Originally Posted By sjhym333 And very legal. As soon as you purchase the ticket you have basically entered into a contract with Disney and you have agreed to the terms as stated on the ticket. Including that the same person will use it for all days.
Originally Posted By ecdc Perhaps I'm missing something, but it does seem like goofyernmost has a fair point. I don't think anyone is disputing that what Disney is doing is legal. And of course, there's always the argument of "Well, if you don't like it..." Personally, I find that to be a bit unhelpful in examining the situation. I think it's worthwhile to ask questions about what Disney's doing. At its core, the issue seems to be: Disney sells a specific number of days in its parks on a specific ticket. By way of example, let's say I purchase a five-day park hopper, but due to a family emergency, can only use three days. I am contractually forbidden to either resell or even gift (if I'm mistaken, please tell me) that ticket to someone else for the remaining two days. The question becomes: What possible reason could Disney have to forbid this beyond sheer greed? Disney, it seems, benefits from me buying five days but only using three, because someone I may wish to give the ticket to will now have to purchase their own two-day park hopper. Yes, I understand, the more days you stay, the bigger a "discount" you get. That, however, is not out of the kindness of Disney's heart but rather out of a desire to keep people in the parks for as long as possible, where they'll most likely purchase food and merchandise from Disney. It's Disney's park, of course. They can do whatever they like. No one is arguing that. But consumers often evaluate the practices of businesses that they frequent and complain when businesses do something that seems shady or only designed to gouge consumers. For example, when Verizon Wireless decided to charge a $2 fee to pay your bill with a credit card, there was a huge outcry and they relented. The same attitude of "well if you don't like it, you don't have to use Verizon" didn't prevail then. And like this, Verizon wasn't doing anything illegal.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <This is giving money to someone to provide something that all of a sudden they do not have to provide.> That is not correct. You have given them the money so that (as stated on the ticket), YOU yourself can visit the parks for x-number of days. That is the agreement. If they're not restricted to a person, then brokers would simply buy scads of 5 or 6 day hoppers, and break them up into 5 or 6 single-day passes, or some other combination - which is essentially what has been happening. The only scenario I see that makes sense the other way is ecdc's above with the person intending to use the hopper for the full length of time but then not being able to for reasons of illness, say. Perhaps Disney could make some exception for this, but if they don't, they're no different than most businesses where the prevailing attitude is that illness or emergency is unfortunate, but not in our control. Otherwise, I can't see how Disney is in the wrong here. If you want a 3-day ticket, buy that. If you want a 6-day ticket, buy that. But don't buy a 6-day when you know damn well you only want a 3-day, sell it to someone else, and say that Disney is being unreasonable.
Originally Posted By hbquikcomjamesl I agree. Contract law is the issue here. Understand that I am not an attorney, and neither do I play one on television, but a contract is an exchange of consideration for consideration. In the case of an admission ticket to a theme park, you are presenting consideration, generally in the form of money, in exchange for consideration, in the form of the right to enter the theme park, subject to limitations that are made very explicit. Think of another example: suppose you buy a day-pass on the transit system of your choice, e.g., the Los Angeles Metro, or the San Francisco MUNI, or the Boston "T." You've dropped your $5 (Metro), or $14 (MUNI), or $11 ("T") in exchange for one person (not one person at a time; one person) to have (with some exceptions) the run of the system until the end of the transit day (which might be some hours into the next calendar day). You didn't buy the right to resell that access, or even to give it away, once you've made use of it. Likewise, when you drop $220 on a 3-day Disneyland ticket, you're getting $261 worth of admission for one person (again, not one person at a time), and you even have almost two weeks in which to use those 3 days of admission (compared with a multi-day transit pass, which is almost always limited to consecutive days). Whether it's a transit pass or a theme park ticket, you're not buying a piece of paper or plastic (although for the L.A. Metro, you *do* now have to buy a $1 piece of plastic to contain your pass, or your trolley/subway ticket, as they have discontinued paper tickets); you're buying the right to use a facility. Sharing your partially-used tickets is really no different from physically manufacturing counterfeit ones.
Originally Posted By Princessjenn5795 I don't think that Disney is being unreasonable, and they are willing to work with people who have legitimate situations come up. A friend of mine went with her two kids to DL for a 5 day trip. On the 3rd day she found out that a friend of hers was in the hospital, and she went to city hall and asked if she could have her cousin come and take her place (hotel reservation and tickets) so her kids didn't have to shorten their trip. They told her they couldn't do anything there, but they would find out for her. It took about two hours, but eventually they got permission from someone, and she was able to give her remaining days on the ticket to her cousin. I think Disneyland is perfectly reasonable in trying to prevent people from splitting tickets, and I think it this company should stop doing what they are doing. If someone has an emergency or something, they should ask someone at DL for an exception to the rule, not just grant that exception to themselves.
Originally Posted By hbquikcomjamesl Hmm. With a transit pass, the cost is generally so low that there would be no reason for someone prevented from getting full value by unforeseen circumstances. And with full-fare airline and rail tickets, the fare is generally refundable, or at least exchangeable for credit on future fares, so long as you cancel in a timely manner. But with theme parks, you're paying (frequently) a great deal of money for something that's almost intangible. I can't see a theme park allowing guests to share unused portions of their tickets on their own, or through a third party, in such cases, but I can certainly see them giving credit for future visits, or (depending on circumstances) even outright refunds. Indeed, I have direct experience with something similar, as I once unwittingly asked for, and received, a "gift card mall" DL one-day park-hopper, right on the cusp of a price change, bought at the old price, without anybody noticing that I wouldn't be able to use it before it expired. I actually dragged myself down to DL guest relations in person, discussed the situation, and found out that there would be no problem exchanging it (albeit with a surcharge to cover the price difference) for current ticket media. My understanding is that as long as you go through the proper channels, and you're clearly not trying to defraud the company, Disney is actually quite liberal about giving credit for unused or partially used tickets, in cases of hardship or honest error.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>If they're not restricted to a person, then brokers would simply buy scads of 5 or 6 day hoppers, and break them up into 5 or 6 single-day passes, or some other combination - which is essentially what has been happening.<< That does seem like a legitimate concern. Ticket brokers could (and apparently have) exploited the system. >>Sharing your partially-used tickets is really no different from physically manufacturing counterfeit ones.<< I don't see how that follows. To continue your mass transit analogy, if I pay, say, $10 to use the DC Metro for the day, but then use it half the day and hand off the ticket to someone else to use the remaining half of the day, I no longer have possession and can no longer use it. That's a far cry from duplicating the ticket, then handing the copy off to a second person so we can both use it simultaneously. That's not what's happened here. And the end result is the same: A single rider has used a day ticket for the whole day. The argument then becomes the same issue: The Metro wants both people to purchase a ticket because it generates more revenue, regardless of when the ticket is used. They get $20 for two people using the Metro for half-a-day each.
Originally Posted By ecdc I'm probably sounding more invested in the argument than I really am I don't think it's that big of a deal that Disney does this. I'm just suggesting what all of our experience with big companies ought to tell us: Are they more likely to be the victims of rampant abuse, or are they more likely to devise policies and practices that attempt to wring as many nickels and dimes out of their customers as possible? Maybe there really is a serious problem that is a threat to Disney's revenue here. But I think the previous example of a gift card with an expiration date gets closer to the truth: This is a way for a company to get more revenue without having to provide anything in return. It's closer to a "service charge" on your phone bill or a "restocking fee" when you return an item.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <My understanding is that as long as you go through the proper channels, and you're clearly not trying to defraud the company, Disney is actually quite liberal about giving credit for unused or partially used tickets, in cases of hardship or honest error.> That's my understanding too, as PrincessJenn's example shows.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 <Maybe there really is a serious problem that is a threat to Disney's revenue here. But I think the previous example of a gift card with an expiration date gets closer to the truth:> Gift cards with expiration dates really tick me off. But I don't think the DL thing is the same thing at all. <This is a way for a company to get more revenue without having to provide anything in return. It's closer to a "service charge" on your phone bill or a "restocking fee" when you return an item.> Those things really tick me off too, though I can understand a SMALL restocking fee. Yet this DL thing doesn't tick me off at all. Because the terms are clear from the start. If you want to visit the parks for 3 days, buy a 3 day pass. People who buy a 6-day pass with the intent of using it for 3 days and then selling it so that they can essentially get in for cheaper are creating their own discount that Disney didn't offer. That's questionable when done by an individual; extremely questionable when done by brokers, as in the OP.
Originally Posted By karlg RE: Goofernmost's post 17 All my examples have a defined number of days, it is 365. In the case of some of the other the Delux and So. Cal. passes it is fewer days. If by some travesty of justice the ticket "renters" would win in court (frankly I don't see these kind of semi-corrupt businesses wanting to test things in court), the next day Disney would make a 5 day pass cost exactly 5X a one day pass. But I guess that would make Goofeyrnmost happy. The way it works in a capitalist society, is that the company sells a product for whatever price they think they can get. If you don't like it, don't go. You don't have some "right" to get whatever you want because YOU think you paid a lot of money and therefore it entitles you to everything you want on your terms.
Originally Posted By karlg I'm with Dabob2, I absolutely hate gift cards and think they are TOTALLY stupid and corrupt. They play on peoples feeling that some how buying a card that tells the person where to shop is almost like buying them a gift. The companies play people for being a fool. But buying a ticket to Disneyland is totally different and just like any other ticket you purchase. You play by the rules of the ticket. If you don't show up, it is not the fault of the person that sold the ticket. They can be nice, as Disney often is, and bend the rules in some circumstances, but they have no obligation to do so.
Originally Posted By berol I thought this should have covered it in post #10 from the good Dr. Hans. "Suppose you'd purchased a non-refundable plane ticket..." Throw in non-transferable, too. "Greed" and "hero" are the most overused words. And yet, "greedy hero" and "heroic greed" aren't. It's a head scratcher.
Originally Posted By doombuggy "tears in their eyes and say 'without your company, we would have never been able to afford to purchase these tickets for our kids" ummm try saving up instead of just heading there with little money DUH. "I paid money for that ticket it is my property and is no ones business who uses it except mine." And there's that scene of entitlement. Read the back of the ticket or the Terms of use on line, It is NOT your property. So by your way of thinking the next time I pay $10 for all day parking some where but leave early I should get a refund or sell it to the next person? It doesn't work that way ANY WHERE.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip At WDW you can buy multi-day passes that never expire but they cost considerably more than the passes that do expire. Does DL offer that option?
Originally Posted By Dr Hans Reinhardt "The way it works in a capitalist society, is that the company sells a product for whatever price they think they can get." I think part of the confusion here is that a ticket to DL is not really a product, but a service. When viewed this way the idea that you "own" something when you buy admission to the park goes out the window. To me what the brokers are doing is similar to renting a car or a hotel room at a weekly rate and then re-renting it to a 3rd party each day with a mark-up.
Originally Posted By DlandDug Why couldn't I just go to an "All-You-Can-Eat" buffet and rent out my plate? After, all, it's my plate, so I should be able to choose who eats off it, right? Right? Think of those poor folks who wouldn't otherwise be able to afford the buffet. And their kids, too. So if I charge them a fee to eat off my plate, I am doing them a service. And the restaurant already has all the food out there. And they charge too much, anyway. So I'm really a HERO for making this food available to people at a lower cost than some greedy, greedy restaurant. Not my fault they had to build the place, furnish it, develop a menu, pay the cooks and servers and busboys as well as the bills for the heat and air and insurance. They say "ALL YOU CAN EAT," and I believe that means all that can be eaten off MY PLATE, no matter who eats it. See the logic there?
Originally Posted By hbquikcomjamesl Let us go back to the transit analogy. When you drop, say, $14 on a MUNI day pass, you have the run of the system (with very few exceptions) for the entire day. If you buy your pass at, say, 9 A.M., and stay entirely off the cable cars, riding only buses and trolleys, then anything beyond the equivalent of 7 90-minute transfers amounts to riding for free. And since each single cable car boarding would, without the pass, cost you the same as 3 90-minute bus/trolley transfers, every time you ride a cable car, you're effectively 3 transfers closer to riding for free. Or you could drop double the amount, for an entire week (and if you use the MUNI like I do when I'm in town, you'd be riding for free by the end of the second day). Transit passes and free transfers are a transit authority's way to encourage ridership, by offering frequent riders, as well as those with complex itineraries, a price break. When you violate that contract, you're helping people evade fares, which eventually drives up either everybody's fares, or everybody's taxes, or both. Likewise, when a performing arts organization offers a subscription series, it is their way of encouraging patrons to attend performances beyond the ones that attract their immediate attention, by offering either a price break, or exchange privileges (as a Los Angeles Philharmonic subscriber, I can even exchange tickets I bought individually, so long as they're added to my subscription account), or other discounts and privileges. Generally, you're perfectly free to, for example, use your subscriber discount to pick up tickets for a friend (something I've done openly), or to sell/give away your unused tickets before the concert, but regardless of whether or not you're a subscriber, you can hardly expect the Philharmonic to sit still while you walk out at intermission, and send somebody in to take your place, especially if there are more empty seats than warm bodies (a situation that's, sadly, all too common at Hollywood Bowl, with its 17000+ seats). When a theme park offers multi-day tickets, and/or annual passes, they're giving you a price break, in order to get you to spend more time enjoying their facilities. They're NOT giving you the price break so that you can deprive them of ticket revenue. Is the cost of theme park tickets based more on "what the market will bear" than on simply making a reasonable profit over the cost of keeping the gates open and the attractions running? Yes. Far more so than it was in Walt's day. Far more than it was back in the days of ticket books. But then, so is the price of a lot of things. Look at the price of consumer video cameras in Best Buy. Then look at the price of professional broadcast video cameras. You're going to be in for some sticker shock. My best friend is in the video business. He specializes in figure skating competitions. He has better cameras than anybody else shooting figure skating video: Ikegami HL-55 Unicams. Originally, they sold, new, for $35k. Just the camera head, maybe with an eyepiece viewfinder: no lens, and probably no back. When he bought them USED, they were $20k each. But that money buys absolutely stunning picture quality, and anybody who buys a camera like that is planning on using that stunning picture quality to earn lots of money, one way or another. Take the opposite extreme: have you noticed how cheap laser printers have been getting? And scanners? And all-in-ones? Competition on pricing has driven the price way down. But the lack of competition on quality has let that slip, too. And what happens? You end up with new devices that can't be used at all with older software, and older ones that can't be used with newer software. I once dropped a bundle on a color laser printer that was billed as a Postscript printer, yet when I fed it a perfectly legitimate Postscript data stream, it couldn't handle it. (I got my money back.) And more recently, at work, when we tried to use the scanning function of the company's all-in-one with MacOS X Mountain Lion, we found that MacOS support for it had been cut off 2 vesions back. You get what you pay for. And these days, lots of companies are doing their level best to charge as much as they can, and deliver as little as they can. Don't like it? Vote with your dollars, and support non-profit and "not-just-for-profit" alternatives. (And I'll note that when Walt was running DL, he used a not-just-for-profit business model long before anybody had coined the term: he made it his priority to give his guests the best entertainment value he could, for what they were paying, because he was confident that if he did so, the profits would take care of themselves. Which they did.)
Originally Posted By ecdc >>See the logic there?<< I do, and it's flawed and is comparing apples and oranges. A Disneyland ticket has a clearly established finite number of uses that your analogy does not. Now, if you'd said you pre-purchased a meal plan for the day that includes breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a dessert, but that after you finished breakfast and lunch, realized you couldn't use the rest of the meal and instead gave your meal ticket for dinner and dessert to someone else, then you'd be closer. You can of course argue if that's ethically right or wrong (presumably by pre-purchasing for the day, you received a discount), but that's at least comparing apples to apples. Companies do in fact sell services, not only with the hope, but actually built into their business model, that purchasers will not use the service. Think gym membership.
