YouTuber John Campea recently detailed a horrific experience he at Disneyland that ended up costing him $1500.
Campea posted his experience to Facebook where he declared, “I’ll probably never go back again.”
Campea began detailing his experience stating that he bought a pair of park hopper tickets and a night at the Grand Californian resort hotel that cost him “around $1500.”
He specifically noted that he wanted to experience the Rise of the Resistance ride and the new Spider-Man ride at Avengers Campus. However, he did not get to experience either.
He explained, “Now, in order to do either Resistance or Spider-Man you have to get into a virtual queue on the day of your tickets (you can’t do it in advance for some demonic idiotic reason). So we got up in time to register on the app for the Resistance ride at 7am. And right at 7am it told us that it was now fully book. WHAT?!?!”
He continued, “Ok, so already 1/2 of our reason for spending $1500 was gone. Ok… our park hopper tickets don’t let us get into the California Adventure park until 1pm, so we attempted the 12pm virtual queue opening for the Avengers ride. And you guessed it… at 12pm as we tried to register a spot it told us it was fully booked.”
From there he stated, “So, we spent $1500 for nothing. We thought “ok, we just got extremely unlucky, we’ll cancel our Disneyland tickets and reschedule them for another day.” But guess what… if you want to refund or reschedule the day of your tickets, you have to do it at least 24 hours in advance.”
He added, “SOOOOOOO…. that means that by the time you find out you don’t get to use the attractions you went there for, you’re too late to get a refund or change dates. Disneyland essentially just said to us “We’ve got your money now suckers.'”
Campea would also note, “So basically you’re paying Disneyland for the CHANCE that you MIGHT be able to ride the attractions you went there for in the first place with no hope of refund or rescheduling if you can’t. It’s a disgrace and I’ll never give another dollar to that racket.”
Campea would elaborate on YouTube.
Campea’s experience came the same day Disney CEO Bob Chapek touted their parks experience in an interview at the Credit Suisse 23rd Annual Communications Conference.
During the interview Chapek stated, “In the interest of sort of contactless guest experience during the COVID time, we’ve dramatically improved our mobile ordering opportunities in the park, contactless check-in our hotels, virtual queues.”
“It sort of releases the guests more to do things inside the park and enjoy the park, have a better experience, but also have an opportunity to experience more things. And that obviously has a revenue impact for us,” Chapek continued.
He concluded, “And just to manage the guest flow and the overall experience so you can have the same number of people or more people in the park, but at the same time give them a better experience. And these are all things that frankly without the stoppage of COVID we never would have had a chance to completely reset like we’ve done.”
It doesn’t appear that the virtual queue gave John Campea a better experience. One has to wonder how many others have had this happen to them as well.
What do you make of Campea’s experience at Disneyland? Have you had a similar experience?