World. For me, this was the announcement that did it. That wasn’t some unique insight, but rather because, for many guests at the time, this irrevocably changed their relationship with Walt Disney World.
The news came in mid-March 2018, and immediately garnered hundreds upon hundreds of comments on this site–and far beyond. The fan reaction to the resort parking fee felt different. It was more emotional than normal. Walt Disney World fans bemoan prices increases, but are generally comfortable paying more for a premium experience–even then, they were clearly fed up with being nickel and dimed.
The hotel parking fee struck me as a tipping point for many long-time fans. The grassroots ‘campaigns’ on social media and crowd-sourced review sites reflected this. Walt Disney World was inundated with a barrage of 1-star reviews on Facebook, TripAdvisor, and elsewhere, with most pointing to this fee.
It was a bridge too far for a lot of fans, and I wondered whether the revenue was truly worth all of the outrage and damage to the brand’s reputation. Within a few days, I penned Is Walt Disney World Eroding Fan Goodwill? It’s an article from 2018, but feels like it could’ve been written anytime between July 2020 and today.
Fans often talk a big game about being “done with Disney,” but I know a few who actually followed through and either quit visiting or quit staying on-site as a result of the parking fee. It did a lot of brand and goodwill damage. Walt Disney World finally undid this decision at the beginning of last year, reintroducing free resort parking. That news was simultaneously surprising (because of the revenue Disney was giving up) and unsurprising (because of the backlash).
Skyliner – This was a fun one. The Skyliner gondolas were an ongoing controversy from the time they were first rumored until they opened and even the months after. To be sure, there were a lot of fans who were incredibly excited for this new transportation network at Walt Disney World.
There were seemingly as many, or at least a vocal minority that presented as such, who hated the idea and boldly predicted the many ways the gondolas would fail. Having been on gondolas in other parts of the world, we offered assurances that they were, in fact, a known quantity and not so new-fangled contraption that would catapult guests to their deaths or fail so spectacularly that they’d close within the year.
No matter how persuasive I was (or so I thought), it made no difference whatsoever. Over and over, the same critiques and criticism cropped up. And honestly, I should’ve just kept my mouth shut. (A lesson I did not learn, and have not learned.) Because not only did it seem to change zero minds, but then the stupid sky buckets collided a few days after opening, and the critics took their victory lap. Oof.
For the record, I love the Skyliner now more than ever. If a gondola cabin is to come crashing down and act as my “tin coffin” someday, then so be it, I guess. Worse ways to go out…like eating too much “food” from the Italy booth.
Icon Obstructions – Sarah and I made our first trip to Walt Disney World together as adults in 2006. By the following year, I was already in deep. One of the first rumors that got me hooked was the removal of the EPCOT Wand. Like many curmudgeonly Disney Adults of the era, I hated the EPCOT Wand. When news broke of its demise, I spent days buried in forum threads–some of which exploded to hundreds of pages in length.
This blog did not exist then, so obviously the EPCOT Wand removal was not one of the most controversial topics here. But only a few short years later, Walt Disney World announced the removal of the Big Sorcerers Hat (known not so lovingly as the BAH–I’ll let you mull over that acronym and figure out what the A stands for…) at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.
Still a curmudgeonly purist, I was overjoyed. Many readers of this blog agreed, but just about as many did not. As it turned out, the BAH had been around long enough for fans to form sentimentality around it, and as we often say, nostalgia is a helluva drug! It probably wasn’t just the news people took to heart, but also my acerbic commentary dancing on the grave of Mickey Mouse’s oversized headwear.
Not one to learn from my mistakes and more curmudgeonly that ever, I expressed similar sentiment when the EPCOT Leave a Legacy slab-things were removed. It turns out some people don’t take kindly to jokes about the “Battle of Future World” or the moniker “EPCOT Tombstones.” The Leave a Legacy tiles have since been relocated outside the park, but we’ll never forget.
End of Disney’s Magical Express – I still remember where I was when the press release came through that Walt Disney World was sunsetting Disney’s Magical Express. Honestly, I wasn’t totally convinced at first. Part of me believe–or wanted to believe–that it was a negotiating tactic with Mears, or that it was a decision that would be undone or something, anything.
We still hear from readers holding out hope that Disney’s Magical Express will return. Maybe in 2025 or beyond ocne Epic Universe opens and poses a serious threat to Walt Disney World’s hotel occupancy. Although its spiritual successor is still operated by Mears, it’s just not the same. DME made Walt Disney World feel all-inclusive, like they “took care of you” from the moment you stepped off the plane until you left to return home.
Even a couple of years later, this is still an ongoing controversy because it’s difficult to make sense of this decision. It’s gotta be one of those things that somehow makes sense on a spreadsheet, but is doing incalculable damage in the real ‘World. I firmly believe the beancounters got this one wrong, and its long-term consequences to the company will far exceed whatever money they saved in the short term.
One of Walt Disney World’s greatest strengths was its bubble, and the company voluntarily punctured that. The captive audience that was viewed as advantageous for years is gone–and at a time when Walt Disney World’s #1 competitor keeps growing and getting stronger. Retiring DME is the equivalent of Sabermetrics in baseball. Analytics gone awry, justifying decisions that diminish the overall quality of the experience. It’s the fun being sucked away by people who don’t actually love the game, armed with computers that have deemed those decisions to be “correct” and “good.”
Free FastPass -> Paid Lightning Lanes – Walt Disney World retiring free FastPass and replacing it with a paid alternative continues to be one of the biggest fan complaints we hear. This is destined to be a controversy for decades to come, unless the decision is someday undone, because fans are reminded of this every time they shell out money for Lightning Lane Multi-Pass, which is strikingly similar to FastPass+, but paid and arguably worse.
This was controversial at the time not just because it was a paradigm shift, but for what it represented. It was an encapsulation of so many other frustrations and typified decisions of the Chapek era. It didn’t help that the initial replacement, Genie+, was unnecessarily convoluted and half-baked at launch.
With every Disney theme park in the world now using some sort of paid line-skipping option and the upcharge essentially offering free money with minimal costs to the company, it’s going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Fans nevertheless hold out hope. If ever there was a time to take the win, it’s when the competitor down the road is opening a shiny new theme park and Walt Disney World has nothing major to market for a few years. But more likely, they’ll view that as even more of a reason not to give up a revenue stream.
DAS Overhaul – The biggest controversy of 2024 is that Disney has once again overhauled Disability Access Service (DAS) at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland due to abuse, misuse, and proliferation of the program’s use. The changes to the program have had cascading effects on standby lines and Lightning Lanes that we’re still monitoring some 6 months later.
According to Walt Disney World, “DAS is intended to accommodate a small percentage of guests who, due to a developmental disability like autism or similar, are unable to wait in a conventional queue for an extended period of time.” This line (or a variation thereof) can be found repeatedly throughout Walt Disney World’s new DAS resources.
Walt Disney World has publicly stated that DAS usage has tripled since 2019. Independent of that, we received credible reports that the majority of Lightning Lane usage is actually not paid, but rather, Disability Access Services. This comes as the prevalence of diagnosed disabilities, especially among children, has increased dramatically in the last several years.
The other thing that happened during that time, as discussed above, is the elimination of free FastPass. This new system and each subsequent price increase thereof created a perverse incentive for cheating the system. At the same time, it also expanded the audience for social media “hacks” about how to skip the lines for free, which absolutely exploded on TikTok and Facebook. This, in turn, created its own vicious cycle. As this DAS abuse content proliferated, it became normalized by virtue of its ubiquity.
Park Reservations – Walt Disney World’s announcement that the parks would be reopening in Summer 2020 was a joyous occasion that was almost immediately overshadowed by news about the Disney Park Pass system for accessing the parks. And in fact, our post announcing the latter received more comments than the former. (That’s to say nothing of subsequent posts about logistics, the launch day crash, lack of availability, changes, etc–all of which dwarf the reopening news exponentially.)
While most of the COVID era news is lumped together in the part two (sorry for the spoiler), the Disney Park Pass system is the one piece of news from that we’re pulling out because it was an inflection point–just like the hotel parking fee or end of free FastPass (or DAS overhaul for disabled guests).
As excited as fans were for Walt Disney World to reopen, they were also hit like a ton of bricks by the reality that things were never going to be the same. It was already a difficult time in the real world, and this news undercut one of the rare pieces of good news. There was no going back to 2019 at Walt Disney World, and this was the first announcement that really drove that home.
From my perspective, that more than anything else is why Disney Park Pass struck such a chord with fans and was so controversial. It wasn’t just the reservations system itself, which was annoying. It was what it symbolized–a seismic shift to the Walt Disney World guest experience. And even though Disney Park Pass is finally dead for most guests, we still aren’t entirely out of its shadow.
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
Your Thoughts
What are the most controversial changes Walt Disney World has made from your perspective? Any dubious decisions that have been a bridge too far for you? Predictions as to what’ll be included in part 2–keeping in mind it’s all from the last ~13 years? (There’s one that I’m confident no one is going to guess, but then will say “oh yeah, that was something.”) Agree or disagree with anything that made this list–or our assessments? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!