re: 300 Minute Wait Time for Frozen Ride at WDW

quote:

---

That's because Disney practically hid it. I guarantee you that a lot of causal visitors (the kind not of the type that plan things down to the minute on spreadsheets) weren't even aware of its existence and passed it right by. First, almost none of the country pavilions have rides, so people aren't expecting rides back there in the first place. Second, it was tucked back in that pavilion and there wasn't a lot of signage to entice people toward it. I remember when I was a kid and we went to Disney for the first time - we just kind of stumbled on Maelstrom and were like "Holy crap, it's a ride? Let's do it!"

When we were kids we called it "The Secret Ride at Epcot". That goes to show you how well they did at making people aware of it.

Disney failed Maelstrom, not the other way around.

---

Just because you didn't realize it was there doesn't mean others didn't. The Frozen signage is in the same spot that the Maelstrom signage was. Ridership on the attraction had been waning for years now. It used to pull in many more people in years past. Hell, they were smart with the design of the attraction because it had the open waterfall that drew people into the pavilion. Then you'd see a boat almost go over the falls and it would entice you to ride. Signage wasn't the problem. The problem was that people didn't want to ride an attraction where there was no connection to the characters or story and had gone virtually unchanged since opening 20 years ago. And then add to that the people that rode it expecting a thrill ride but were disappointed with 2 meager drops at best.

The rerideability of the attraction wasn't there for the typical guest. Tying the attraction in with such a popular franchise was the smartest thing they could have done to drive people into the ride again.