…and what it can teach you about creating smarter spaces.
Disney is world renowned for being an experience led organization. I don’t know many, if any other organizations around the world that you could point to that put the experience of their guests at the center of what they do and how they operate more than Disney.
And when it comes to technology and experience, they have always pushed the needle in all aspects of their operations to embrace technology to enhance the experience of their guests. And for this, as both a surveyor of the smart, connected spaces industry and as a guest of theirs I have always applauded them.
But in this article, I want to use my most recent experience with a Disney property to highlight what happens when things don’t go so well.
This isn't about the cool, pre-registration apps, the apps they have to organize all the things you want to do when you go on a trip with them, the industry innovation that is the MagicBand+.
No.
I’m going to tell you a story about laundry.
In last few weeks, I’ve had the privilege to take the inaugural Disney Cruise from Honolulu Hawaii to my home country, Australia. It’s a 14-day journey across the Pacific Ocean and if you’re an ocean lover like me, it’s a bucket list experience for sure.
But when you’re on a 14-day cruise with 2 kids under 12 with free access to all the buffet and ice cream they can get their hands on, you end up with a lot of dirty clothes!
Now the Disney cruise ships have self-service laundries, and they also have the payment and operations of these connected to your ‘key to the world’ card, which is essentially your access card you use across the ship to enter your room, pay for drinks and collect your kids from the kid's club.
They’ve nailed the digital access/ID challenge many of corporations' face and have also embedded it into the Disney Magic Band which you can purchase and use across all their properties and even as ID when getting on and off the ship at ports all around the world.
When it comes to the laundries, all the washers and dryers in the laundry are connected to the key to the world card and there is even a connected platform that tells you, via a display in each of the laundromats, how many washers and dryers are available in both the laundry you are in now, but also across other areas of the ship. AMAZING.
There is also a Disney Cruise Line app that you use on the ship to communicate via text message with different services, like the childcare facility as well as others you might be cruising with.
Again, amazing.
Now for anyone that’s ever used a shared laundry service, what’s the biggest frustration with them, especially if the number of units are limited?
Availability!
And not just availability, but people putting loads of laundry in, cycles being finished and the now clean clothes, just sitting there waiting for someone to come remove them.
Sound like something I’ve talked about before?
An asset others want to use, not actively in use, but being out of commission because someone else is camping in it? Disney has solved this issue! Or at least, gone a long way to minimizing its occurrence.
Their laundry platform is also connected to the Disney Cruise Line app so when you turn on your laundry load, you get an app alert on your phone to tell you it’s on and when the cycle is done, it sends you another to tell you it’s completed!
It’s an awesome experience, helps things keep moving and makes active utilization of the washers/dryers improve…
except…on my trip the other week… this all fell apart.
See while the system was working great at telling me I had put a load of washing on, the alerting function that would usually tell them the load had ended, which is the most important piece of the experience, wasn’t working!!!
I didn’t really need to know when the cycle started, I already knew this, because I was there, I pushed the button!
The part I really needed to know was when it was done so I could come back and move it onto the next part of the process, and free up that resource for the next person… wasn’t working!
Not only was it not working, but none of the guests were informed that it wasn’t working. This left people that were seasoned cruisers, who have grown accustomed to this functionality… had their clothes sitting in washers for far longer than needed, because they were waiting for the alert!
This might seem like a minor issue, but from an experience perspective, it wasn’t great. And not only that, but Disney also probably received 30% less revenue through Landry because of it. Maybe peanuts in the grand scheme of thing, but money is money.
My point of this story here is this.
As we build great experiences, enabled by technology, to make processes more efficient. We need to ensure we also put the rigor and support behind their operations. The more people rely on technology, the more we need to ensure their operations and support are robust.
And when they fail, we need to know how to either rectify them rapidly or communicate temporary workarounds to your people, in this case, your guests.
There’s a great comedy sketch from more than a decade ago from Louis CK (regardless of what you feel about him now, the sketch holds true) called ‘Everything is Amazing Right Now and Nobody is Happy’. It’s quite a few years old now about how people would get so aggravated when Wi-Fi in planes stopped working, and how we get so frustrated when things we didn’t even know were possible or even existed just 12–18 months before don't work 100% reliably. The sketch is so funny because it’s 100% true, especially if the thing that's not working provides us with conveniences that make our lives easier. This is a perfect example.
If there’s anyone from Disney reading, I want to reiterate I love what you’ve done integrating the physical and digital in the app. But I do have a few feature enhancements I’d love to see;
- Show me the availability and status of the washer and dryers across the ship in the app. I shouldn’t have to go to a laundry to see this.
- Give me some expected and then real time occupancy of the theaters so I can tell if a certain movie showing is going to be packed or not and whether I might want to go to a showing later in my cruise.
But these are all minor, and just show that with smarter spaces, once we have the tools and systems in place, interconnected, there is so much value we can bring in both experience and operations.
Now all this aside, my trip across the Pacific was great. We met some amazing people, my kids made some new friends and I got to spend some extended and long overdue time with my wife and kids, my parents and my sister’s family. It really was a bucket list trip and if you love the ocean, I can’t recommend it enough.
I go into more details on this and more in Episode 8 of the Creating Smarter Spaces podcast.
I hope you’ll listen in to more on this story and my most recent experience with the Marriott Bonvoy App in New York City!
