Shanghai Disneyland Review & Impressions
Counterfeit tickets. Broken rides. Food shortages. Plumbing issues. 100-degree weather so hot it softened the partially-set pavement. As compared to Disneyland’s “Black Sunday” opening day some 60 years ago, Shanghai Disneyland’s opening day was uneventful. Although there are radical differences between the launch of Walt Disney’s big, personal gamble on his park, and the one financed as a joint endeavor between the Chinese government and the corporate behemoth that is today’s Walt Disney Company, there are some parallels, too.
These parallels start before opening day, with the trailblazing done in the former orange groves of Anaheim and the unprecedented collaboration between an American corporation and the Chinese government that gave rise to Enchanted Storybook Castle among the rice paddy fields outside of Shanghai. They continue with how each project was perceived through opening day, and persistent questioning as to whether the projects were follies.
In deference to Mr. Disney, with 60 years of experience, one would expect today’s far more polished and sophisticated theme park operators to have learned a thing or two about opening new theme parks. In the intervening years, lessons have been learned in Florida and beyond. It’s not as if Bob Iger was taking loans against his personal property or having his brother make personal visits to banks to assist with funding. Conversely, to modern Disney Co.’s credit, Walt didn’t have the unique challenges of building in mainland China. Only time will tell whether Bob Iger is vindicated the way Walt Disney was 60 years ago. If early response is any indication, it seems Shanghai Disneyland will quickly vanquish criticism of the project as “Iger’s Folly.” Of course, opening day festivities can be pandemonium or peaceful without being indicative of the likelihood of long-term success.
This post offers my thoughts on the grand opening of Shanghai Disneyland, with the first page focused on our opening day experience, the second offering my feelings on each individual land, and the third my overall, early analysis of the park. (Note: it’s 5,000 words…if that’s too much, I’d recommend skipping the rest of page 1, as that’s the least interesting.) The post is meant to provide some quick impressions while the experience is still fresh in my mind, and will do so without providing attraction spoilers.
Let’s start at the beginning: how Sarah and I ended up in China in the first place. Our desire to visit was motivated by the dorkiest reason no one outside Disney fandom would probably understand. We wanted to be part of the spectacle of opening day for a new Disney park. It’s like getting nosebleed seats to the Super Bowl–you’d have a better view of the game on an HDTV at home–but there’s a certain energy and feeling in being there. In the case of opening day at a new Disney theme park, the word “magical” seems apropos for describing the experience.
After this, we figured it’s unlikely another castle park will open in our lifetimes, so this was our last shot at being there to witness the momentous occasion, firsthand. It was this rationale that made opening day at Shanghai Disneyland a ‘Disney Bucket List’ item for us as soon as we got serious about visiting all of the Disney parks. I could go on about the rationale for our opening day visit, but it’s one of those things you either “get” without elaboration–or don’t get, and no amount of explanation will change that.
With the mentality that opening day would be some form of chaos, we approached our first visit as a chance to soak up the experience and savor whatever opening day threw at us. Sure, riding TRON Lightcycle Power Run or Voyage to the Crystal Grotto would be great, but we were most concerned with playing witness to history. (Little did we know the longest wait would actually be for turkey legs…) After all, the attractions would all be there weeks, months, and years later–and with much shorter lines–so going for opening day made little sense from that perspective.
Instead, we went because we wanted our own crazy stories that we’d be telling our grandkids decades from now about our shoes sinking into wet pavement or no working plumbing so we had to go in the bus–bad example, I’ll stop there. 😉 In the sense that the opening day experience is always–for better or worse–all about the stories, it could be said that opening day at Shanghai Disneyland is a pretty boring story.
For starters, if you’re reading this, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve seen more of the opening day festivities than we have. The television special and grand opening ribbon cutting were both held only for invited guests and media, so no regular days guests saw these. We strongly suspected opening festivities would be for invited guests only when we saw the noon opening time before even purchasing tickets, so this was totally on us, and not a huge deal. Little touches throughout the day, and a spectacular finale more than made up for missing a ceremony. (Unless I watch a replay of that ceremony later and find out it featured a trope of Panda acrobats and was basically the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony 2.0.)
I’ll offer more details in a full trip report to follow, but after dropping off our luggage, we (Sarah, me, and our friend Mark Willard) left Shanghai Disneyland Hotel via bus for the park. Upon getting through bag check there, we got in line at the turnstiles so they could validate our electronic tickets and give us paper tickets marked “used.” From there, we were ushered away from the turnstiles to backstage holding corrals until noon. We had arrived a little over 2 hours early, expecting baggage check and the lines to get into the park to be crazy. It turned out that baggage check was a breeze and validating our tickets was also quick.
Around 11:45 a.m., the corrals started moving, and moving quickly. With no re-check of tickets, we were ushered right into the park. Removing the wait we experienced from arriving so early, the whole process of baggage check to ticket redemption to corral entry took maybe 20 minutes. I’ve had longer waits with the new security screening process at Disneyland.
Crowd control and organization were both exceptional. After years of seeing D23 make the exact same mistakes again and again, I was flabbergasted that the opening day entrance experience at a new theme park was so painless. As a blogger, I feed off of drama, panic, and hyperbole, so I suppose you could say Shanghai Disneyland’s opening day was super disappointing in at least one regard.
All of this was facilitated by a surplus of Cast Members, both local and foreign, and they were all great. (As a whole, the local Cast Members were exceptional throughout the day–cheerful, energetic, friendly, and sometimes just a bit nervous.) They were handing out buttons, stickers, and other items to guests, while gleefully shouting “have a magical day” to anyone who appeared western. (And unlike in Florida, this enthusiasm did not feel feigned.)
From there, it was time to explore! It became fairly obvious early that tickets were purposefully capped for opening day, and I’d guess the park was restricted to around 75% capacity or less. This was an incredibly savvy move, as esteemed members of the worldwide press was present for opening day. They were (mostly) conveniently gone by the time the reality of day 2 operations rolled around, when some vulnerabilities appeared.
Some attractions–Soaring (with a g) Over the Horizon, Roaring Rapids, and TRON Lightcycle Power Run–had waits that climbed above an hour early on, but most attractions had <20 minute waits until the evening hours when the shows and other minor attractions with ‘dusk’ closings had concluded for the day.
As far as anything special went, opening day buttons, and “first visitor” cards at select attractions were about it. There were also fireworks during the post show of the Ignite the Dream (this post show is emotive and perfectly fitting for the park–it’s one of my favorite experiences at Shanghai Disneyland)…but honestly, that’s about it. So much for war stories to recite to the grandkids. Oh well, I can always make something up. Not like they’ll know the difference.
On our subsequent days in the park, when the weather was hotter and crowds were significantly worse, issues started to appear. Most notably was the lack of shade and easily accessible attractions with air-conditioning. I normally take restaurant seating area photos in mid-afternoon (the trials and tribulations of Disney blogging) because this is a time when they’re emptiest. Not so at Shanghai Disneyland. I found nearly full seating areas with guests resting around tables. The breezeway through the castle was reminiscent of large exhibits at 3 a.m. during the past 24-hour parties, with bodies strewn everywhere.
Lines for everything were excessive; walk-through exhibits with 60+ minute waits were demonstrative of this. Multiple attractions broke down. This is all still a far cry from the type of chaos we expected, especially after much ado had been made guest behavior online before the park opened. (We saw a few instances of poor guest behavior–but we see a few instances per day no matter where the park; by and large, the guests were respectful, friendly, and polite.) I’d have to embellish day 2 & 3 in order for these scenes to even remotely resemble chaos. If anything, the takeaway here should be that Disney needs to work on more shade (and not waiting for trees to mature over the course of years) and air conditioned attractions in the park ASAP.
While I plan a much more thorough report once I get back home, I thought I’d offer some preliminary, land by land assessments. Most of the park has already been “revealed” via the internet, so I don’t consider anything on the next page spoilers. I will not detail or show the interiors of any attractions on page 2, but there will be photos showing the various lands, so if you want to avoid anything that might be construed as a spoiler, you may not want to continue reading…
Awesome! Can’t wait for your trip reports (well, of course I can wait; I bet you guys are exhausted from the long flights and jet-lag). Please include lots of pictures!
Tom,
“Chinks in the armor”????
Really???
That doesn’t mean what you think it means in this context: http://grammarist.com/usage/chink-kink/
I had the same thought as Julia. Tom, love the blog, but you are mistaken about relying on context to justify your usage. It’s the context of the article as a whole (China) that makes it unavoidable to think of the racial slur and not what you are claiming. That was my first thought. So many other word choices yet you choose that word on an article about a Chinese attraction?
I guess we will have to agree to disagree. It’s a common idiom with innocuous meaning. I don’t know how the context of an entire article overrides the sentence in which a word is used, especially since you have to take that word out of context within that sentence to infer a meaning other than the common one.
If people choose to infer racist intent, I suppose that is their choice. That was in no way my intent, and the possibility of any secondary meaning didn’t even cross my mind while writing the post.
In Tom’s defense, I think he (and I) are too young (20s-30s range) to associate that phrase with a racial slur. You’re absolutely right that it’s inappropriate here, but I have only heard that word usage once or twice in my life (in books, no less) and would never associate it with Chinese. I think it’s safe to say it was an inadvertent (though regrettable) use of the term.
I’ve heard the slur before, but it didn’t register when I was writing this. The idiom has literally nothing to do with the slur (obviously), so I didn’t think anything of it. Nonetheless, I’ve changed it to “vulnerabilities” so as to avoid any further confusion.
You need to leave it in, unapologetically. Make sure to nip in the bud those niggardly in their vocabulary, and be free to call a spade a spade.
LOL. Thanks for the quick trip report.
Thanks for another interesting read guys! Seems like a very fair assessment of the park. This park gives me all the more reason to finally take the leap on a Disney Asia trip in the next few years.
Thank you for this excellent update — and while you’re still in Shanghai, too! 🙂 I am so looking forward to a bona fide trip report (!!) and tons of your usual amazing photography. Thanks for all your hard work, Sarah and Tom!
Park designed by fascist corporate one party state committee – not interested
I am Shanghai Disneyland right now, killing time in the 50 minute queue for Winnie the Pooh by reading this post (this is the only ride I haven’t crossed off the list!). I have to say, I mostly agree with your conclusions. I was here on the second day of opening also (I looked out for you guys but sadly missed you!). Lines were a little crazy and my friend and I found ourselves wandering aimlessly, reluctant to join the end of a 100+ minute ride. This is a park that guests really need to come into with a strategy (walking briskly for a Soaring fastpass upon opening and then jumping on Roaring Rapids worked pretty well for me this morning!). Pirates is by far my favourite ride here – quite extraordinary, and has had criminally low wait times on both days, for bizarre reasons! However, I must absolutely disagree with you about Tomorrowland – it is usually my least favourite land in the other parks because of the mismash of rides and concreteness of it all (Hong Kong’s tiny, cartoony version being by far the worst!), but at Shanghai Disneyland it is really a breath of fresh air, an escape from the hustle and bustle and claustrophobia of the other lands. All the skyways also elevate it, so you see so much more sky than anywhere else in the park (or Shanghai, for that matter, and having lived here for 18 months it really is a treat to see such an open space!). Also, as for the Chinese guests, I have seen a lot of bad behaviour which I was expecting having lived here for a while. Parents taking little kids to pee on the drains, a LOT line-jumping, pushing, running, and people getting irate and shouting (a big fight broke out behind me while watching the fireworks the other night, and this morning there was an argument over queue jumping in the line for Roaring Rapids). The cast members also seem a little clueless about how to deal with this behaviour.
But overall, I have been enjoying the park (although I just got off the Winnie the Pooh ride – the biggest clone EVER! With the exception of the Chinese, of course!). Well, off to do Pirates again, I think!
Thanks for your feedback! As for strategy, I think “walking briskly for a Soaring fastpass upon opening and then jumping on Roaring Rapids” that you suggested is going to be the go-to option once Roaring Rapids is operating consistently. The first few mornings we were here, it was not always open right away, so that strategy would’ve been difficult.
Roaring Rapids was open bright and early yesterday, so that’s what I’ll be doing on future visits!
Is it possible to go from Shangay to Hong Kong and not have a visa? I read that to qualify to not have to get a VISA in Shangay you must have a connection flight that doesn’t go through mainland China. Is Hong Kong considered outside that? Did you get a visa?
Thank you for taking the huge effort of making this post while still there, it’s great!
Thank you for your great insight and analysis. Better then anything I get from any major news outlet. I will say I’m surprised you have it ahead of Epcot but behind California Adventure in your rankings. It does help me plan on probably doing another trip to Tokyo Disney again before a first trip to Shanghai Disneyland. Thank you, I love your blog because you really get it when it comes to talking and knowing about theme parks.
Thanks for taking the time to post this! I look forward to hearing more. I’m interested in any air quality observations, maybe how it compares to places like LA or DC.
Props to the joke on page 1 I thought was funny but can’t remember now that I finished reading. Enjoy the rest of your trip!
How was the smoking issue?
Thanks for your thoughts on the park – it’s fun to visit Shanghai through your pictures. I’m curious if it felt weird to turn left to enter Tomorrowland rather than right.
I’m in R&D rather than project engineering at my company. But my understanding is that “delays, cost-overruns, and work that had to be rebuilt” is pretty standard for our Chinese facilities, so this may not be just Disney.
Thanks for the report. It’s fun hearing from a fellow Indy resident and your impressions of the newest Disney park.
Loved the insta and twitter voyage !! Until I can work out how to “arrange” a work trip to Shanghai your reports keep me happy.
Very interested in how locals (not regional Chinese they need permission to travel to the city) feel about the park. I think they will visit on mass!
Again thanks for sharing and looking forward to your reports
Anthea
Sounds like a great trip- and definite bragging rights for being there on opening day! Looking forward to the full trip report and lots of photos soon.
Will you be posting more photos of your visit? I am so curious to see photos of Mickey Avenue.
After reading your blog I have such hope to visit the other parks. Thank you so much for sharing your experiences! And your amazing photos.
Thanks for posting. We are going in January and can not wait, but will only be there two days – hoping to see it all (or at least what we can). Can not wait for your full report about the food and the hotels. We are staying at the Disneyland hotel. Crystal Grotto was the thing we were looking forward to the most, but sounds like we will keep our expectations down.
Really interesting! Thanks for the real-time update Tom! Loved your perspectives as always.
Very interesting that you (evidently) rate it above HKDL – I love that park/resort!
Pepsi? PEPSI?
I know I thought that also when I looked at that picture. Times are changing with the current CEO.
Anyone know the backstory with Pepsi being in this park?
The story goes, as per the contract with Coke, Disney offered it to them and Coke said “nah.”
I heard that Disneytown was visible from Tomorrowland. Did this bother you?
I totally forgot about that when writing. Yes, it is visible, and this really bothered me. For some reason, there’s no berm around the park. This is really noticeable in that area of Tomorrowland where Disneytown is in plain sight. That whole space with some half-hearted planters is pretty sad.