MiceAge 12/27 - XPass ruminations http://miceage.micechat.com/kevinyee/ky122711a.htm

The Internet has been buzzing for months now with news (much of it originating here on MiceAge/MiceChat) concerning a new type of ride reservation (dubbed XPass) coming to Walt Disney World, which will allow folks to make ride reservations weeks or months before the actual vacation.
XPass won’t be available for everyone—it will possibly be an upcharge service (and/or come with the most expensive packages sold by Disney). We may see it for parades as well as rides, starting in 2012.

XPass is causing a stir online among park fans for a few different reasons:

• Stratification: the use of an upcharge system creates different strata of visitors. Those with more money get a better experience.
• Planning fatigue: vacations will be so pre-planned and regimented that all fun will be squeezed out of them.
• Greed fatigue: the Mouse is reaching into our wallets yet again
• FastPass dilution: the presence of XPass won’t add to overall capacity, so it’s either going to “steal” from the number of available FastPass tickets, or make standby lines even longer still. Or both.

Let’s take these one at a time. With stratification, we’re really talking about creating different “classes” of park-goers. There’s a first class who gets the best treatment, and other classes below. This irritated some because Walt always talked about making EVERY guest feel like a VIP. And it certainly feels like everyone’s an equal now. After all, everyone can get a FastPass, right?

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