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Anecdote: 2 months ago I was in paris in Disneyland Paris. I have been to the US parks many times, the last one about 2018. The FastPass was free, you just pick

• Fatnino 4y ago
  There is a finite number of visitors a park can handle per day. Number of rides * capacity per ride per day / number of rides a visitor expects to experience without feeling ripped off. I suspect that on peak days Disney will often sell way more tickets than this number. The addition of the concept of fastpass puts even more pressure on this problem as fast pass holders get priority over the people standing in line. They have made some efforts to limit how many fastpasses can be given out per ride per hourbut those just lead to free fast pass "selling out" earlier and earlier in the day. The next logical step is to put a real money price on it to try to curb demand. In an alternative universe, they would have made all the rides free fastpass only and visitors would go around the park collecting appointments for the rides they want. But the problem is that the overselling at the gate requires lots of people to waste hours standing in lines. If no lines, can't oversell as many tickets. There's also the problem that people might be late or miss their appointment entirely and then the ride goes underutilized. So now we invent a standby line where people wait near the ride to get into a time slot that a fastpass holder missed and now we are back to having lines.