Welcome And Guest Introduction

Intro 0:03

Please stand clear of the doors. Por favor, manténganse aljadoa de las puertas. Please stand clear of the doors.

Alicea 0:23

Hello everyone. I'm Alicea.

Nathan 0:25

I'm Nathan.

Len 0:26

And I'm Len.

Alicea 0:28

Welcome to episode 234 of Adventures and Mouse Capades.

Nathan 0:32

This week's guest doesn't need an introduction if you're a deep Disney nerd, but since my mom listens to this show, we're gonna do one just for her.

Alicea 0:41

If you've ever wondered how busy a Disney park is going to be when you're planning to visit or wanted someone to help you figure out which ride to rope drop and which one to hit after lunch, our guest has your answer. If you've ever listened to the Disney Dish podcast with Jim Hill and enjoyed a good pun or inside Disney joke, our guest is a familiar voice. And if you've ever leveraged the unofficial guide to Walt Disney World or Disneyland, our guest is one of your guides. Unofficially, of course.

Nathan 1:08

Our guest is the president of Touring Plans, one of the most trusted corners of the internet when it comes to Disney World, Disneyland, Universal Orlando, and the Disney Cruise Line. He's co-author of The Unofficial Guides, as Alicia mentioned, to Disney World, Disneyland, and British theme parks, which is a thing, and uh contributor to The Unofficial Guide to Las Vegas. He also wrote the forew to Why the Magic Matters, which we covered earlier on our show, a fantastic academic book, and worked with a contributor on that volume talking about data science in Disney. And since we are nerds, we reached out to Len to have him on our show. So without further ado, we want to extend a warm welcome to the man, the myth, the legend, Len Testa.

Len 1:54

Thank you for having me, Nathan. And uh, and Alicea, thank you for having me as well.

Nathan 1:57

Absolutely. So again, you're you're one of the most trusted voices in Disney planning. How did that all get started?

Len’s First Disney Spark

Nathan 2:04

Was Disney?

Len 2:05

Everyone has made terrible decisions along the way.

Nathan 2:09

Was Disney a big part of your life growing up? Was it like jazzer or uh mouser size and all the rest of that stuff on Disney Channel?

Len 2:16

Yeah, it was like uh so uh many, many years ago when I was very young, uh my grandparents moved to Florida from Ohio because when you retire back then, you were legally obligated to move to Florida.

Nathan 2:30

Right. It's in the contract.

Len 2:31

Exactly. And I have a twin sister, and we used to spend summers with my grandparents in Florida, and one summer they took us to Disney World. And I don't remember very much about the the whole trip, but my earliest memory of Walt Disney World is standing in the line for Pirates of the Caribbean, realizing that the lights in the queue flickered as if they were candles, but we knew they were electric lights, and realizing that somebody had to design a light bulb that flickered like a candle. And I was immediately impressed that anyone had thought of that and then went ahead and did it. And I've I've I've been in love with the parks ever since. Like I think the I think the parks are truly one of the great man-made locations anywhere on earth. I I honestly believe that,

Nathan 3:17

yeah. Yeah.

Len 3:19

After that, my twin sister and I, because we have a birthday, we share a birthday in August.

Nathan 3:22

That's how that works.

Len 3:23

Yeah, yeah. It does, yeah. It does. We're not identical. Let me get that other way too. Um, we we would visit every year on our birthday. And the summer before I started graduate school in computer science, we waited in line for two hours for this ride called the Great Movie Ride. And and I was like, oh God, there's got to be a better way to see the parks than this. So we went back to my thesis advisors. I said I wanted to write a computer program where you told the computer program the rides you wanted to ride in Disney World, and the computer program told you the order in which you should ride the rides to minimize your wait in line. As it turns out, that is a super complicated scheduling problem. It's one of the benchmark problems in math and computer science. It's this thing called the traveling salesman problem. Um, so my master's thesis expanded on the PhD dissertation of UPS's lead research scientists because UPS faces the same problem every day.

Nathan 4:16

Right.

Len 4:16

Like imagine you're the delivery driver for UPS. The rides you want to ride are the customers you need to visit. And then the wait in line for the ride is the traffic at a particular time of day between customers. So yeah. Yeah.

Nathan 4:29

Wow. And they're figuring out all the routes and optimize time and avoid left turns and all the rest of the things.

Len 4:36

Exactly, avoid left turns, it's a thing.

Nathan 4:37

Yeah.

Len 4:37

So it was um it was Chrissy Melindrakey uh was was the leader lead research scientist names. And then there's a guy at um named Bob Dial at the Volpe National Transportation Lab at Harvard, who were uh really helpful in getting like the first half of my thesis

From Computer Science To Crowd Forecasts

Len 4:52

done.

Alicea 4:52

Yeah. Well, a lot of what you do today feels like data science before people even called it that. Um how do your computer science roots shape the way that you look at Disney parks today?

Len 5:04

That's a great question. Um, so while I was doing my master's thesis, I realized that um this guy named Bob Sellinger, who was writing the unofficial guide at the time, was really the only person sort of combining math and operations research with travel. Right. And so Bob started the guide in '86. Um literally the first person, he invented touring plans. Um it was his idea for things like Disney crowd calendars. Like so my contribution there was sort of to productionalize those ideas and turn basically Excel spreadsheets and back of the napkin math into uh formal things. One of the things that I realized though with uh computer science is computer science is solving problems in a formal structured way. And so that's a skill that you can apply to lots of other things. I am not great at math. I was joking with you guys before we started. Uh my wife is getting her uh master's degree from Columbia in math, uh, and I am not that good. I'm good enough, right? Um so for me, a lot of it is like how do I break down this problem of you know predicting wait times into manageable chunks and what do I need to know at every step of the way? And that's you know, that's just another form of problem solving.

Nathan 6:18

Yeah.

Len 6:18

Um yeah, so so that that really helps. Um the the forecasting that we do obviously takes a ton of computational power and uh and lots and lots and lots of data. So we've been collecting things like Disney World wait time since 2009.

Nathan 6:35

Yeah.

Len 6:35

Yeah. Um, and so analyzing that data is uh sort of like the fundamental thing that we do every day. Yeah.

Nathan 6:41

Well, I I definitely want to cycle back to that. But in the meantime, I want to share a quote from uh from why the magic matters and and uh Lucy D'Agostino McGowan. Uh

Len 6:54

Lucy, Wake forest. Yeah, she's great.

Nathan 6:57

She wrote uh quote, for a Disney park goer, whether you realize it or not, you are immersed in a world meticulously designed with data analytics. Disney uses data to shape nearly every part of the guest experience.

Len 7:10

Yep.

Nathan 7:10

Can can you expand a little on that from your perspective? I mean, your point of view, you are in this data all the time.

Len 7:18

Yeah.

Nathan 7:19

How does that translate?

Len 7:21

One of the best lines that Bob Sellinger ever wrote in the unofficial guide was was this, and it's a quote: Disney's the ultimate system. Um so theme parks operate on a predictable basis, lines form in mostly predictable ways. Um, and Bob was the first to recognize that and subject it to academic study. Um, the the my take on this, uh, because I'm a smart ass, and um my my quote is this um Disney's an analytics company that just happens to run theme parks and make movies. The the analytics team in Disney is the secret sauce that none of their competitors have been able to match. And if you understand that and look at the basis for how the parks run as you know spreadsheets and quantifiable data, then everything makes sense.

Nathan 8:12

Yeah.

Len 8:13

Um, yeah. So Disney's analytics capabilities are world-class in a way that that no other theme park um operator is. Um I've talked to I've spoken to theme park operators, obviously, you know, Disney Universal, but all the way down to you know, regional theme parks like um uh Hershey's, right? Right. And the gulf in analytics capabilities between the very top tier, Disney, you know, Disney's number one. Universal is second and it's not close. And then there is a huge canyon between those two and everyone else. I haven't actually spoken with Merlin. Um, but you know, you got those top three, and then everything after that is it's basically like mom and pop almost. They're getting everyone's getting better. Um, but but analytics is the key to how a Disney theme park does what it does. Yeah. And so when you realize that and you start collecting the data, um, you can see how they how they make decisions.

How Disney Uses Guest Surveys

Len 9:12

Yeah.

Nathan 9:12

Is that why on the Disney dish you guys are often picking apart the the guest surveys that come in? Because it is kind of an insight into what they're trying to figure out.

Len 9:22

Yeah. So Disney uses surveys a couple of interesting ways. Um, one is to check how something new is faring, right? So new ride opens up, you get an survey immediately that asks, you know, is this better or worse than the refurb? So for example, um BuzzLight you're just reopened, Big Thunder just reopened in the Magic Kingdom. And and people who rode those in the first month the park was open literally got an immediate survey that said, hey, you rode this. Quick question, was it better or worse before? Right. Um the up but the other way that they use surveys is they have an idea and they want to test out what the potential reaction to that's going to be. So if you've been listening to the Disney Dish recently, um the Disney Cruise Line's been sending out an interesting set of surveys that ask how effective certain hypothetical promotions might be. So if you're on the Disney website, for example, and a pop-up window appears that says we'll give you $500 off your cruise if you book now. They're trying to figure out how successful that campaign might be before they actually commit to $500 less in revenue per cruise. The other thing that they use is the same dollar amount in discounts, but phrased differently. Like we'll give you $250 off in free internet, which works out to be almost exactly $500. And you see the same thing at Disney World with resort discounts, right? So you can get like 20% off a uh a room or quick service free dining. And for most people on average, it's the same amount for Disney. Um so it's interesting to see how they phrase discounts to see how people respond to them. That's really interesting to me.

How TouringPlans.com Got Built

Alicea 11:11

Pulling back over to touring plans, how did touring plans actually come to life?

Len 11:16

Oh, it's a great story. So um, so I started working for the I started doing research for the unofficial guide in like 1997 while I was in grad school because I was spending so much time in the parks collecting data. Um, you know, I would write to Bob and say things like, um, hey, the the name uh of this bridge on Fort Langhorn, or sorry, the name of um the fort on Tom Sawyer Island has changed to Fort Langhorn. You know, update this. And, you know, so it's like, you know, change this line in the in the book. Right. And, you know, just like anything, you know, a couple of lines becomes a paragraph, paragraphs become the sections, sections become pages.

Nathan 11:53

Yeah.

Len 11:53

So by 2003, I was um I was co-authoring the book. But one of the things that we realized early on was that the touring plans that we had in the unofficial guide were good, but they assume certain things in print, right? So in print, you can't give people different touring plans for like if I show up at rope drop versus 15 minutes later versus 15 minutes later than that versus 15 minutes later.

Nathan 12:18

Right.

Len 12:18

Um, so we had this idea for computerized touring plans. And the initial thing, the the funny thing initially was this. Um, we went to Wiley, the publisher, and said, hey, we want to do a website. Uh and they were like, absolutely not, it's gonna cannibalize sales of the book.

Nathan 12:30

Oh, wow.

Len 12:31

And and so we didn't do it in 97, but in 2001 we launched touringplans.com.

Nathan 12:36

Yeah.

Len 12:36

Despite well, we're like, we're basically we're like, I think Wiley's wrong. And the funny thing was that we found out immediately, not only did it not cannibalize book sales, it actually kept the book relevant during uh for the basically the next 20 years because people read the book and were like, oh, I like these tools that you can do. Because certain tools you like again, like touring plans with different array times, you can't do those in print, but they're custom made for you know for the internet, right? So over time we started adding to touring plans um tools that we couldn't put in print. So we did things like the least expensive ticket calculator, which finds you the cheapest combination of tickets that you can buy um to do everything you want to do in Disney. And all of those started off as basically problems that we encountered either in planning Disney trips or that uh readers were telling us about for the unofficial guide. And so the philosophy of the website is we can implement online tools that we can't solve in the book. And so that's been super successful, even to this day. I mean, um, you know, travel books don't sell as much anymore because of the internet in general. But I think everyone would agree um the reason why the unofficial guide is still as successful as it is is because there's been always been a companion website to direct people back and forth.

Nathan 13:52

Sure. Sure. And to your point, you know, you can't update a book because you know, Splash Mountain is going to be closed from January 15th to February, you know, 25th. And that changes the the math considerably and stuff like that.

Len 14:07

It does. At one point we were updating the book every three months. And the issue became not that we couldn't do the updates.

Nathan 14:13

Right.

Len 14:13

Um there there were there were two issues. One, um indexing a book, especially an 800-page book like the unofficial guide, takes time.

Nathan 14:20

Yeah.

Len 14:21

So whenever we had changes that would affect pagination, that was time consuming. But the other thing was too, um, Amazon has this policy where Amazon will look at a set of corrections or updates that an author makes and sends in. And Amazon, in its sole discretion, will determine whether that update is enough to update like the Kindle edition of the book.

Alicea 14:47

Oh wow.

Len 14:47

Oh, so interesting. So like imagine, imagine Disney World closes Frontierland. Right. Right. We all know that that's a huge change. Right. Amazon might disagree. And and and so we were doing these updates, and not all of them are making it through to the Kindle edition. So we're spending all of this time, you know, and and paying people to do you know, re-indexing and stuff like that, and then it just wasn't making it to the end user. And so we were back to you know, annual updates. Not because we don't want to do it, because Amazon is, and you can't, you can't, there's nobody in Amazon you can call. Yeah, you can't you can't reason with Amazon.

Nathan 15:22

Right. So they're down the street if you need me to go find someone.

Len 15:25

Find me the right person and I'll I'll start visiting. Yeah. I mean, honestly, God, if I could, if I could send someone, if I could send the person at Amazon who makes a decision, if I could send them like Harry and David gift baskets with every update, I would do it. Like I'd find me that person's name. I'll I'll do it.

Alicea 15:39

Right. Yeah. Send them a tower. Yeah.

Len 15:41

Exactly. Chocolates for everyone.

What A Touring Plan Actually Does

Nathan 15:44

For for someone who's who's brand new to all this, in in your kind of like in simple terms, what would you describe a touring plan to be? Like how does this work? What does it get you?

Len 15:55

Yeah. So a touring plan is a step-by-step itinerary for seeing the things that you want to see in a Disney theme park while minimizing your wait in line.

Nathan 16:04

Okay.

Len 16:05

And we use historical wait time data, again, that we've collected since 2009, to predict reasonably accurately how long you're going to wait in line in each ride in basically one-minute increments throughout the day. So if you create a touring plan, you know, sometime in June of 2026 for Christmas Day 2026. On the website right now, there are predictions that tell you this is how long we think you're going to wait at Space Mountain at noon on December 25th, 2026. The interesting thing is we had to wait until Amazon Web Services and the iPhone came before we could do real-time updates to those touring plans. So we have an app called Lines, um, where you can, it's sort of like Waze for theme parks if you're familiar with Waze.

Nathan 16:52

Yeah.

Len 16:53

Um yeah, but basically we can do real-time updates on your touring plans. If a ride breaks down or you know, an unexpected Brazilian tour group gets in your way, um, we we will update your touring plan uh in real time to route you around those things. Have you guys heard the story of how we we started doing real-time updates?

Nathan 17:10

No.

Alicea 17:11

No.

Len 17:11

Bob and I like to joke that every sentence in the unofficial guide and everything you read on touringplans.com exists because we made a mistake and learned from it. Uh and so back in 2010, I was doing a father-daughter trip with my daughter Hannah, and we were getting in line. We were getting onto Peter Pan’s flight. And you guys are parents, right, Alicea, you know. I am 100% certain that when that child got on Peter Pans flight, she was wearing two shoes. Guarantee it. 100%, I am certain. We got off that ride and she was wearing one shoe. And so we had to take, we had to stop a touring plan, and it was a paper touring plan at the time, and spent half an hour finding her a pair of shoes that A, she would wear, B, would not give her blisters, um, you know, walking around the park, um, and and and see that we're, you know, that she would keep wearing outside the park. And that screwed up the touring plan because we were using paper-based touring plans.

Nathan 18:09

Yeah.

Len 18:09

Um, so I went back to my team and I was like, we need a button that basically says um re-optimize from this point forward for the rest of the day.

Nathan 18:15

Yeah.

Len 18:15

And so that's that's how that happened.

Nathan 18:18

Wow. Well, thank goodness for kids losing shoes.

Len 18:21

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Learn from your mistakes. Exactly.

Nathan 18:24

Yeah, exactly.

Where Wait Time Data Comes From

Alicea 18:25

So let's let's pull back the curtain a little bit. Where does all your data actually come from? Is this is this guest submitted, um, observed data, or do you do you have a Secret Disney supercomputer connection?

Len 18:37

Uh so a couple of we get we get data three ways. So if we're talking about like wait time data, um, three ways. Um, one from users who submit their actual wait times in line um while waiting uh in the park. So like we have a timer built into the lines app, and you can say things like, I've just entered the line for Peter Pan's flight, uh, I start now, and then you stop the timer right before you get on the ride. Uh, that gets sent to our servers, and you know, we we do that. Um, we also have people like full-time staff whose job is to be in the parks. And primarily what they do is look for discrepancies between the posted wait time on the sign out in front of the ride and what the line looks like. So, for example, if you're in um fantasyland and the Peter Pan's flight sign says five minute wait, but the line goes outside the ride and you know down the walkway in fantasyland, you know it's not a five-minute wait.

Nathan 19:30

Right.

Len 19:30

So our staff's job is to get in that line and do the actual timing themselves. Got it. Um, the third that the way that we get it is, and I don't think this is a state secret, if you know where to look in My Disney Experience or in Universals app, there's a data feed where you can pull those data and we pull it every couple of minutes. And by the way, I've actually had conversations with Disney's teams, internal teams. They know that we do this.

Nathan 19:51

Yeah.

Len 19:52

They know that everybody does it. Um, it's fine, right?

Nathan 19:55

That was actually one of the biggest questions I want to ask because you know, between um yourselves with wait time data or tools like mouse dining, where it seems like you know, there is a reservation that somebody cancels, and all of a sudden I have a text on my phone that says, here's a link, go book this now because it meets your criteria. Like, is it literally just the the equivalent of screen scraping the data, or is or does Disney actually have an API feed that they kind of give to select partners?

Len 20:27

It it's a mix, actually. Um and internally, Disney looks at those two things vastly differently. I think in this day and age, they don't have qualms one way or the other about people um capturing wait times. Like I think that's and and we don't actually capture them directly from MDE. We use um, if you guys are familiar with GitHub, there's a um there's a repository called Kube House that is basically the central repository. Every everybody that I know that captures theme park wait times uses kubeuse's GitHub repository um for that. So we don't we don't all beg against Disney servers, and Disney knows this, right? I've had conversations with them. Disney knows that uh as long as we're not all begging against their servers and there's one central repository that does that, that's better for the entire ecosystem.

Nathan 21:12

Sure.

Len 21:13

Um where they where they tend to be more concerned about server load is for things that scrape or use the APIs directly. Um and so things like reserve dining reservations are one of them.

Nathan 21:30

Right.

Len 21:30

The the and and really for them, like they they know that reservation finder sites are sort of like the not not necessarily the cost of doing business, but they provide a service to guests that Disney can't or won't provide themselves.

Nathan 21:50

Right.

Len 21:51

Right. Um and they know, like I I've I've had this conversation, they know, and I'm I'm not you know uh uh uh mentioning mouse. Dining specifically, but I know that they know who to call up mouse dining if mouse dining behaves unprofessionally with those requests. And the uh and and and they know that, right? So the the thing that they're mostly concerned with is be a good consumer of their data. And that's just that's just common sense, right? Like we're we're all all of us are in IT, right?

Nathan 22:23

Yeah.

Len 22:24

We we know what it's like to be on call, right, with a with a with a with a with a with a system. The last thing you want to do, and this is what I tell people all the time, like when people email me and say, hey, I'm thinking about doing this and I need to scrape some or you know, hit a Disney API, I'm like, you know, step one, don't be an animal, right? Be a be a professional here.

Nathan 22:41

Right.

Len 22:42

Because the last thing you want is to wake somebody up at two o'clock in the morning because you're hitting their API every two seconds or something. That's that's just not cool. Um so they know what happens, they know who everyone is involved. There's a list of phone numbers they can call if they know something you know goes wrong. Um so for them, it's uh I can I can't send the Disney side. Like it, I'm gonna say it's like a necessary evil. It's they know that it exists, and we uh we exist in a sort of state of like benign neglect, if you will. Yeah. Where um as long as you don't screw things up, everyone's cool.

Nathan 23:13

Yeah. Right. It's it's it's like a deprecated feature. It's it's not supported, but it's not necessarily like it still works.

Len 23:20

Yeah, yeah, exactly. The the yeah, and and so they know um they just it as long as it doesn't, as long as you don't keep everyone up at nights or make them work on weekends, again, it's everything's kind of

Disney Tech Friction And Legacy Systems

Len 23:33

okay. Yeah.

Nathan 23:33

Yeah. So uh you guys talked about this. Uh, Jim talked at this uh at length recently on the the Disney dish. You know, there is a you know, we often say on our our show that Disney has wonderful technology aspirations. And the lived experience of the guest often falls short of where I think Disney has set that mark in the goal.

Len 23:59

Yeah.

Nathan 23:59

What are your thoughts on that, having seen kind of under the covers? Like, is it is it just a confluence of legacy systems and cruft and all the rest of that stuff that is just really difficult to overcome?

Len 24:13

Yeah. So we're talking about things like um, I'll I'll give you an example. Um in the old days when My Disney Experience first came out, you if you wanted to make a dining reservation, it would actually make you sign into the website. Like it would, it would launch a browser from your phone outside of the app. You have to log in and do it that way. And so it wasn't really integrated. I think there are um there are a couple of probably three reasons for stuff like that. One is to your point, Nathan, um, you know, legacy systems. When you're you know, Disney, uh, you've got disparate systems that do different things. There's a hotel system, there's a separate uh restaurant system, right? There's a separate transportation system. And getting those things integrated over time and keeping them updated is difficult, right? Anyone who's worked in IT knows what legacy dealing with legacy systems is like.

Nathan 25:04

Yeah.

Len 25:04

Um the the things that are two things are interesting to me. One is do you remember like back when Chapek Bob Chapek was Disney's CEO? I think he on an earnings call, he once uh tried to position Disney as a technology company instead of a legacy media company.

Nathan 25:24

Yeah.

Len 25:25

And my I was listening, I remember where I was listening to that, and my my comment was the way to the way to tell whether somebody is something's a technology company is do you pay your developers the same amount of money as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, you know, and so on. And if you do, you're probably a technology company. If you don't, you're not, right? Right. So do you value your developers the way that true technology companies do? Um and and Disney doesnt. They're not a technology company. They're getting better, they're much better, but they're not there yet. But the other thing I think that's interesting when looking at Disney Tech is for a long time, they were willing to accept a lot of friction on the user experience side because fixing it would have cost money, right? Like going back to the dining reservation thing. Jim and I have said on the show many times that the My Disney Experience app would look vastly different if Disney executives had to use it to plan their own vacations. Like and you guys know that like the term for this in tech is dog fooding, right? Right. Um, you gotta eat your own dog food.

Alicea 26:34

Yeah,

Len 26:35

and it's one of the core things that we do with the Lines app is that the people who develop our app have to use it in the park s, you know, right on a regular basis to see what users experience. Like, you know, I want to find out what the parade schedule is. Well, if it takes 12 clicks to do that, that's a bad user experience. So we gotta raise that. Um Disney, again, my Disney experience is getting better on that. Um, but it the overall, the overall experience of visiting Walt Disney World in general, not just the technology, would be different if Disney executives had to plan their trips like guests do. Like I firmly believe that. And that's like if I could if I could suggest one improvement, it's that. Use your own stuff, see what happens.

Disney Cruise Line Detour

Nathan 27:17

I I want a Disney Cruise line executive to have to check into a cruise. That's what I want. Yeah. Because, oh my gosh, it's insane.

Len 27:27

How many uh cruises have you guys been on?

Alicea 27:29

Uh 20. 20. So you're 19. 19. 20 will be the next one.

Len 27:33

Platinum, but not Pearl.

Nathan 27:35

Correct.

Alicea 27:35

We'll get there eventually. 25 is Pearl, right?

Nathan 27:38

Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. No, we squad goals. We're we're we're getting there.

Alicea 27:42

Yeah.

Nathan 27:42

Yeah. We're getting there.

Len 27:43

You gotta move to Florida where you can get those last minute uh last-minute Florida resident discounts.

Nathan 27:47

Yeah, yeah. Don't think that's not on our roadmap.

Len 27:51

Three days, three nights on the dream counts as one.

Alicea 27:54

Yeah. Yeah. That's our problem, is we do a lot of longer cruises, like two weeks and uh at least a week.

Len 27:59

Yeah, you gotta make it worthwhile. Yeah. Right, right.

Alicea 28:02

Yeah.

Len 28:02

I didn't get into cruising until like 2012.

Alicea 28:04

Our first one was 2009. Yeah. Yeah.

Len 28:07

Yeah.

Nathan 28:08

There are people who have the uh the the sign on castaway, like their name is on castaway, which is means they've done at least 50 cruises who started cruising in like 2017, and that just blows my mind. Like that is a lot of itineraries in just a few years.

Alicea 28:24

Yeah.

Len 28:25

Yeah. I mean, I love the ships. I um my favorite is sort of right now the dream class. I think that's the sweet spot between um modern cruise experience and amenities and um uh cost.

Nathan 28:38

Yeah.

Len 28:39

I I've been on the wish, I like the wish, I like the food, but my first experience was on the fantasy, so that's sort of like you know, everyone, everyone's favorite ship is generally their first or second ship.

Nathan 28:49

Of course, of course.

Len 28:49

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so yeah, but I I I like the I haven't been on the Destiny, the treasure, or the adventure yet. And I really want to go on the adventure because that looks just like bonkers. But

Alicea 29:02

it looks like chaos.

Len 29:04

Oh, yeah, yeah. But for me, like coming from the East Coast, that's a 19-hour flight.

Nathan 29:08

Yeah.

Alicea 29:08

Oh yeah.

Len 29:09

Yeah, so that's difficult.

Nathan 29:10

Yeah. We we actually had uh Scott Gustin on.

Len 29:14

Scott! Yeah, from Greensboro. Yeah. That's how I know him.

Nathan 29:18

Uh he was on, gosh, probably a couple months ago. Uh I'm doing math as like when this drops and things like that. But um, and he was on one of the early cruises. And uh yeah, it was it was an experience. I uh I think we're gonna wait for that one to settle out a little. It's definitely our completionist Disney adult side says, yeah, well, we have to check that box, but it it might be a hot minute before we get over there.

Alicea 29:44

Yeah.

Nathan 29:44

I think Scott's great. Yes.

Alicea 29:47

If if Disney had built that ship from the ground up, we'd want to go on it a lot more than we do right now.

Len 29:54

That's the thing. I've like I've watched some video tours of it, and you you it's weird because your brain is doing two things at the same time. One, you're like, okay, I recognize the theming for this. But two, it's in completely the wrong deck and it doesn't it doesn't look like the other ones. Right. Yeah. Right? Like, like why are there 17 decks here? And like why are why is all the counter service restaurants um uh um square footage, you know, 100 square feet? Yeah. Very small.

Nathan 30:19

Right. And and your kind of main lobby atrium-ish area where your your like main statue is turns into a restaurant at night? Like, I don't understand. It's yeah, it's there's some yeah. How many of you just for the difference? Yeah, sorry.

Alicea 30:35

Yeah, I was gonna say they didn't have their data scientists and analytics people working on that to make a big ship.

Len 30:41

Do you know how much they paid for the um the ship when um

Nathan 30:44

It was like $47 million?

Len 30:47

And it's funny because there was a line in their annual report, and there's like, yeah, the expense of acquiring the ship is not a material investment. We're not even gonna list it separately. They bought it for a million dollars over the scrap value.

Alicea 30:59

That's crazy. they spent a little bit more on it.

Len 31:02

A billion. A billion dollars, yeah, to upfit it. Yeah. But still, I mean, they they they saved a couple hundred million dollars. So totally worth it, yeah.

Nathan 31:09

Yeah. So you're you're circling back again, tangents. We love them. Yeah.

Crowd Calendar Modeling Behind The Scenes

Nathan 31:15

Um your your crowd calendar is something that we rely on a lot. How do you guys actually build those predictions?

Len 31:22

Oh God. Um, so it's one of the most difficult things that we do. Um, and it involves a ton of data analysis and machine learning. So I mentioned earlier that we um that we capture wait times you know from our users, from our staff, and from the My Disney Experience app, also from Universals app. For every wait time that we get, we attach between two and 600 pieces of data that explain what was going on in the resort at that time that may have contributed to that wait time. So, for example, if we like right now, it's you know 11:45 a.m., if we capture a wait time for Space Mountain that says 50 minutes, we're capturing things for every every piece of data there. We capture things like what were the park operating hours at the Magic Kingdom today or in Disneyland today? Um, what were the operating hours for all the other parks? Were there special events yesterday, today, or tomorrow? Because we know that things like um Halloween parties at the Magic Kingdom substantially. Um so uh and so you know, not only do we get like park operational details, we also look at things like the school schedules for the hundred largest school systems in the United States, and then weigh that based on population and distance from Walt Disney World.

Nathan 32:42

Right.

Len 32:43

Because like Orlando schools schedules have a vastly different impact on Walt Disney World than like Detroit, Michigan.

Nathan 32:51

Sure.

Len 32:51

Right. Um but we know like New York, for example, um, six percent of Walt Disney World visitors come from the New York, New Jersey area. So when those schools are all off at the same time, that's a significant impact to Walt Disney World. Um so we factor that in. And then we've got some fairly sophisticated machine learning models um that try and incorporate those data. Um, if you guys are familiar with how decision trees work, the machine learning models are basically making decision trees that say um what are the factors that look like they're contributing to this over time. Uh, and then uh we we spit that out. And there's it's more complicated than that, but that's the general idea. Yeah.

Nathan 33:27

Wow. Okay. What was going on in my brain as you were describing that is basically it was popping up all these tables in like a relational database model of like and trying to figure out like how all of these things relate. That is so cool.

Len 33:43

We captured things like um uh um macroeconomic indicators for the United States, Canada, and Brazil. Because if you think about how people plan a trip to a theme park, the people who are in the theme park today, the people who are in Walt Disney World today, did not wake up this morning and decide to go to Walt Disney World. They planned that trip months ago.

Alicea 34:03

Yes.

Nathan 34:03

Right.

Len 34:04

And when they did that, they were, I'm assuming, taking into account things like what's the US unemployment rate? How do I feel about my own financial future right now? What's the state of the economy that I feel right now? So things like consumer sentiment is really important. Um but we but those are lagging indicators.

Nathan 34:20

Right.

Len 34:21

The decisions that the the fact that there are people in the parks today use the data from six months ago or three months ago to make those decisions. So we look at that as a lagging indicator, and then we have to figure out how to project those things going forward. But yeah, there's an entire set of columns in a table somewhere that say things like, you know, normalized US gasoline prices per gallon, you know, stuff like that. Yeah.

Alicea 34:42

Too much right now.

Len 34:44

Yeah. School school schedules are actually um a really big um factor. Uh yeah. So Magic Kingdom, so park park events, park hours, school schedules, those are the big ones.

Nathan 34:54

Got it. Yeah.

Alicea 34:56

Whether it's a crowd calendar or wait time estimates that that power a touring plan, how do you check them against what really happens in the park?

Len 35:04

So we um so we make predictions, right? And then we um our crowd calendar predictions use the wait times at popular attractions between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. to determine crowd level. Right. So um and we'll do some background on this. You guys have all seen Swiss Family Treehouse. Swiss Family Treehouse has a posted wait time in MDE, which is always it's it's either always zero, five, or ten minutes, right? But it's it's literally always zero, five, or ten minutes, right? If you if you look at the variance um over time, the the average wait time per Swiss Family Treehouse is between five and five and a half minutes every day, which means Swiss Family Treehouse is not a great predictor of, or not a great, uh not a great indicator of crowds in the park for like 363 days out of the year.

Alicea 35:56

Yeah

Len 35:56

so you should not include that in your analysis because if you add um if you add a bunch of not popular rides into your analysis, what it does is it sort of squishes all the other wait time averages together and it makes it harder to discern trends. So one of the things that we do for our crowd calendar is um we ignore less popular attractions like Enchanted Tiki Room or the Railroad or Swiss Family Treehouse. We focus on core attractions. We do it between 11 and 5 because um, as I like to point out, if you're the first person in the park, your wait time everywhere is zero. But that doesn't really give you any additional information about crowds. What you really want to know is um what's the difference when things get really crowded. So again, you're you're trying to isolate the differences in crowd levels as much as possible. And the best way to do that is to focus on peak times

What Predicts Crowds And What Doesn’t

Len 36:49

of the day.

Nathan 36:49

Are there rides that are on the opposite side of that scale that are always super busy no matter how many people are in the park that you have to discount?

Len 36:58

There are um there are certain rides that are very good indicators of crowds, buzz lighter, um, haunted mansions, uh, seven dwarves mine train, um, they are. There are certain rides. Slinky dog dash um is always going to be super popular no matter what. Um the peak peak wait time is sometimes interesting um for that because that you can use to differentiate crowds. Um Guardians of the Galaxy, Cosmic Rewind now is probably one of those. Yeah. So there are definitely things, yeah.

Nathan 37:27

Got it.

Len 37:28

The other interesting thing is that um obviously we we we've looked at things like how much does it cost to get into the magic kingdom for one day and is that a good predictor of crowds? And it turns out it's not for a variety of reasons. Um one is that

Nathan 37:43

Disney loves to hear you say that.

Len 37:45

It's it's it's not great. And there's a couple of reasons why. Um one is one is a fact, and one I think is my hypothesis. But if you look at um the price of tickets in in October, November, and December, those are generally higher price seasons for Disney. But remember, when the Magic Kingdom has a Halloween or Christmas party event, on that day, the crowders lowers are going to be within weeks of that, right? It's basically on a one to ten scale, 10 being very busy. It's always a one.

Nathan 38:15

Right.

Len 38:15

But the the price of the tickets don't reflect that. What does seem to um be better, and this is actually something I learned from Lucy McGallins um at Wake Forest. So Lucy uh gives us a class uh once a year in the spring and lets them do, I get we give them data and they do, they investigate some question.

Nathan 38:33

Yeah.

Len 38:34

Uh and so the question that I had them look at this year, this spring, was um was around lightning lane return times. And one of the things that their students found out, well, that Lucy's students found out, was that uh ticket prices are not a great indicator of uh lightning lane distribution times. But lightning lane prices are a weak but significant indicator. So you can improve your predictions by 10% if you incorporate in the cost of lightning lane at Disney's Hollywood Studios.

Alicea 39:01

Interesting.

Len 39:02

Uh into the predictions. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan 39:05

Very interesting.

Len 39:06

It's stuff like that. Yeah. The um it's kind of funny because like like I know this, right? I and you know, um, because we've done the analysis on it. And it's it's kind of funny to see like uh a large language model try to try to answer a question like when is the magic kingdom gonna busy and be busy and not busy? Because unless enough websites have done that sort of sophisticated analysis or detailed analysis, um it's never gonna pick it up. So the LLM is not going to learn unless multiple places have said the same thing. Uh so that's kind of interesting. Yeah.

Pandemic Data And DAS Rule Changes

Alicea 39:43

Have you ever had to completely rebuild models because something completely changed overnight? And we also have to ask, what did the pandemic do to your data?

Len 39:53

The pandemic we basically threw out all the data from 2020 and 2021. We we don't consider it um in a lot of models. There have been uh significant events uh in Disney park operations and universal park operations that completely change uh the data. And I'll I'll mention one. You guys remember in mid-2024, Disney changed the disability access service eligibility rules, and that broke wait time analysis because um, and I'm not saying anything controversial here, um, uh the abuse in the DAS system was so great post between 2021 when Disney introduced Genie Plus to mid-2024. The abuse was so great that it was significantly altering both uh posted wait times and lightning lane distribution in the parks.

Nathan 40:52

Wow.

Len 40:52

So yeah, uh without a doubt, 100%. And and again, that's not controversial. Um in 2012, Disney was running the old uh guest assistance card program. And they were sued um by somebody who wanted to change the rules. And as part of that lawsuit, uh it's the lawsuit is AL versus uh Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, you can find the transcripts online. But as part of the testimony um that Disney gave on that, they called in Bruce Laval, who actually invented the FastPass system. Um and yeah, Bruce is great. I've interacted with him one or two times, just the most helpful dude. Um one of the things that Bruce said was if you look at the analytics, 3.5% of the people in a park on a given day qualify for DAS. So three and a half percent of the population in the park has a disability access card or you know, sort of that three and a half percent of people account for 30 some percent of the rides on popular rides. They so the people who were using DAS were experiencing popular rides at rates up to 10 times higher than guests without disability access cards. And internally, like I've seen some internal Disney numbers that say things like after Disney introduced Genie Plus, obviously there was a you know, there was a financial incentive for people to game the system and and and claim disabilities that weren't there, so you wouldn't have to pay $100 a day for your uh for fast passage, right?

Nathan 42:20

Right.

Len 42:21

Um internally, I've seen spreadsheets that say for certain popular rides in the Magic Kingdom, the number of guests using disability access in the Lightning Lane was just under 80% of the people in the Lightning Lane line.

Alicea 42:38

Wow.

Nathan 42:39

Holy cow.

Len 42:40

And so when I when I saw that number, I was like, okay, there's there's no way that that's that can be true, right? 80% of the people in the line cannot have a disability that prevents them from waiting in the standby line. So we went back and actually did some research on this. We looked at um, we have contacts at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, at the Census Bureau, um, and I looked at the Social Security data on disability. And it turns out the vast majority of disabled Americans are senior citizens, right? Um, the disabilities come through normal aging mostly, or they come through things like, you know, I was a coal miner in West Virginia and I got black lung, right? Things like that. The vast majority of disabilities are either age or occupation related. But it turns out that really old senior senior citizens and disabled coal miners do not travel to Disney World at the same rates as families with young children. So, in order to make sense of that, in order to get to an explanation for why 80% of the people in a lightning lane line were claiming a disability, you basically had to had to make a chain of assumptions where every step in that chain was the worst possible thing that could happen. Like, okay, every disabled coal miner from West Virginia decides to visit Walt Disney World at the same time. They all bring their extended family. Everyone in that extended family wants to go on Seven Dwarfs Mine Train at the same time, right? It's just like these, these, this continuous step of thing. And obviously that's that's never gonna happen, right? The odds of any one of those events.

Nathan 44:12

Yeah.

Len 44:13

So it was abuse. Um and I'm super confident in saying that. There was a certain level of abuse in there that Disney just had to cut down. And if you remember, um, they did this crackdown before, right before Tiana's Bayou adventure opened in the Magic Kingdom. And what I learned after the fact, not talking directly to Disney, but to people who sort of knew the conversation was their big concern was that when Tiana's bayou adventure opened, something like 100% of the Lightning Lane line would be claimed by guests claiming disability. And obviously that was just gonna ruin the experience for everyone. Like that, that was just unsustainable. Right. So um, so going back to to your question, Alicea, about um, you know, do you ever have to redo the models? Yes. We have before and after um events for we we say the the cutover date is July 1st, 2024 because Disney announced that data has changed in May, but they grandfathered in people who all are requalified under the old system. Right. We're saying July 1st.

Alicea 45:10

Okay.

Len 45:11

Yeah. So wait times before July 20, July 1st, 2024, vastly different than after.

Why “Crowd Level” Gets Misread

Nathan 45:18

Similarly, you know, you you were talking about how you basically threw out you know 2020 and 2021.

Len 45:23

Yeah.

Nathan 45:24

From what you're seeing now, are we quote unquote back to normal or have too many things and variables changed? So that's really difficult to say whether we are or not?

Len 45:36

We we have not yet got back to pre-pandemic wait times or crowd levels. And I don't think we're ever going to see that again. At least not for a long time. And it's really interesting because um, when we do our crowd calendar, we're based on historical wait times and the the underlying scale, like you know, an average 25, an average wait of 35 minutes is always like a four or five for us, whatever the number is, right?

Nathan 46:00

Right.

Len 46:00

And that that hasn't changed. The interesting thing for us now is people have started to forget what the parks were like before the pandemic. So I'll give you an example. Um, one of the largest wait times we've ever seen in the parks was 305 minutes for Soarin uh on a New Year's Eve pre-pandemic.

Alicea 46:21

Oh my goodness.

Len 46:22

So five hours and five minutes. And by the way, my first question then is like, you know, to get to five hours and five minutes, someone had to get in line at exactly five-hour wait time to make it five hours and five minutes. What's the thought process of that person? Like, okay, I'm gonna spend you know the next half a day getting in line for this one. Like, what went through your anyway? Okay. Um, so so we haven't got back to those points yet. But that was a, you know, that's obviously a 10 out of 10 crowd level.

Nathan 46:49

Right.

Len 46:50

So these days now, when people see like a 65 or 75 minute wait at Soarin’, very occasionally, I will get an email that says, oh my God, you know, your crowd calendar was completely off. You said it was going to be a five, but there was a 65 or 75 minute wait at Soarin, and that's got to be a 10. And I'm like, oh, you know, if only it were, right?

Nathan 47:10

Oh, you sweet summer child.

Len 47:12

I know, yeah. Because it will be again eventually, right? We don't want to change the scale.

Alicea 47:16

Yeah.

Len 47:16

Because, you know, we're now in the at the very beginning of a building boom in in the theme parks, right? Tropical America's is gonna open in 2027, you know, um Piston Peak's gonna open, Villain’ Land's gonna open, Monstropolis is gonna open, you know, 2028, 2029, 2030. We're gonna have large crowds again.

Nathan 47:34

Yeah.

Len 47:35

Yeah. And and eventually we'll get back to a point where there are more 10 out of 10 days in the park. But it's kind of funny that that that people going to the parks these days don't remember, you know, a 180-minute wait for Peter Pan's flight. So that's communicating what a one to ten crowd level means is I think our primary challenge on the website.

Nathan 47:58

Yeah.

Len 47:59

Yeah.

Alicea 48:00

You do have something saying that though.

Len 48:03

We do. Yeah. We try and tie it now. Like we've in the last website we did, we try to give people an indication of what that means. So we'd say something like, you know, a crowd level five at seven dwarves mine train, really popular, is generally a wait time between this and this.

Nathan 48:16

Yeah.

Len 48:17

The other thing that we've learned over time, and this is not a knock on anyone, but um the average American's relationship to math is not great. Like the vast majority of Americans understand math only as it relates to money because that's how they deal with it on a daily basis.

Alicea 48:32

Yeah.

Len 48:33

Um, communicating things like average is extremely difficult for um for us to do to the, to, for anyone to do to the general public. Um, yeah, just in general.

Nathan 48:45

When you start talking about the public, you also need to assume that people are going to actually read what you put on your website.

Len 48:49

Yeah, and they don't.

Nathan 48:50

Nobody reads it.

Len 48:50

Nobody reads anything. Um, you know, but but when we start talking about things like confidence levels and confidence intervals, that's just that only nerds get that, right? So when I I talk to college kids all the time, who, you know, college kids studying math or operations research could and who are interested in the parks. Like the big challenge you have isn't necessarily acquiring the data or making predictions. It's explaining what you're doing to the average American who doesn't understand, who has never seen Excel.

Nathan 49:16

Yeah.

Len 49:16

Right. And that's and that's our challenge, right? That's it, it's our product, it's our job to communicate effectively. And when when when people don't understand that, that's that's our fault. It's not the user's fault, right?

Alicea 49:27

Yeah.

Rope Drop Risk And Expected Value

Nathan 49:28

Yeah. As a as a nerd, one of the most fun classes I had to take when I was in college, I was I have a business degree in in um uh MIS. And I had to take a stats class. And it was just eye-opening and has been foundational in everything I have done since. And uh this past uh uh quarter, our daughter, uh, she's a psych major, but had to do a stats class. That's going into it, she's like, oh, I don't really like math and blah, blah. I was like, no, no, no, no. You're gonna actually like this. And she did. I was like, yes. Like, win. This is fantastic.

Len 50:05

Yeah, it's it's it's it's it's great because I think a lot of the data that we have is actually very good and people should make decisions based on the data. Even when it's wrong, it's it's we're basically playing probabilities, right? So, like if so, like if I say you should go to Slinky Dog Dash first thing in the morning, right? One one day out of every seven days in a week, Slinky Dog's gonna be down at rope drop. And that's that's just that advice isn't gonna work, right? But you don't know that in advance. So if you're right six out of seven times, that's about as good as it's gonna get. Like that's that's the best advice you could probably get, right?

Nathan 50:40

Yeah.

Len 50:40

Um, but but but again, it's wrong. And you know, what you could do is you could communicate to people like, you know, you've got a six and seven chance of that being right, but conceptually, people will fix it on the one time it's wrong.

Alicea 50:54

Right. Yeah.

Len 50:55

Anyway, so that that's that again, that's an ongoing challenge. Yeah. By the way, the uh the really funny thing is um at at Wake Forest in previous years, uh, some of Lucy's students answered the question um about expected value. And it was like this if you know the downtime at rope drop for every attraction in Hollywood Studios, and you know um what amount of time you could wait if you rope drop the attraction versus visiting it later in the day, which are how do you incorporate the odds that a ride is going to be down at rope drop with the expected value? And the funny thing was, they um so they looked at every possible um initial touring plan with the with three different steps, like do I go to Slinky Dog first, then Millennium Falcon Smugglers Run, you know, then whatever. So they looked at every possible, and I think there were at the time of like 72 different combinations. They looked at every one of them. Uh, but their their conclusion was what Disney should do is have a cast member stand on Hollywood Boulevard. And as guests walk into the park, say, Slinky Dog Dash isn't running right now, go somewhere else. Because the worst thing that you could do as a guest, the worst experience you could have is get your family up early for uh extra magic hour mornings, right? Or uh early theme park entry mornings, right? Get everyone up at you know 6:30 a.m. to be on the bus at 645, to be at the park at 7.15 for 7.30 a.m. opening, walk all the way to Slinky Dog Dash, be first in line for that, and then have the ride not open. Because anywhere you go after that, you're basically at the back of a line now and you've wasted all that effort.

Alicea 52:27

Yep.

Len 52:28

Yep. And so I actually, and Disney actually does this, but for one ride. They do it for rise of the resistance because rise is so unreliable in the morning. I guess they've got enough, but they don't do it for any of the rides. So so they did this analysis. It was a great PowerPoint presentation they came up with. I we validated the results in the park by sending people over and over again to test the results. And then I eventually sent it on to um to Disney. And I was like, hey, you already have someone on Hollywood Boulevard saying whether rise of the resistance is up. Could you also tell us about Slinky Dog Dash? And they didn't. And I think the reason is, honest to God, is because if you start saying things like, you know, a couple days a month, Slinky and Rise are going to be down. That's bad. But the the negative impact um to guest satisfaction then, you know, why the hell did I get up so early when all these rides are down? I think they decided against that.

Nathan 53:21

Yeah.

Len 53:22

Yeah. Yeah. It's really interesting to see, like, because we share data with Disney all the time. Um, and some stuff is genuinely useful to them and they implement it, and sometimes they don't. And we never hear back why they don't, but you can sort of figure it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

How Disney Dish Started

Nathan 53:41

Well, there are a ton of more questions I want to ask, and and uh uh we've got to figure out how to talk again. But I do want to pivot and and give a little time. Uh you were starting to tell some stories uh before we hit the record button. So I want to pivot slightly. How did you get linked up with Jim Hill and start off the Disney Dish podcast?

Len 54:03

All right. I was walking through the Animal Kingdom one day, way back early, like early 2000s. And Jim was giving an unauthorized tour of not unauthorized, it was like, let's say not sanctioned, um tour to a group of people basically walking through the park and telling stories about how the rides were developed. Because remember, Animal Kingdom opened in 98. Right. So, you know, in the early 2000s, it's still open. Jim's basically telling the history of how the park got developed. Yeah. And I joined this group. Um, I sort of tagged along, and at the end I introduced myself. Um, and I don't know if you guys know this, but Jim used to be a writer for John Candy, the comedian.

Nathan 54:44

I did not know that.

Len 54:45

And Jim is very, very funny uh in person. He's in great stories. Obviously, he has you know huge connections inside Disney. So it's like we should do something. So I just started um officially co-authoring the unofficial guide. I was like, hey, could we get together you know once a year when I'm updating the book and have you tell me stories about either why Disney built something that just opened or you know, something that they're building? So like, you know, if they're at the time I think they were they were building Soarin. And I was like, well, you know, what's the story? What is what's this gonna be? What's inspiring it? Or, you know, after it opened, like what were they going for? And so once a year we would get together and I would set aside an entire day, and we would basically get on a call, I would open up a you know Microsoft Word, and we would just go attraction by attraction, land by land through all four parks, and he would tell stories, and then we would figure out how to summarize them succinctly and which ones were best for the book.

Nathan 55:39

Right.

Len 55:39

And then sometime in like 2010, I was like, you know, we should just record this as a podcast because I was doing the WW WDW Today podcast with um Mike Scopa, Matt Hotchberg, and Mike Doel. And I was like, we should we should do this as a podcast. And then in 2012, we actually launched it um as a podcast. And it was we did a uh walk around through the parks, basically just exactly what we would do for updating the book, and and that caught on immediately. And we're like, oh, we should do this as a as a podcast. And so we did it, yeah. It's bizarre by the way, too. Um so Jim Hill has obviously a ton of industry contacts.

Nathan 56:19

Yeah.

Len 56:19

Jim, Jim Scholl, our um our partner on the Disney Unpacked um shows, is former is the former creative executive, sorry, executive creative director of Walt Disney Imagineering. Jim Scholl built Rock and Roller Coaster. He built all the Toy Story lands. Um, those are all his designs. So having him on the show um has a is a bunch of great stories about the parks. But I was just at IAPA with them in November and walking, so IAPA is a trade show for theme park people from all over the world. It's in Orlando, it's at the convention center. They actually build amusement park rides out in the parking lot. It's it's it's bizarre to watch. But but going through IAPA with those two is the most surreal experience you could have in the themed entertainment industry. And I like to say it's IAPA is the land where non-disclosures go to die. Because, like, and I'll give you an example. Like, we walked into the show floor day one, like IAPA day one, 15 minutes after the thing opens, right? So, like my coffee still hasn't kicked in. And we walk in, and I recognize from a distance somebody who works for a theme park and their entourage. And I know this person is a source for Jim and Jim the show. But I don't know that they that anyone knows that they know each other. So they go up and start this person and Jim and Jim start talking, and I'm with the Entourage. And my my initial approach to this is oh, it's nice to meet you. Um, you know, I guess these guys are introducing themselves, but my my assumption was that I had to assume or pretend that Jim and Jim don't know this person. They'd never met before in their lives, right? And out of one ear, I can hear Jim, Jim, and this person saying, remember, this is November, it's right before Thanksgiving, you know, oh, are the kids coming home from college, you know, for you know, for Thanksgiving. Or you go to your parents' lake house and I'm looking at these people like Jim Hill has never met this person before in their lives, right? Like, I don't know what they're talking about. And, you know, it was just, it was weird. But uh yeah, but Jim and Jim have have really great industry connections, and I think that's what makes the show um really fun to listen to.

Leaks Trial Balloons And Media Lists

Alicea 58:32

Um you often joke that Disney will never invite you to a press event because you already know too much. Uh where do you get all these stories?

Len 58:42

Yeah, so I the vast majority of people in the world in any theme park company, Disney and Universal, appreciate not only what we do, but specifically what I do, right? Like I've I don't know if you guys are familiar with the um the Disney Slack leak that came out a couple of years ago, um, where um there was a data dump of internal Disney Slack communications and it's like terabytes of information. First thing I did obviously is look up what Disney said about me, and everything's positive. Right. So internally, like they know, um, you know, stuff like that. Where they where we tend to run into issues is where um I say things that aren't entirely positive.

Nathan 59:24

Right.

Len 59:24

So so from the very the the point of the unofficial guide and the point of touringplanes.com is to help consumers spend their money and time in theme parks wisely. And so if a ride isn't worth your time or a restaurant isn't worth your money, we have to say that. That's our job. Right. Um, and and that doesn't get you on the media list for a theme park, right? Because, you know, Disney World is not Lake Wobagon, where every every child is above average. Right. And and and that fundamentally, it's not in Disney's best interest to do it. Like I understand how the game is played, right? Like we're um, you know, even if I'm if I'm gonna say something positive 80% of the time, because 80% of the time Disney does it great, it's the 20% that they don't want to get invite me for, because I'll I'll say it. Um that you know that's that's one thing. Um and that's the reason why I don't get on media events. The weird thing is like now when I do interviews with with TV or uh television stations or newspaper, one of the first questions they'll ask me is Um, do you get invited to Disney media events? And because they're they're filtering out those. They don't want to hear from people who are on the Disney media list now because they know that that's not an unbiased opinion. Right. So so the weird thing is like for social media, the way that Disney's operating is absolutely right. For national media, it's the exact opposite of what you want to do. Basically, no one trusts a Disney influencer for a newspaper or TV interview, um, which is really interesting. Yeah. So that's but going back to your question about how we get the information. Um, I've been doing this a long time. Um and that there are people inside the companies who are who work in theme parks who grew up listening to us. Like I was walking through Epic Universe during a preview one time, and somebody who was shaping concrete walked up to me and said, I, you know, I got into theme parks because of you. And I was like, that's the greatest thing I could ever hear. Um, you know, thank you so much for that. And so, you know, sometimes they talk, right? Uh yeah, that stuff and they tell us things. Um, that's one thing. Like basically fans are like, you know, you'll find this thing interesting. And I and I appreciate that, right? Don't get me wrong. That's fantastic. The the other thing, and I think Jim Hill has alluded to this before. A lot of times the stuff that we get comes directly from Disney or Universal as a sort of trial balloon for an idea.

Nathan 1:01:52

Yeah.

Len 1:01:52

And and that's an effective way of gauging. So, and we know that, right? Like I know when they do this.

Nathan 1:01:58

Right.

Len 1:01:58

Like we have a general sense of like this is happening. So it's funny that, you know, because we we say things that about you know future plans or don't get invited to media events. But at the same time, like the call is coming from inside the house, guys. Again, I like to I like to tell people at Disney, like the relationship that between sort of like Jim and I is not black and white. You have to be comfortable with like operating in sort of gray zones where again, like 80% of the time we're we're we're all on the same page, 20% of the time we just can't be because that's the nature of the relationship. Yeah. Um yeah, so that's fine.

Nathan 1:02:38

Yeah.

D23 Wish List And Timelines

Nathan 1:02:39

So so knowing all that, looking ahead to D23 later this summer, yeah, as someone who has their finger on Disney's pulse, what's on your personal wish list for what you really want? Not necessarily what you think, but what would you really want to hear from Josh D’amaro and his team?

Len 1:02:59

I think I think Josh has been very good as CEO so far. He's said things that we would not expect a CEO to say um about how the theme parks work. And the example that I give is he said that you know, guests like Millennium Falcon smugglers run, but they don't love it.

Nathan 1:03:17

Yeah.

Len 1:03:17

Um that I I think Josh has done a great job as CEO so far. Um the thing that I would be interested in is you know specifically, we don't know what the second ride at Piston Peak is going to be in Frontierland. We don't know anything about villains land officially. Um I'd love to hear about that. Um, and then sort of like timelines for opening. And the same thing in in Disneyland as well. What's the timeline for Avengers Campus? What's the timeline for Disneyland Forward? I'd love to hear um to hear those things.

Nathan 1:03:48

Yeah.

Len 1:03:49

I I I don't think we we might. I think it was actually kind of surprising to me that we didn't hear a D23, the Carousel of Progress uh announcement.

Alicea 1:03:59

Yeah.

Len 1:03:59

Um because that was relatively big news. You think they would have saved it for D23. My my suspicion is, if you guys notice, they timed that announcement, or sorry, that announcement fell on the exact same day that Universal or Universal Parks announced the opening date for their Texas park.

Nathan 1:04:19

Right.

Len 1:04:20

I don't think that was a coincidence.

Alicea 1:04:22

They keep some stuff in their back pocket just in case.

Len 1:04:25

I think they do, 100%. Because from what I know about that announcement, it was it was only leaked to influencers a couple of days before it happened. And so that tells me that they got advanced warning. Again, I suspect, right? But yeah, anyway. Yeah. So that's that's that. Yeah. So I'd love to hear, I'd love to hear that. Um, we're not yet at a point where we are going to get information about the phase two Disney Parks expansion. So remember a couple of years ago when Bob Iger was CEO, um, I Bob and Josh announced a 10-year, $60 billion investment in parks and experiences.

Alicea 1:05:05

Yeah.

Len 1:05:05

Right. And I think well, they may have announced in 2023, but but really started in 2025. And so everything that we know right now, everything that's being built is basically phase one.

Nathan 1:05:15

Right.

Len 1:05:15

We haven't heard anything about phase two. I don't expect we're gonna hear anything about that until like 2028, 2029.

Nathan 1:05:21

Yeah.

Len 1:05:21

Um, but you know, just to hear sort of like directionally what parks are gonna happen next, um, what's gonna be on the cruise line, you know, when they go to 13 ships eventually, stuff like that. I don't think we will. I think the stuff that we're gonna like for this D23, we're gonna hear more about what the Encanto ride actually is, um, more about the Indiana Jones ride, um, you know, and more about Piston Peak, right? We're gonna get more details. But I'd love to hear like, you know, looking forward, blue sky, what park is gonna be the next one to get a major expansion? And what are we thinking there? I don't think we will, but we'll see.

Favorites Lightning Round Plus Food Talk

Nathan 1:05:56

Yeah. Well, uh in the interest of Time. Like I said, I could monopolize the rest of your day, but I will demure. But it is now time for Alicea's patented Disney torture test. But you are a Disney professional. Still, good luck.

Len 1:06:14

There's a lot I don't know. I mean, I tell Laurel all the time, I'm good at like one, maybe two things, and that's out of that. Yeah. Let's say.

Alicea 1:06:22

Well, this is not patented, nor is it torture. Just to allay your fears here. What this is is just your favorites from across the city. Lightning's umbrella. Yeah. So Disney, Pixar, Star Wars, Marvel, anything under there. Who's your favorite character?

Len 1:06:37

Mickey Mouse. The first tattoo I ever got was Mickey Mouse.

Alicea 1:06:41

Nice.

Nathan 1:06:41

Nice.

Alicea 1:06:42

Uh favorite movie.

Len 1:06:44

Pirates of the Caribbean, Curse of the Black Pearl. Nice.

Alicea 1:06:47

Do you have a favorite ride?

Len 1:06:49

Used to be Splash Mountain, and I know that's I loved Splash Mountain before I knew about the back ground. I can't help that. It's like falling in love with somebody who's flawed. These days, it's the the two rides that I will go on, three rides that I will go on every single time I'm in a park, Pirates of the Caribbean. Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway. I think Cheer De Carter and team did a fantastic job on that ride. I love the new Mickey Mouse cartoons. They are genius. Like if you've ever seen Potato Land, that is that is one of the great pieces of American animation. Like I will, I will, that in like uh the Bugs Bunny What's Opera Doc for tea. Um also um Rock and Roller Coaster with the Muppets is genius. I don't I don't love the songs, but everything about that is fantastic. Those are my three favorites now.

Nathan 1:07:33

Nice.

Alicea 1:07:34

Disney World or Disneyland?

Len 1:07:36

Uh Disney World, without a doubt. Disney World Disneyland is uh Disney World beta. 0.9.

Alicea 1:07:44

Out of all the individual parks that you have been to, which one is your favorite?

Len 1:07:48

Epcot 1995. Um so when Epcot had Horizons, the original world of motion, the the the optimistic view of the future that Epcot had back then in its attractions, in its, you know, in its signage, in its songs, in its background music, um, made me fall in love with the parks. I uh so when I was writing my master's thesis, which was on you know how to this basic problem of minimizing your wait line of theme parks, I listened to the uh 1991 official soundtrack of the Magic Kingdom in Epcot to the point where I can't listen to it anymore because it's you know, like my wife says it's of a particular place and time. Um and it just brings back memories of me at two o'clock in the morning sitting in front of a computer trying to write a 300-page master's thesis. And I loved every, you know, I I that park was so different than the Magic Kingdom, and it was so built for you know, slightly autistic ADD people like me. Um that you know had a had a positive view of technology in the future.

Nathan 1:08:57

Yeah,

Len 1:08:58

I don't know that's ever going to be replicated. Like they they'll never build another Epcot. No one will ever build another Epcot.

Alicea 1:09:03

Yeah,

Len 1:09:03

um, and but for a time it was glorious. Yeah.

Nathan 1:09:06

Yeah. It's funny you mentioned the the link between music and doing something. Because for me, it's reggae and stats, because our college radio station had like a reggae block, like the two hours before our my stats class, and that's when I did all my homework.

Len 1:09:21

Yeah, I could, I mean, I right even right now, like I listen to Disney background music with no words. Um as my background music, like getting up in the morning, it uh gets me in the right mood. Like the Magic Kingdom um uh entrance background music loop is about an hour and five minutes. It's it's fantastic, yeah.

Alicea 1:09:37

Yeah. Do you have a favorite hotel or resort?

Len 1:09:41

My yeah. Okay, so it's probably it's probably the Polynesian. Um I also love the Wilderness Lodge. Like the Poly for me is like I love the uh, especially at night, it's just beautiful. I really like the Poly Island Tower more than I thought I would. Um it looks, it's better than um than it's better when you're a guest than just looking at it because you've got excellent views of the Magic Kingdom fireworks if you stay on the um Seven Seas Lagoon side of it. My backup would be the Wilderness Lounge, again, because I like the theming. The rooms aren't great, but the pool is good. Geyser Point is fun. Um, I like America's national parks, and the background music um is um Aaron Copeland a lot, right? It's basically like Western music, and you get like the Billy the Kid music suite and uh Appalachian Spring and stuff like that. And that's it's very American to me. And I like um I like that stuff, yeah. Yeah.

Alicea 1:10:35

Uh favorite DCL ship.

Len 1:10:38

The dream. So uh Laurel and I were on The Dream uh doing uh uh Copenhagen uh in northern in northern Europe, and it just came out of Referb. And when I say that's one of the best vacations I've ever had, not Disney vacations, but one of the best vacations I've ever had, like the ship was spotless. The ports were fantastic. Yeah, uh crew members were excellent. I really like that ship. By the way, um, we were on a um shore excursion in Kiel, Germany. And like you know, you go to Europe and you want to find like all the old historic places and things like that. So we were walking through, got off the ship, sort of walking towards the center of town. I happened to stop an old German grandmother and said, Excuse me, can you can you direct us to the old part of town and you weren't looking for churches and stuff like that? And she looked at me in the perfect English said, You bombed it during the war. Yep.

Nathan 1:11:28

Oops.

Len 1:11:28

There's no recovery from that conversation, by the way. You say thank you and move on.

Alicea 1:11:32

Yeah, exactly. Oh my goodness.

Len 1:11:35

Yeah, good times.

Alicea 1:11:38

Your favorite restaurant.

Len 1:11:41

Victoria and Alberts is an excellent restaurant. The general manager there, the proprietor, um, Israel Perez won the 2024 Michelin Award for Service for Florida. And honest to God, I can't think of any other person I know in any other industry who deserves that kind of award more than him. Israel has dedicated his life to um uh elevating restaurant experiences. He is the best at what he does that I've ever met. Victoria and Alberts, like for a day-to-day basis, yeah. I I like Pecos Bills. Like nothing wrong with Pecos Bills. Um Columbia Harbor house is actually the highest-rated uh restaurant in the Magic Kingdom. That was sort of by default. I was just there last week. So yeah.

Alicea 1:12:19

We haven't hit Victoria and Alberts yet. It is on our list, though.

Len 1:12:23

It is, it is an experience.

Nathan 1:12:25

If you haven't been out there, and I'm assuming you guys are going out for D23 here in a couple months or so, um, the new Napa Rose.

Len 1:12:33

Napa Rose, yeah, I haven't been there since the reef roof, yeah, yeah.

Nathan 1:12:36

Is amazing. I will say it is gunning for a Michelin star food-wise. I don't know that the snobs that uh that make those decisions will cough up a star given the uh the atmosphere though.

Len 1:12:50

So I when the first year that Michelin did um stars for Orlando, VA didn't get one. And I was like, why? And so my I suspect from talking to people, the issue there were multiple issues. One was it had not been reopened long enough after the pandemic to establish a baseline. Number two, um, they had recently got a new chef. Uh-huh. And I think Michelin generally wants to see that chef get comfortable for a couple of years before they do a full evaluation. So I think Napa Rose is probably on the list of places to visit, yeah, but needs a couple of years of stability um and consistency to get there. I think they eventually will. I think VA actually is a two-star restaurant. Um, and it is really surprising to me that they don't have two stars. Like I've been to, I've never been to a three-star restaurant. I've been to several two stars and a bunch of ones. Yeah. VNA's is as good as any two-star restaurant I've ever been to. Like they deserve two. And I think that's just a matter of time. Again, it's a consistency thing over time. Yeah.

Nathan 1:13:52

Just since you have much more experience in this than we do, how would you compare something like Remy's on The Dream to a VA and then compare that to like a Michelin star kind of uh experience?

Len 1:14:05

Yeah. Remy should probably get a star too. Um, I think the issue with that is how is a Michelin reviewer going to go enough times on a cruise to evaluate the I mean, because you're not just paying for the meal, you're paying for the entire cruise. And eventually over time, people are gonna figure out what you're doing, right? So there's I I that's never gonna happen, although it probably deserves a star. Um the the things that make a restaurant worth a star for me would be obviously you've got to prepare the food correctly every single time. But you also have to show some inventive inventiveness in the presentation um and in the use of ingredients, right? Um, and that's the thing that makes a Michelin star restaurant different than you know, a place that is, you know, mom and pop place that is consistently good. Like my my my the canonical restaurant that I use for rating Italian restaurants, like mom and pop Italian restaurants, is this place that Scott Gustin and I go to in in Greensboro called Elizabeth's Pizzeria, which serves like the very best um chicken parm I've ever had. And you can't make it better, right? It's like home cooking, but that's never gonna get a Michelin star because it's chicken parm. Like what would you have to do to it? You know, it you'd have to make it $75 chicken parm instead of $20 chicken parm, but then that's not what Elizabeth does, right? Right. So that's the that's the difference there. You've got to use elevated ingredients, unusual ingredients presented in novel ways that really um highlight either the the core purpose of the dish, like if you're doing like um a casole, right? You have to highlight the duck in the the three-day preparation process, or you've got to use ingredients in an unusual way. On the ship, I think the first time we ever went to Remy, they did you guys ever have the um grilled cheese and tomato soup cube?

Alicea 1:15:59

Yes.

Len 1:16:00

Okay, so it's it's for our listeners, it's imagine something a little bit bigger than a sugar cube. That is an entire grilled cheese sandwich filled with tomato soup in a single bite. And imagine what it takes to present that.

Nathan 1:16:16

Yeah.

Len 1:16:16

Right? It's basically the size of a dice, but it's a complete meal in a in a in a dot. Right. I looked at that and I was like, I don't know who thought of this, but but that's you know, that's why we're paying you know someone else.

Nathan 1:16:26

Right, exactly. Yeah, exactly.

Len 1:16:28

That's that's the difference there.

Alicea 1:16:29

Yeah.

Nathan 1:16:29

Nice.

Alicea 1:16:30

All right, last one. Your favorite Disney snack.

Len 1:16:35

I am a sucker for a Mickey pretzel with the um the industrial cheese and a Coke. Like, I mean, it's basically all carbs and it's a sugar high, but that is my go-to snack when I when I want to drink a soda in the parks.

Alicea 1:16:49

Nice.

Len 1:16:49

Yeah. That is that is my favorite thing, yeah.

Nathan 1:16:52

You can't go wrong with plastic cheese.

Len 1:16:54

Yeah, and it's got this weird sort of like Chernobyl like orange glow to it. Like I haven't I haven't put it in a dark room, but I'm pretty sure I could it would it would glow.

Alicea 1:17:04

It glows in the daytime. I mean, it's gotta glow in the evening.

Len 1:17:07

Exactly. Yeah. Those are my favorite things, yeah.

Alicea 1:17:10

Awesome.

Len 1:17:11

This has been super fun, guys. Thank you so much.

Nathan 1:17:12

Yeah.

Wrap Up And Listener Requests

Nathan 1:17:13

Yeah, absolutely. Our our pleasure. Um, thank you for being available. Uh, thank you for nerding out a little with us and and uh peeling back the curtain and showing us uh you know the the guy pulling the strings back there that uh is uh is making magic happen for for lots of guests uh across the pleasure. Yeah, yeah, it was such a pleasure getting to know you today.

Len 1:17:35

Let me know when you guys uh make it to Florida.

Nathan 1:17:37

A few moments later. Oh, the conversations we just had after we hit stop. Uh you guys will never hear them. And um, I am sworn to secrecy, as is Alicea. The NDA from Len Testa was quite substantive. Uh, but um, you know, we signed it uh against our lawyer's advice, and um that was worth it.

Alicea 1:17:58

Very much so.

Nathan 1:17:59

That was worth it. Anyhow, thank you so much to Len for uh sharing stories and sharing time and coming on. That was everything I was hoping it would be. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, as we wrap up, just a reminder that we are not affiliated with Disney or any of its subsidiaries. Everything you hear on the show is based on personal experiences, opinions, and questionable snack choices. We are, however, proudly affiliated with fun.

Alicea 1:18:26

Yes.

Nathan 1:18:26

Uh and data.

Alicea 1:18:27

And data. Yeah. If you're planning a Disney vacation, we always recommend working with a travel advisor or reaching out to Disney directly to help make the magic happen. And if you enjoyed today's episode, please take a second to rate and review this show. This really helps other Disney fans find us.

Nathan 1:18:44

If you have a question or a topic suggestion, or even a Disney story you would love to share, please send us an email at podcast at our mousecapades.com.

Alicea 1:18:54

You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Threads at OurMouscapades, and on YouTube at OurMouscapades Pod. And don't forget to share us with your friends, your family, and Disney fans of all ages.

Nathan 1:19:06

Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back in your ears next week. Thank you for flying Star Tours. Bye bye.