Disney Online Reservations
Lets Improve!
The Disney Online Reservations Website.
Adding small features to the Disney World reservations website generated millions in revenue, and greatly improves customer satisfaction.
Customer
Huge Impact for Customer Satisfaction. Shows value vs. competition.
Financial
Increased User Satisfaction leads to $1.5 million in new revenue and 300% ROI.
Impact
Relatively small financial, but large impact on Customer Satisfaction.
Competition
Most of the Improvements are already available on other travel sites.
Summary
The Disney World online reservation site handles approximately 3,000 reservations per month, but it is slow, and does not contain all of the user features readily available on other travel sites, causing user frustration and extra taxing of the back end systems due to multiple calls, etc. This also leads to user frustration and potential lost reservations to aggregator travel sites like Travelocity.
The goal is to make the site so easy to use that the majority of users come here first, and don’t go to aggregator sites.
This speeds up the overall time from first search until final reservation, reducing customer indecision and eliminates potential competition from other resorts on aggregator sites.
Improvements
Add a Monthly Low Rate Calendar
Allow User to browse rates for an entire month at a time for each Resort
Better Promote Important Benefits
“”Free Parking” & “No Resort Fees” are huge benefits that aren’t promoted on the site.
Add User Functionality to Search
Search functionality is much worse than competitors
Improvements – Details
Add a Monthly Low Rate Calendar
Many travel sites allow users to see rate for a month or more at a glance. The only way to do this on the site is to put in one starting date, and select “see rates” then put the next potential date in and select “see rates” again, over and over.
This causes user frustration and multiple database calls one after another. Adding a low fare calendar, would be easy, and it’s already designed on multiple other sites, as shown below. Disney reservation site could add a drop down menu to select a specific resort, or a class of resorts (deluxe, moderate, value).
Better Promote Free Parking and No Resort Fees
Paying for parking stinks, and when Disney changed the policy to charge for parking, it was the most frequently mentioned disliked change. All universal hotels charge for parking ($28-$45, per day).
Free Parking is a huge new benefit as of Jan 2023, but it is hardly mentioned on the site. They’re already doing this, so advertising it doesn’t cost any money, and it will make the user feel better about their trip. It also may seem that the free parking benefit it’s from booking on the Disney site, which would seem like an added benefit.
Many hotels, including most in the Disney World area charge Resort Fees for each night of the stay, averaging around $25 per night (although Universal does not). This fee is usually difficult to see until final booking and this is a concern for users booking a hotel. Adding “No Resort Fees” prominently makes the user feel more confident in booking.
Add User Features and Filters
Additional smaller changes are to add a number of days reservation field, and change the sort functionality to improve usability. Both of these changes increase customer satisfaction and reduce database call numbers.
Most travel sites include filters to make the searches go more quickly and meet customer needs more accurately. Visitors to the Disney site will expect these features, however the current functionality it’s very limited.
Add filters similar to the major travel sites like range of rates, or distance from attractions to the main rate display page.
Financials
Adding the low fare calendar, and other user improvements, could reduce server usage by 20%, and increase reservations made on the site. We’ve estimated a 1% increase reservations made on site, which will lead to a X amount up yearly additional revenue.
Notes and Assumptions
• 19 Disney Owned resorts, with 23,000 rooms
• 10 Leased Resorts, with 7,000 rooms
• Typical hotel Occupancy rate – 65-80%
• Disney Occupancy Rate 2022 – 82%*
• Disney Total Hotel Nights Available 2022 – 10,073,000*
*All US Disney, including Disney Land
• Travelocity charges 20-25% for booking reservations. Assuming Disney has the market power to dictate terms, we’ll use an even lower rate, 15%.
