Disney to redesign theme park apps, websites
Walt Disney World and Disneyland will be updating their apps and websites, as Disney works to make booking a trip to its theme park resorts easier.
Disney outlined the coming changes during a press briefing at the Walt Disney World Resort last week. (FYI: those corporate lounges above various EPCOT attractions are still there, though often unused. Now and then, Disney uses them for things such as... press briefings.)
First up will be long-awaited Spanish language support for the apps. Beyond that, Disney will redesign the apps' homepages to focus more clearly on a guest's upcoming trips.
The changes previewed last week reminded me of the Disney Cruise Line app, which dispenses with sales pitches in favor of a sharp focus on functionality. The new Disney World app homepage will focus on your upcoming trips, featuring a checklist of what you need to complete before your vacation begins.
As part of that, Disney is redesigning the app to make linking family and friends easier, so everyone on your trip can share plans. Disney also is working to create a better search engine for its U.S. theme parks apps and websites, so that Disney can deliver more relevant results and answers for guests' questions.
The new search functions will make better use of Disney's AI system to sort through Disney's own webpages, FAQs, and location listings in response to guests' questions and queries. I know that the letters "AI" provoke strong reactions, so allow me to put on my techie hat here for a moment to share some context.
AI, at its heart, is simply automated pattern recognition and replication. An AI program looks for patterns in a set of data, then can replicate patterns of words or imagery within that dataset in new ways based on a user's request. That makes it a great tool for a next-generation search engine, in that the AI program can determine connections between the words that user include in their questions and the available data that the AI is searching to find matches that users find useful.
The big, big problem with AI is that an AI program is only as good as the data that it is scanning. Disney's AI is looking at Disney's data and no one else's. It's not "training" on a bunch of stolen content or made-up stuff from the Internet, or other AI-generated content online. That should help ensure that the answers that Disney's new search engine provides are accurate and relevant to a user's needs.
When a guest is ready to book a Disney vacation, the new design on the Walt Disney World (and eventually, Disneyland) website will streamline that process. Disney showed off a design that allows guests to compare options more easily and review rates across multiple dates. The new system also is designed to suggest which available deals make most sense for the dates and options a guest is considering.
The new system also will allow guests to search prices based on various seasonal events. For example, you don't have to go looking up the dates for the next EPCOT International Food & Wine Festival anymore. Just check the option to tell Disney that event is what you are looking for, and Disney will show you options for a vacation during that event.
At this point, Disney is not sharing publicly the mock-ups for its new websites and apps. Nor is it announcing specific dates for their roll-out. But changes are coming, and - as someone who has used all of Disney's theme parks apps, including the My Disney Experience, Disneyland, and Disney Cruise Line apps - the changes look good.
In the meantime, if you don't want to wait for the new tech and need assistance in planning a Walt Disney World or Disneyland vacation, please contact our travel agent for a free, no-obligation vacation quote.
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This is what happens when you spend over $1 billion trying to solve a problem that didn't need solving - you end up with a mess of a website/app that was really only intended to help facilitate attraction reservations that's now being asked to integrate dining reservations, mobile food orders, resort reservations, as well as information traditionally relayed through a paper park map. Synergizing these various functions has been long overdue, but I do worry that D'Amaro's vision of a 1-stop shop Disney app (that includes streaming services, shopping, and various other aspects of the company) is still a long ways off.