As covered in Walt Disney World is Worried About Its High Prices, there are concerns about Disney pricing out the middle class. This is now a debate inside the company among leaders, with growing fears about how price increases and unpopular decisions are angering fans and losing guest goodwill.
We’ve already discussed all of that (twice!), but there’s one morsel from the WSJ that we haven’t yet discussed. Shortly after Chapek’s ouster, Iger called a meeting and asked D’Amaro to come up with a list of things the company could do to win back the goodwill of fans, undoing some of the damage of the Chapek regime.
Among that discussion, there was this quote: “Disney eliminated some perks that used to be gratis, like the Magical Express airport shuttle and the FastPass ride-scheduling system. It said only about a third of hotel guests were using the airport service when it was canceled.” Obviously, Disney’s Magical Express was not one of the things Iger picked from the list of guest perks to be restored, but this is still the first time the company has ever disclosed ridership numbers for Disney’s Magical Express.
Let’s break this down. On January 11, 2021, Walt Disney World officially announced the decision to discontinue the free Disney’s Magical Express airport shuttle service. The company explained that “vacationers have more options to choose from than ever for transportation, including ride-share services that save time and offer more flexibility to go where they want, when they want.”
In light of this transportation preference shift, Disney explained that when hotel bookings opened for stays in 2022, they would no longer offer Disney’s Magical Express service for new arrivals. Walt Disney World continued to operate the service for new and existing reservations made for arrivals throughout 2021, and departures into early 2022.
Disney’s Magical Express airport shuttle service was operated by Mears, a transportation company with coach buses and taxis that enjoyed a virtual monopoly on the Orlando market for years. During COVID, Mears struggled. It furloughed 83% of its workforce and permanently laid off 200 workers.
Mears came back from the brink, announcing Mears Connect only a few months later, in April 2021. The service was launched in direct response to overwhelming demand and inquiries by guests. Mears Connect promised the “same safe and reliable service the company has provided millions of guests for decades.”
Shortly thereafter, a newcomer entered the arena, with Sunshine Flyer also launching in 2022. While it was a fantastic and unique train-themed twist on airport shuttles, it didn’t last long. Sunshine Flyer and Mears Connect merged in August 2023. Although the companies didn’t state as much, the reason was obvious to me: insufficient demand to sustain both.
The combined company, Mears Connect Driven by Sunshine, still operates as of 2025. In Mears Connect Driven by Sunshine Review: Is Disney World’s Airport Shuttle Still Good?, I mention that the number of stops has increased. That review was from exactly one year ago, and this issue has only worsened during non-peak times.
It’s worth reading that full review if you’re on the fence about Mears Connect, but the last line is the most pertinent part for our purposes: “Part of me wonders if the only way an airport shuttle is viable at all in the long-run is by being an on-site perk offered by Walt Disney World.”
With regard to Walt Disney World’s statement that “only about a third of hotel guests were using the airport service when it was canceled,” the first thing that sticks out to me was it was cancelled during the height of COVID. If only a third of guests were using Disney’s Magical Express from July 2020 to January 2021, that’s not indicative of anything.
We heard from countless readers then who were renting cars or driving all the way down to Walt Disney World for the first time to mitigate risk. Others opted for private transportation to reduce their exposure to other guests. This was all fairly cost-effective because not many people, period, were visiting Walt Disney World at the time. Even internal transportation was barely used during that ~6 months.
The bottom line is that if Walt Disney World were making the basis to discontinue Disney’s Magical Express on the basis of ridership numbers in mid-to-late 2020, oof. That would be very flawed methodology, to say the least.
While no poorly-reasoned decisions during the Chapek years would shock me, I’ll give Walt Disney World the benefit of the doubt and assume that the one-third stat for Disney’s Magical Express was not from late 2020, but rather, late 2019 or early 2020.
That retiring DME had been on the table for a while, and Walt Disney World used the “cover” afforded by the soft reset of the phased reopening to finally pull the trigger on what it knew would be an unpopular decision. This is precisely how we ended up with paid FastPass, which had been rumored for years but Disney never had the “courage” to move forward with previously.
By Disney’s own admission (contemporaneous interviews with Chapek and Parks Chairman Josh D’Amaro), the closure and phased reopening presented a unique opportunity for the parks to reevaluate its business practices and make difficult decisions. At that time, paid overnight resort hotel parking was fairly recent, and Walt Disney World probably was already looking for other ways to improve margins on its resorts without increasing rack rates.
Regardless of when the decision to eliminate Disney’s Magical Express was made, my reaction to the one-third ridership statistic was: “wow, that’s a higher number than I expected!”
Not everyone flies to Walt Disney World. Florida residents doing “staycations” most certainly are not. Same goes for those in other Southern states for the most part. There are a lot of regular guests, even those living farther north, who don’t fly because it’s not cost-effective or for other reasons. My family never fly to Walt Disney World when I was a kid–we made the long drive from Michigan!
Although the percentages probably vary by season, I would conservatively estimate that 20% of on-site Walt Disney World guests are not flying. That number could be as high as one-third, I have no clue–it’s not a statistic I’ve ever seen Walt Disney World release.
Within the remaining bucket of guests, there are those who do not want to use an airport shuttle for whatever reason.
Many want to be the masters of their own fate by having a rental car, allowing them to not be beholden to Walt Disney World transportation. Not just Disney’s Magical Express, but all of it. This is common at the spread out Disney Vacation Club resorts and other hotels reliant on all-bus transportation. There was a period between the time Sarah and I were broke college students and the rise of rideshare when this described us, and we rented a car for those trips.
Others prefer private pickups. The limo and town car companies have done big business at Orlando International Airport for as long as I can remember. It’s always been the case that some percentage of guests preferred a private transfer as opposed to a public shuttle.
The bottom line is that there’s another big chunk of guests airport-arriving guests for whom Disney’s Magical Express was always a non-starter. For as long as we’ve been visiting Walt Disney World, the hotel parking lots have seen reasonably high utilization, taxis were always around, and private transfer companies existed. The rise and fall of Disney’s Magical Express didn’t meaningfully change the equation on any of this.
With all of that said, it would be foolish to pretend that the rise of rideshare didn’t change things for Disney’s Magical Express. It very obviously did.
Uber and Lyft have been massively disruptive not just to the taxi industry, but presumably to demand for Disney’s Magical Express. I would hazard a guess that as those rideshare services became more mainstream, so did their usage around Central Florida. This is something we also saw and experienced firsthand.
We were early adopters of Uber, and noticed that for several years after we first wrote about rideshare, readers were still “discovering” it and debating whether to use rideshare for the first time. This might surprise some, but it makes sense. The experiences of those who live in Los Angeles, New York, or Chicago are very different than those in rural regions. Rideshare is still not a “thing” in my hometown.
This is not just about how many guests were using Uber or Lyft for transportation to and from the airport, cutting into Disney’s Magical Express ridership numbers.
Equally significant, if not more so, was the freedom that rideshare offered. Uber and Lyft opened the door for on-site guests to venture off-site, including those who had used Disney’s Magical Express for transportation to Walt Disney World from the airport. This meant doing meals off-site, but more critically, it meant spending days at Universal Orlando and other Central Florida theme parks.
This was the whole reason why Disney’s Magical Express came into being in the first place. Just like the Disney Dining Plan, it was originally a play to keep people on-site. Long ago, Walt Disney World determined that the increase in average per guest spending with Disney’s Magical Express plus the perceived convenience and goodwill obtained from offering the service outweighed the average per guest cost of offering the service. It was a ‘soft lock’ in keeping people in the Disney Bubble. Uber and Lyft punctured that.
Even though I’ve long accepted the above reasoning about rideshare, I’ve maintained my belief that Disney’s Magical Express was still a net positive for Walt Disney World. That it was probably a short-sighted decision to end DME even if rideshare increased the mobility of guests to flow off-site.
However, the last time I wrote about Disney’s Magical Express, we were a frugal, tech-savvy couple of Childless Disney Millennials. Today, we are parents to a small child. Being a Disney Dad has changed my perspective on a lot of things, including Disney’s Magical Express.
Before, I overestimated how big of game-changers Uber and Lyft were for Walt Disney World transportation. Even though I had heard from many families that rideshare wasn’t a viable option for them, I probably discounted this perspective. And as a frugal couple, we probably overemphasized the difference between rideshare and taxis on the basis of cost (and it’s no longer the case that Uber is significantly cheaper than taxis!).
Suffice to say, there never has been a ‘soft lock’ on the Disney Bubble because taxis have existed as long as Disney’s Magical Express existed. While it’s undeniable that the cost, ubiquity and ease of Uber increased its uptake versus taxis, the extent to which this is true is debatable.
What I now understand is that there are other factors that create that ‘soft lock’ for families. Car seats are a big one, as neither taxis nor rideshare in Central Florida come equipped with these. So families with small children have to travel with their own, which is a non-starter for many.
We do travel with a car seat and, honestly, rideshare or taxis have also become a non-starter for us. Another thing I never appreciated until ~16 months ago was just how recklessly people drive. There was like one time, ever, when I was concerned for my safety in hundreds of times using rideshare prior to last year. Now, I’m a nervous wreck whenever I get into an Uber or Lyft, and that’s when it’s just me! (Beyond the scope of this post, but being a parent has definitely changed my risk tolerance in a big way.)
There is no way we’ll use Uber or Lyft with Megatron unless it’s an absolute last resort. We will “suffer” through however many stops Mears Connect throws our way. We’d rather be on the safer and much larger bus rather than play russian roulette in a regular vehicle with someone else behind the wheel.
I now “get” why so many families loved Disney’s Magical Express despite it being objectively inefficient. I also understand why families love Minnie Vans, for that matter, despite it being objectively much more expensive than other rideshares. You can’t put a price on peace of mind or your kid’s safety. Funny how perspectives change with lived experience!
I also can plainly see that Mears Connect ridership numbers are nowhere near the level of Disney’s Magical Express when it was discontinued. (I would be shocked if more than 10% of on-site guests are using Mears Connect, on average.) As the shuttle service has gotten less and less efficient, it’s become a vicious cycle of people abandoning it. In the case of families, I can only assume they’re largely opting instead for rental cars. And nothing bursts the Disney bubble like a rental car!
In other words, the “switch” from Disney’s Magical Express to Mears Connect is not simply a 1:1 change, with Disney seeing the upside of higher hotel margins without any downside in not offering the “free” shuttle. And it’s not just that they’re losing vacation time and spending by virtue of those same families renting cars.
They have undoubtedly lost some families completely, as the cost or inconvenience of paying for airport transportation was their tipping point. Or, it could’ve been the straw that broke the camel’s back from a nickel and diming perspective even among families that could afford alternative airport transportation.
Bringing things full circle with the commentary to our last post on Walt Disney World pricing out the middle class, all of this pertains disproportionately to families with small children. Much of what’s discussed in the few preceding paragraphs is our own past anecdotal experience as a childless couple (or me as a solo traveler) versus us currently as a family of three with a baby/toddler.
However, I doubt any of this is unique to us. I’ve been hearing similar sentiment from readers and parents for years, it just never fully “clicked.” Just going off my own observations, I strongly suspect that more convention-goers, honeymooners, and other members of the Childless Disney Millennials cohort are using rideshare or private transportation that were using Disney’s Magical Express or now Mears Connect.
The flip side of that is that I’d also strongly suspect that a disproportionate percentage of Disney’s Magical Express ridership was middle class families with children. That one-third number may appear low on its face, but if it spikes to two-thirds or more of all MCO-arriving families with kids, that’s actually a huge percentage of Disney’s bread and butter! And, as explained above, a big chunk of those guests still aren’t venturing off-site even with rideshare–given that they weren’t with taxis.
Ultimately, given what we now know about internal concerns that Walt Disney World is pricing out middle class families plus this Disney’s Magical Express ridership stat plus my own life experience in the last couple years, I’m even more convinced than ever than ending DME was a mistake.
I still couldn’t make sense of this decision 2 years ago, and that’s doubly true today. I’ve discussed this repeatedly and at length in posts like the list of Top 10 Guest Complaints About Walt Disney World. It’s gotta be one of those things that made sense on a spreadsheet or as a short term boost during the period of pent-up demand, but is doing incalculable damage to Walt Disney World. I firmly believe the beancounters got this one wrong, and the long-term consequences to the company in ending Disney’s Magical Express will far exceed whatever money they saved and to whatever degree it juiced margins for a few years.
Eliminating Disney’s Magical Express was short-sighted. The move will cost Walt Disney World on-site hotel stays, visits to other theme parks, meals outside the resort complex, and more. One of Walt Disney World’s greatest strengths was its bubble, and the company voluntarily punctured that. The captive audience that was viewed as advantageous for years is gone–and at a time when Walt Disney World’s #1 competitor keeps growing and getting stronger.
Another thing that resurfaced with this WSJ article was how, upon returning as CEO, Bob Iger made it clear that he had been “alarmed” by price increases at Walt Disney World and Disneyland, and was concerned that Chapek was “killing the soul” of Disney. Back when Iger’s “alarm” first leaked, we wrote 7 Good Changes CEO Bob Iger Could Make to “Fix” Walt Disney World.
To his credit, he has accomplished most of that, with only 2 entries remaining. As it’s once again clear that something substantive needs to be done–beyond ineffectual press releases–and as Epic Universe is only months away from opening, it’s time to break the glass and do one of the final two things: restore Disney’s Magical Express.
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
Your Thoughts
What do you think about the statistic that around one-third of Walt Disney World resort guests used Disney’s Magical Express? Higher or lower than you expected? Think that number was disproportionately the very middle class families that Disney is now worried about losing? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
