Lake Buena Vista, Fl

Visiting Disney World for the first time, the most striking thing is the sheer size and scale of the operation. With a size of about 100 sq km, the park complex rivals some small island states like Malta, Aruba or the Cayman Islands and with about 16 million visitors yearly for Magic Kingdom alone, at about the same level as Turkey or Austria in terms of yearly tourist visits - with a permanent population of only about 40 people according to the US Census bureau. Disney World is likely the largest and most labor intensive complex owned and operated by a single company. A glimpse of the utopia (or dystopia...) of how a world would look like, run by a single all powerful, all controlling corporation.




The idea that the thanksgiving week-end might be an opportunity to visit the parks with low attendance did not exactly work out as it appears the modern, geographically dispersed American family of today has increasingly re-defined the going home for Thanksgiving as meeting at Disney World for Thanksgiving - apparently the day before has reached a new daily attendance record. Seeing the park and its infrastructure stressed to its limits, we at least get to fully appreciate and admire the true ingenuity and sophistication of taking standing in line to the next level. Every attraction is built around queues, designed to maximize flow and throughput. All people flows are one-way, to avoid blocking and turbulent interference, electronic tags handed out to random visitors as they enter the line is used for real-time delay estimation, which is displayed at the entrance. All attractions are built around space for holding and folding lines of people efficiently, with the decor of the waiting area often being at least as elaborate and "in-character" as the actual attraction people are waiting in line for.