Many of you probably heard that the Disney Skyliner shut down just days after its grand opening to park guests. While Disney wouldn’t go into much detail on what happened, several hundred guests were stranded on the new transportation system for several hours until rescue teams were able to get them down. While most guests were okay several were taken to the local hospital as a precaution.
So what exactly happened? We’ve noticed over the past year or so that Disney has been getting ahead of themselves when it comes to launch or opening dates for attractions at the parks. One of the biggest was the early opening of Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland Resort. While nothing went wrong per se the land did not meet expectations as far as crowds were concerned.
Also during this time the hype and the way Disney gave access to the new land via reservations only scared a lot of guests away from the parks. This in turn made for a very slow summer for Disneyland which was great for park goers but bad for Disney.
Dates for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance were also pushed back for both parks with neither one of them opening with the rest of Galaxy’s Edge. What we’re getting at is Disney should have waited to the whole thing was complete before launching. Thinking the Imagineering way they’re known for instead of with their wallets.
At Disney’s Hollywood Studios theme park Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway was supposed to open but was also pushed back to later dates.
This trend leads us to believe that Disney is trying too hard to open new attractions, lands and transportation without their usual testing and safety concerns. While we know that they take these things very seriously, there was a definite fail with the Disney Skyliner.
So what’s next for the Skyliner? More testing, bug fixing, testing and probably another soft opening before guests are allowed back on to it. If you visit the Disneyworld.com website you’ll see that it currently says Temporarily Closed with no set date in mind. It could be a week or a few months before we see if running in the sky again.
Until then guests will continue to have access to buses, boats and personal vehicles to get from their resorts to the theme parks. We’ll continue to update this story as more details are released.
