Niles: One year after reopening, repairing relationships is Disneyland’s next challenge

A year after their reopening, Disneyland and California’s other theme parks have welcomed back millions of fans and thousands of employees. But returning to a pre-pandemic normal remains elusive.

All might seem well again when riding on the Haunted Mansion or flying through Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey. The churros remain crispy and delicious, as does the fried chicken at Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland’s Plaza Inn. But enough remains different that some fans no longer feel the same emotional connection with the parks that they did before everything changed in March 2020.

Disneyland is bringing back its Main Street Electrical Parade and other nighttime shows starting April 22. Their return, along with the resumption of character hugs and meets, should help make a day in the parks feel more like it did back when the word “COVID” just sounded like some new, cut-rate streaming channel. Yet these shows’ return cannot restore the pre-pandemic illusion that Disneyland and other theme parks could provide an escape from the rest of the world.

The parks’ closure in March 2020 exposed that not even the Happiest Place on Earth can evade a pandemic. Returning required the parks to make substantial changes to help protect guests and employees from COVID-19 transmission. The disruption also provided parks with an opportunity to reevaluate other long-standing operational and business practices, as well.

Many parks implemented advance reservation systems to control the number of visitors when the state required limited capacity. But Disneyland decided to keep its reservation system after the state lifted its restrictions. Disneyland also dropped its old annual pass program in favor a new program that limited the number of reservations that passholders could have at one time. It also eliminated its free Fastpass program, rebranding Fastpass queues as Lightning Lanes and charging people to access them.

Those changes, in turn, led many fans to rethink their relationship with Disney. That, more than anything else, ensures that things won’t soon go back to the way they were before the pandemic. Yes, fans continue to fill the parks. Those visitors also are paying the higher prices to use the rebranded Lightning Lanes, along with other in-park price increases, driving Disney’s theme parks to near-record profits.

Disneyland needed to change. It could not support the number of people who were overwhelming the parks at many times before the pandemic. But fans who got the most from the old ways of doing things are not happy to have to pay more to get what they see as less today — especially when those changes are delivering huge profits for Disney.

Disney’s employees are pushing back now, too — as illustrated by the recent backlash over Disney management’s financial support for politicians backing Florida legislation that was criticized by some of its employees as anti-LGBT.

Disneyland has come far in the past year, but its work remains far from complete. The change in how so many people now feel about Disney provides the company’s next challenge in recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic.