Former Disney CEO Bob Chapek says Disney leadership weighed getting rid of Disneyland’s annual passes altogether, and only backed off because the company knew how loudly fans would react. In his memoir, Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth, Chapek writes that the executives studying the program understood that eliminating the passes would bring heavy criticism, so he chose a different route: make them cost more.
The book was published September 29 by Gallery Books. The annual pass passage has picked up fresh attention this week as Disneyland fans read it for the first time, and plenty of longtime passholders are taking it as proof of what they always suspected.
A Fantastic Deal For Passholders, A Terrible One For Disney
Chapek took over Disney’s parks division in 2015. He writes that Disneyland had far more demand than it could handle, and that some passholders were coming through the gates as many as 200 times a year. By his math, those frequent visitors were worth about $25 a day to Disney, while other guests spent an average of $150.
According to the book, Michael Colglazier and Josh D’Amaro, who is now Disney’s CEO, studied the pass program with him and summed it up bluntly: a fantastic deal for the passholder and a terrible one for the company. That is the analysis that put elimination on the table.
Raising Prices Instead Of Cutting The Program
Rather than scrap the passes, Chapek went after the price. “I raised prices and restricted access relative to the price of the pass for the annual passholders, both to serve the shareholders and to try to improve the experience of the vast majority of park visitors,” he writes.
Disneyland had 1.1 million passholders when he announced the first round of increases. After it, the count slipped to about one million while revenue went up. Chapek calls that “a huge win.”
He was already saying a version of this out loud as CEO. On an August 2020 earnings call, Chapek told investors that a guest who travels and stays five to seven days is marginally more valuable to the business than someone who comes in on an annual pass for a day or two and spends less on food and merchandise. Passholders took that comment personally at the time, and the memoir confirms the thinking behind it went much further.
What Happened To Disneyland’s Passes
Disneyland did end its annual pass program in January 2021, while the resort was still closed for the pandemic. It came back in a new form that August, when Disneyland Resort unveiled the Magic Key program with four tiers priced from $399 to $1,399, all of them requiring a theme park reservation to get in. Sales opened August 25, 2021.
A year later, Disney put the passholder problem in writing. In its August 2022 third-quarter earnings report, the company said gains in per capita ticket revenue were partially offset by “an unfavorable attendance mix at Disneyland Resort.” Disney never spelled out what that meant, but fans widely read it as too many Magic Key holders in the parks, and the phrase turned into an in-joke, with some passholders wearing “Unfavorable Attendance Mix” shirts around the resort.
Chapek ran Disney as CEO from February 2020 until the board fired him in November 2022 and brought back Bob Iger. In the same chapter, he credits D’Amaro as the “tip of my spear” on the park reservation system, which Magic Key holders still use today.
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