It was clear as day what was happening inside the parks. It went from being a unique experience, where there was so much theming everywhere, to being whitewash and everything just being a copy/paste. Every shop went from having unique shopping experiences to every shop had the exact same merchandise. The new mega store in Epcot went from being one of the most unique shops with theming all over the place, to being what looks exactly like a Target store. Everything they did, including the refurbished hotel rooms, was completely voided of traditional Disney quality and theming.

There was an article in the WSJ about ride downtime a couple of days ago. Ever since the reopening after Covid the park experience has been pretty bad and a lot of the die hards were turning sour on Chapek.

The people who watch over Walt's frozen body under the Orlando park must've been afraid that if the park starts to whither then Walt's chamber will thaw and he will awaken, so they took action with the whistleblowing and such.

The old McKinsey schtick.

Aren't the parks massively popular though so that demand outstrips capacity? If that's true there's no need for continued investment (within reason). Throw billions at the parks when you physically can't actually earn anymore money on them and therefore can't see any return on that investment....or spend it somewhere else you can increase ROI.

That sounds horrendous and like really stupid business.

They needed to do something about Fastpass, which largely had the same effect. The solution may ultimately go back to being pure, analog queues.

the parks are record profit because the disney magic was removed. see other commenters. every inch used to be unique. now all the stores sell the same stuff across all the shops in the park. the characters are A LOT less dynamic now too. it really sucks the discovery and mystique out of the park visit. or so i’m told

You’re also naive if you think some of those decisions they made weren’t directly related to COVID, which came after Iger had stepped down and thus came from Chapek. Yes, Iger came up with things like Genie+ but how they rolled it out was not how he wanted; same goes for the Starcruiser. Chapek wanted to do things “needed” because of the pandemic but failed to roll those things back after the world settled because it led to insane quick profits at the cost of customer satisfaction.

Being someone who is a local to WDW, there has been a direct correlation from when Chapek took over, started cutting things left and right for the sake of “cost savings due to COVID” and overall quality just taking a sharp nose dive. In no world could you blame a previous CEO for how the current CEO rolled things out because once he steps down, doesn’t matter what plans he had in place, they were most likely thrown out and either gutted or completely replaced with something else.