Quoted from Parkshow30:Extra magic hours was one of the main reasons we always stayed on site. I don’t go on vacation to wake up early, I do that everyday for work. We enjoyed and planned our time around going to the parks that had nighttime extra magic hours. Staying inside the magic kingdom until 1am was great! Now the only way you will be able to do that is to buy tickets to their parties. After our last stay at a house with a private pool for less money than a small room at one of their moderate resorts, Disney will be getting far less of our money than they used to.
Quoted from Fizz:I agree with you 100%. Disney is going to slowly turn themselves into just another amusement park.
Ending the magical express is going to hurt them more than they may realize. They say that they are doing it because it's easy to ride share these days. OK. But, it's not easy or even possible to ride share with young kids who require car seats.
For years, when my kids were very young, disney world had a huge advantage for us over other vacations. Because I didn't need a car, didn't need to ride share or take a taxi, and I could bring my small children on the buses with no car seats required.
And I totally love the late nights at the parks. We always stayed out late when the kids were super young. They'd be the only kids there at midnight and would get so much attention, it was awesome.
Yep and yep. Starting when our kids were 1 and 2 we went every year for 8 years. Started with a 4-day trip then added another day to the trip each year. Magical Express was a BIG incentive for us to stay on property. No rental car, no car seats, & bags came to the room from the airport, and that was a big load off our shoulders when traveling with such young kids. And also the dining plan was a really good option the first couple years (but then started losing it's value/appeal a few years later).
If today we started taking those same trips without Magical Express where we would have to arrange our own transport from the airport with car seats and wrangle our bags from the carousel, then we would be taking an Uber to an AirBnB instead. Around 2014-2015 or so there seemed to be a shift in the trips where it felt like Disney cost controls were starting to become noticeable on the vacations. Not a good vibe to have on those vacations. The last two trips there we ended up skipping Magical Express and instead hopped into an Uber from the airport to the Disney hotel because it was going to be a long (hour or more) wait for the Magical Express bus while in all the previous trips I don't think it had ever even been half that long, and with the kids a bit older we wanted to get to the resort to start vacationing instead of waiting at the airport. The last couple years we went little things like that were popping up where services just didn't seem as great as it had been in previous trips.
So now the last three years we've still gone to Orlando but skipped Disney except for visiting Disney Springs. Still love Disney and have lots of Disney stuff throughout our house, but it just became a bit much with all the planning that had to be done several months in advance to get the rides & restaurants for each day of the trip (especially when the trip length got to 10 days), and we just couldn't shake a sense that while it's still a great place to go (and we want to go back) the feeling of creeping cost controls with things like the dining plan, longer waits for the bus & a lot of other little things just tilted us to start looking at other things to do & places to stay in town. It's a bummer because we really love going there.