Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations (22 page)

As for becoming a Keys guide, Jennifer suggested a few more days of training, in a one-on-one situation. I must have gone pale hearing that, because she quickly backed out of it. Instead, it was decided that I would still have tour shifts and “shadow” other guides, with everyone thinking I was doing it as part of a “special project” for her. I was supposed to “follow these guides and take notes”, but really she thought walking the route a hundred more times, and hearing the tour done a hundred more times, would be the trick.

Going out on these tours, with other guides, taught me one big thing: no one really knew what they were doing. Everyone was sort of making the tour up as they went along. Not the facts and figures; but as guides would walk by the park, things would happen. If construction was happening somewhere, they might talk about how that impacts the park. Or, a character runs by, talk about character integrity. Or, it starts to rain. Make lots of jokes about what it’s like to be here in the rain, and how the park deals with attraction downtimes due to weather. That sort of stuff.

When it was time to reassess me, for the second time, Christopher did it. No one thought it was weird that he was going on my tour, since he told everyone it was for “quality control purposes”. He wanted to check out the route himself, not as a guide, and see if any improvements could be made, and boring stuff like that.

Before I started my tour, he pulled me aside and said, “Don’t suck. I mean it.”

It took a lot for me not to cry hearing that.

Christopher walked along with a little notebook and jotted down things I messed up, and things I did well. When we got to lunch, I asked him how I was doing.

“You’re doing fine, and Kate’s a vindictive bitch,” he said over chicken nuggets at Harbour House. “She’s a bitch. Sorry she failed you the first time.”

Christopher passed me.

Remember during summer vacation, when you were grocery shopping with your mom and would see your teacher there, picking up cereal? It was the most embarrassing, awkward thing in the world. No one wants to see their teacher out of school. It was like seeing a fish out of water, or a dog walk on its hind legs. Nothing about it seemed right.

Growing up, I viewed Disney cast members that same way. I just always assumed that they lived their whole lives in the park, like teachers lived their whole lives in school. It was almost jarring for me to arrive and suddenly be on the clock at Disney, and then talk to another cast member about going to Target after work. It felt like we shouldn’t be discussing our Target shopping lists in earshot of guests, because they were supposed to believe we lived every single day here at the parks. What would we need to go to Target for, anyway?

Disney makes it pretty clear that you’re not supposed to go out and about in your costume. You’re not supposed to go to Target in your costume after work to pick up some groceries. But yes, every cast member has done it once before, because they’re desperate for some milk. I know I did it a few times.

My GR costume didn’t always look like a Disney costume. I could shed the red plaid vest, and suddenly I was walking around in a white blouse and blue pencil skirt. I still looked odd, but someone unfamiliar with Disney costumes might not realize that I work for Disney. It was the same with my blue plaid tour costume. Shed the blue vest and I was wearing a checkered blue shirt and a white t-shirt.

Not all costumes were like this. Some costumes didn’t have layers, so cast members couldn’t shed items if they needed to run into Target. There were so many times I ditched my vest, ran into Target, and then found someone in full costume (sometimes even name tag, too) wandering around the aisles, picking up frozen dinners.

I took pictures of these cast members still in full costume whenever I came across them. Maybe someone should start a website…

A tragedy in two parts: rain and park hoppers.

Walt Disney knew what he was getting into when he decided to build Disney World in Florida. He knew it was going to rain just about every single day. But, the land was cheap, and Walt had big, expensive dreams. Florida made sense, because of the cheap land. Not because of the picturesque climate.

For some reason, Florida is known as the Sunshine State. I don’t know where that comes from. If you’ve ever been to Florida, you know it rains a lot. Sure, some days it is bright, and sunny, and utterly beautiful. But then twenty minutes later it’s pouring and you’re drowning in a small monsoon.

Right on the back of all Disney World admission tickets it says, in crystal-clear terminology, that the theme parks are not responsible for the fact that it is going to rain, and attractions are going to close, parades will be canceled, and you are going to get wet. It says it right on the back of the ticket, so when it does start raining, you can’t come down to City Hall and yell about how it’s raining and you want your money back.

For some reason, guests assume that Guest Relations cast members control the weather. It starts raining, and they march down to City Hall and YELL about thunder storms. They want to know why they weren’t warned about the weather before they bought four $100 tickets for the day. They want to know why attractions shut down when it starts raining. And most important, they want to know if they can have their money back.

That’s what would happen during rainstorms. Guests would come down to City Hall and yell about the weather. Because clearly, once again, it was our fault that it was raining. It wasn’t, like,
Florida’s
fault it was raining. It was Disney World’s fault, since Disney World had the nerve to reside somewhere without perfect weather 365 days out of the year.

It was always a weird situation when this happened. Guests would demand their money back for the two or so hours it rained in the park. They wanted to be compensated for not being able to ride any rides during that time, and their children were crying.

Here’s the thing, though. In the Magic Kingdom, only six rides are affected by weather: Dumbo, Speedway, Astro Orbiter, Jungle Cruise, Splash Mountain, and Thunder Mountain. I guess you could count Tom Sawyer Island in there, too. In that group, I understand that there are three big ones — Dumbo, Splash, and Thunder — but guests would yell as if
all
the rides were down. And I’d wish I could tell them, “Hello, can’t you go wait in the Pirates queue line for 20 minutes? That’s indoors.”

Guests don’t see it that way. They see that they are being inconvenienced, and want to be compensated.

As soon as it would start raining, all Guest Relations cast members put on their game faces, because it was go time. I had a response all worked out for rain-related questions: “Unfortunately, it rains just about every day in the state of Florida, and there is no compensation for rain.” Guests would
fight
me on this. Actually
fight
. They thought they deserved their money back for the little rain shower.

Sometimes, I would feel bad for guests who told me their rain-related sob story. Sometimes it really was a case of this family had saved up to come just for this ONE day, and it rained for four hours in the middle of the afternoon. Or, it was a special occasion, like Grandma’s birthday, and now that it was raining Grandma wanted to go home. I heard those stories, and I felt for those guests. So in those situations, instead of refunding money, I just set guests up with comp tickets to come back another time.

Disney never wants to give someone back their money; you’ve probably picked up on that yourself. So why give someone back their $100 when you can set them up for FREE tickets later on down the road, and have them come back into the park to spend even more money?

So Grandma’s birthday gets rained out? I feel bad. Here, take these six comp tickets, and come back again whenever you want. I like stories with that kind of happy ending.

The other side of this story about tragedy is a tale of park hoppers.

Way back when Disney World opened, there was only one park. Then, there were two parks. Then three, then four. Guests didn’t just want to spend the whole day in one park, so a park-hopper ticket was created to allow guests to “hop” from one park to another over the course of one day.

I remember the big yellow character that used to dance across the Disney television channel in the hotels. He was just a big yellow ticket, with Mickey Mouse-like shoes. Disney actually created a park hopper character, to teach its guests about park hopper, and it worked. Suddenly, everyone was adding on this “hopper” to their tickets. Right now, upgrading the ticket to a park hopper costs about $55ish dollars. But it’s always going up.

For some reason, guests either understand the concept of a park hopper, or they don’t. It was plain and simple. If the guests had it, they used it to its full advantage, and really got their money’s worth jumping from park to park.

However, there were guests who didn’t understand the concept of “one park per day” and couldn’t understand why they weren’t allowed into Magic Kingdom after just visiting Studios.

Sitting in the window, we used to keep a running tally of the first park-hopper situation every day. It usually came sometime between 3 and 4 pm, as guests were looking to do something else for the evening, and the kids had just gotten up from a nap.

Here’s what would happen: the guests would try to go in through the turnstiles, but their tickets wouldn’t work. They’d come over to Guest Relations and say, “My ticket doesn’t work.”

I’d look at the ticket and ask the guest, “Did you already visit another park today?” and the guest would say, “Yes, Animal Kingdom.” And I’d have to tell them, “OK, well, you just have a one-park-per-day ticket, and unfortunately you’re going to need to upgrade to a park hopper to come into Magic Kingdom tonight.”

Guests never want to hear that they have to pay
more
money. This was never an easy discussion, where the guest understood what I was telling them, and happily forked over more money. This situation quickly escalated into lots of screaming, and on top of that, crying children.

Here are the two core arguments of any park-hopper situation:

A) Guest is only going to park hop this one day. So no, the guest does not want to pay to upgrade their ticket, since today is the only day during their vacation that they’re going to park hop. Everything else has been planned out, and the guests found some time on their hands this afternoon, and decided, what the hell? Let’s go to Magic Kingdom! This was not planned, this is a surprise, they don’t want to pay to come in, since they already went to Animal Kingdom in the morning.

B) Guest purchased an extra day on their ticket, thinking that they could park hop. You’d be surprised how many guests buy extra days thinking that they can use those days to park hop. But this is where you need to pay attention to Disney terminology. A one-day ticket is a one-day ticket, so one admission, one day. The computer system cannot read a second-day admission on the same day. Even though the guests have an extra day on their ticket, they cannot use it to enter another park, since they’ve already used their one admission for the day.

So that’s when the guest would ask if I could turn that extra day admission into the park-hopper admission. I actually could. There was a way for me to take that future day admission and upgrade it to the park hopper. BUT, that day admission was more than likely of lesser value than the price of the park-hopper option. Because with Disney, the more you go, the less you pay. So if you have a seven-day ticket, and you want to turn your seventh day into the park hopper on your fifth day, then that one day admission is worth around $15. I don’t even know if that makes sense, but look at a day-by-day ticket break-down for park admission prices. After four days of admission, all remaining days come out to roughly the same price, around $15. So yeah, I could take that day and make it a park hopper, but the guest is still going to owe me around $40 per ticket. And no one really wants to do that.

Then the guest would start yelling that they have dinner reservations in the Castle, and they’re going to miss them, so I damn well better let them into the park. But, when you book dining reservations it clearly tells you that you need to have valid park admission to eat at the location. Just because you have the reservation, it doesn’t mean you’ll be let into the park.

Lots and lots of yelling.

And as soon as parents start yelling, kids start crying.

Sometimes, I would just comp guests into the park for the evening. Every now and then I’d get a really nice family, who seriously had no idea about park hoppers, and had unknowingly made reservations for the Castle, and had a gaggle of little girls all dressed up as princesses. Things like that broke my heart, so I let them into the park without asking too many questions. I was not about to have all those little princesses crying in front of my window.

But if Dad walked up to me and started yelling at me about ticket prices, and how it was a stupid policy, and how it was my fault no one had told him about park-hopper rules, I did nothing. I could do nothing, and I was allowed to do nothing. I’d just wipe my hands of the situation and tell him he could either upgrade his tickets, or he could go back to the hotel for the evening. There wasn’t a lot of grey area.

Unless there were little princesses.

I remember there was this one dad, and I could just see him coming toward the window at full force. He didn’t look mad, he looked
terrified
. He looked like he knew he had made a huge mistake, and he didn’t want to tell his wife that they couldn’t get into the park that evening to have dinner inside the Castle. He had three little girls with him—two of them were dressed as Rapunzel, the third as Belle.

I saw this dad coming, and I knew what was going to happen. I started printing out comp tickets for him before he even reached my window.

March 31 started off like any normal day.

I had an early morning window shift at 8:30, and I walked into City Hall shortly after 8:20. I had my Starbucks coffee in hand, and I was already complaining about having to go to the window, since I was always complaining about having to go to the window. That was a normal thing.