Modified Indoor Meet & Greets Returning to Disney World
Earlier today, Walt Disney World’s announced that Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular and other entertainment will return to Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom between now and December 2021.
This comes as Walt Disney World continues to bring back Cast Members and atmospheric entertainers, and now seems ready to move beyond the spontaneous, and physically distanced the theme parks have embraced (probably not the best word choice) since reopening last summer.
With this announcement, Walt Disney World revealed that indoor meet & greets will return in limited capacity beginning in November 2021. In this post, we’ll cover the locations, details, and what else you might expect from meet & greets for the rest of this year and in 2022.
Let’s start with the official announcement from Walt Disney World:
“Over the past year, beloved Disney Characters have been popping up in cavalcades, motorcades, flotillas, and surprise sightings, much to the delight of our guests, and I’m pleased to tell you many of those experiences will be continuing. Although the environment is not right just yet for hugs and autographs, you’ll soon be able to have individualized time with some of your favorite characters, getting to visit with them in a themed location and snap a photo or two.”
Look for the Disney Princesses to return to Princess Fairytale Hall in Magic Kingdom. When you stop in to see Mickey Mouse backstage at Town Square Theater on Main Street, U.S.A., he’ll be sporting his all-new EARidescent look designed just for the Walt Disney World 50th Anniversary Celebration!
Over at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you’ll soon find Minnie Mouse at Red Carpet Dreams and the stars of Disney Junior in the Animation Courtyard. For now, these 4 locations are all that has been revealed, but there’s still plenty of time between now and November 2021. We’d expect more locations to follow.
In terms of commentary, the timing here is the most interesting part–and how this lines up with a couple of vaccine-related timeframes. One is Disney’s requirement that all Cast Members be vaccinated.
Under Walt Disney World’s agreement with its unions, those employees must show proof of vaccination by October 22, 2021.
Similarly significant is availability of the vaccine for kids ages 5 to 11. Pfizer filed its data with the Food and Drug Administration last week. The FDA has said it’s going to be a matter of weeks, not months, in terms of their evaluation of that clinical data to make a determination whether they’re going to authorize vaccines for kids ages 5 to 11.
A best-case scenario is having a vaccine available to children 5 to 11 years old by Halloween if everything goes well. More realistically, that could drift into early November.
While these are still going to be physically distanced meet & greets, they’re still indoors and individualized. That’s a huge leap forward for Walt Disney World, and this step towards normalcy is motivated by something. Our belief is that the aforementioned vaccine mandate and it being available for kids 5-11 years old are those somethings.
As we’ve reiterated probably 100 times at this point, Walt Disney World is concerned with optics. In fact, in the post about the Cast Member vaccine requirement, we indicated that meet & greets were most likely to be impacted: “The biggest potential thing here pertains to traditional character meet & greets.”
“Our perspective on [meet & greets] was that they’d be one of the last things to return due to the optics and risk of having potentially unvaccinated performers and children under 12 who cannot be vaccinated in close proximity to one another. Requiring performers be vaccinated would change half of the equation on that. Perhaps that would be sufficient to cause a policy change or perhaps not. It might take the pediatric vaccine approval or cases to bottom out for a sustained amount of time before that change occurs.
“We’d caution against premature excitement over the possibility of this change. There are other barriers to bringing back meet & greets and character meals in full force, with staffing being one significant problem. At the absolute best, normal character encounters could return to a limited degree by October 2021. As we’ve stated countless times before, we would not expect “normalcy” on the character front until sometime in 2022. Even with optimistic assumptions, it’s simply going to take time for those changes to fully roll out at Walt Disney World. (Disneyland will have it a little easier, but it’s still probably a 2022 thing.)”
Ultimately, our perspective is unchanged on that since it was written in July–it’s going to take Walt Disney World time to fully restore normal meet & greets. Many of you have been asking about this for months, and modified encounters are probably not what you had in mind. However, this is simply the first step in a gradual process that will occur over the course of several months. This was never going to happen all at once–progress is progress.
We truly have no clue what will happen next, but our expectation is that Walt Disney World will bring back this type of individual, modified meet & greet where space allows for it. This will be followed by regular meet & greets and character dining returning, with princess meals still likely the last thing to come back.
With that said, I’m shocked Walt Disney World is bringing back an indoor princess meet & greet. That means those characters will wear masks or Disney intends to drop the indoor mask rule by November or those characters will be a noteworthy exception to the rule. Of those options, #2 seems most plausible to me, especially with the Cast Member vaccine rule and Florida’s falling numbers.
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YOUR THOUGHTS
What do you think about these predictions for Walt Disney World restoring character meet & greets? Do you expect non-distanced interactions to return by early 2022? Thoughts on how Disney will handle the princess situation? Will you be attempting to visit Walt Disney World this year, or are you waiting until 2022? Do you agree or disagree with our predictions? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
a friend of mine was recently on a disney cruise and the princesses were NOT masked while indoors (or anywhere, I guess, but the photos I saw were indoors) but all guests were required to be masked (also proof of vaccine (?)/negative test required for boarding). The meet and greets were still distanced with a barrier between them.
I can’t get past the point of Disney requiring vaccinations for employment. That is hard to stomach, Disney.
Hi Tom, I’m a faithful follower and great admirer of your blog. . I’ll be at wdw next week the 4th and 15th . You think we my family of 5 can do 3 parks in a day! Starting at animal kingdom then Hollywood studios then fireworks show at epcot. Please let me know what you think my strategy should be just a fee rides in each park. Then magic Kingdom the next day all day?
Is it noteworthy if the indoor meeting characters are the exception to the rule? When frozen ever after returned those face characters were the exception to the rule and that was before vaccines were really available and when mask use was definitely more strict over all. Just my thought personally. I hope it means an end is in sight to indoor masks also though. I am so ready for gradually returning to normalcy!
Hi this is my first time commenting as I love all of your updates, opinions and info outside of anything political discussed but the talk of vaccinating children is unnecessary whether the FDA approves anything at this point while the studies and data is still out there to be determined and as a mother there is not any data to support long term effects of these vaccines. At this point, it has been stated by the director of CDC as well as multiple studies that whether you are vaccinated or not you 100% can get and transmit the virus. We are all equal.
Therefore the quicker Disney gets staff hired and things back to normal, the sooner their loyal guests will experience the “magical” Disney life that we so sadly miss due to the horrible pandemic.
Tom, you mention the vaccine mandate for children being a factor. Here in the UK we’re looking forward to travel to the US finally opening up again later in the year.
However over here they aren’t going to be vaccinating children under the age of 11 anytime soon and I can’t see that changing going forward. I’m wondering if you think that will impact anything or do you think Disney will be relying on ensuring the cast members are all vaccinated.
What I’m suggesting is that it’s totally a matter of optics: younger children can’t be vaccinated now, so it’d be a potentially bad look if Disney facilitated interactions between that demographic, who cannot be vaccinated yet, and performers, who may not be vaccinated yet.
Once the Cast Member mandate deadline takes effect and there’s a vaccine available for younger kids, the optics change. The reality of how many kids are (or are not) vaccinated doesn’t really matter–the option exists. (Short answer: I don’t think it’ll impact anything that kids in the UK can’t be vaccinated anytime soon. Americans think the world revolves around us, so few here will even be aware of that.)
@Tom
After reading your most recent update I agree–they’ll have indoor reqs gone by Princess time.
It was amazing to finally meet you, and if it is going to be on any day that was the one! You and Sarah were great to pass the time with while waiting for the Cavalcade and I hope Disney puts out something soon that’ll bring some of the old joy back to you…
Thank you for the article. Have you heard any chatter about the Behind the Seeds tour returning?
I was at both Disneyland and Aulani this past summer, and I felt both of them did an excellent job with the socially distanced character greets. We had fun interactions with the characters, plus Aulani had a photopass photographer since we are not into selfies. I loved all the quantity of characters at both DL and Aulani. WDW character greets are too distant to have fun interactions. Even DL at DCA had better character interactions with Big Al and Wendell than WDW. Pre-COVID, I do not miss the long lines for the characters at WDW, but I miss the photo pass photographers and the interactions.
Our family visited a local amusement park this summer, where my kiddos met a masked Cinderella indoors, and got a distanced selfie. It was totally fine. I know Disney hasn’t made this move since reopening, but gosh– get the princesses some glitzy, bejeweled masks, and it’d go fine!
At any rate, this is great news. I would absolutely love to see face character dining return as a result of this– 1900 Park Fare, Artist Point, etc. Fingers crossed!
Absolutely delighted to hear this news. My kids are still little enough to believe it’s all real (and magical); meet and greets have always been a highlight for us.
@Tom, just going back to the old setup would be disappointing but you’re right, I could see it happening. I sometimes think WDW has backed themselves into a corner by leaning so heavily into their reputation as a rite of passage vacation. People feel like if they don’t do X (like get their kid’s picture with Mickey) then they didn’t have the full experience, which of course makes them want to be able to guarantee they can do X. So everyone thinks they want the structured meet and greet, even though it takes an hour out of their day and is way less memorable than seeing a spontaneous, organic interaction out in the wild.
I hadn’t thought about the princesses with masks thing. Personally, once my 6yo is vaccinated, interacting with a vaccinated character is fine with me. Wearing masks in line also seems sensible. But I’d be okay with a photo with princess and child in masks. We could do fun things with body language. Not everything has to be grip & grin.
My point was more that it would be unprecedented to have the princesses in masks. Disney is very concerned with ‘character integrity’ and appearances–they haven’t had face characters wearing masks at all, even when the parks first reopened.
It’s hard to imagine Disney suddenly changing course on that after all this time.
What’s your insight on the upcoming races and characters? I’m pretty sure they will have them but my worry is (1) they will be so far away, that you can hardly tell they are there or up on a stage. (2) no photopass person.
I love Disney races because of the characters. Running from character to character is a great motivation for me!
Several years back, runDisney did selfie stations with characters on elevated platforms to expedite the character meet & greet process. Personally, I’m hoping that makes a comeback. I hate stopping and waiting in longer lines, but that’s just me.
I would love an update on indoor masking by 10/28, when the Starcruiser reservations go live. While I’m not opposed to the rule on a casual trip, I’d rather not have them complicate or modify an experience like that.
As long as this doesn’t replace the more spontaneous character sightings I say bring it on. I vastly prefer the random, in-park sightings. It makes it feel more like the characters actually live there and lets more people have a character experience (by being able to observe others’ interactions) without having to spend time in lines.
Totally agree.
I have my doubts, though. While Disneyland continues to tinker with those meet & greets and debut new ones, Walt Disney World hasn’t changed things up in a while. Hope I’m wrong, but it seems like they’re just waiting to bring back normal meets at this point.
I’m pleased that it’s just a small number of these, and that the ‘spontaneous’ sightings will continue. I don’t know much about what it was like before, but I know I’d probably never stand in line to meet a character, but will ALWAYS whip out my phone when they’re in my line of sight.
I hadn’t even thought about the mask ramifications of a princess meet-and-greet though…thank you for pointing that out. It seems like if they aren’t ready to drop indoor mask requirements by that point, maybe they’ll move the greet outdoors somewhere?
I doubt WDW changes anything until Orange County hits the CDC moderate tier, which automatically triggers the ‘relaxation guidance’ (or whatever you want to call it) from the CDC. Based on current trends, it’s entirely possible–if not probable–that happens by sometime in November. So perhaps a safe bet?
Unrelated, but it was great meeting you on 10/1! Hope you enjoyed the rest of your day/trip!