Telling you it was included and then pulling the access the week before is terrible for the guest experience. Besides that bad decision, I disagree with this decision overall, as I did when they initially opened MFSM and VIP didn’t include it either. We have done several VIP tours (But we have also taken many, many trips that don’t include a VIP tour), and we understood (just like on any regular park day) that any ride can go down (or parade get canceled etc), and that you may not then be able to do that ride/parade/attraction. However, just full scale eliminating it from the VIP tours seems short sighted to me. These tours are really expensive, and if Disney is about making money, these are the guests that I would think that they would want to keep engaged and committed to continuing the VIP tours. On any given day, I think someone reported that max VIP tours that can be booked was less than 100 (but someone correct me on that, as I don’t really recall). Think about how many plaids you see with tours at the parks on any given day. It is not 1000’s. So even if every single tour group wanted to ride ROTR (and to be honest, most would), they would not all be trying to do that simultaneously (as most tours do at least 2 parks in the day, some do all 4). So would it really cause that much delay in the ride throughout an entire park day for these groups to ride it?
Yes the ride could go down and then the tour guide takes you to ride something else and they get a call/text usually when a ride comes back up and then the group decides if they want to go back to that ride and try again. Happens all the time when it rains and an outdoor ride closes, etc. It has never ruined our VIP tour when a ride goes down, as it usually comes back up at some point during the 7 hours of the tour. So fear of the ride going down and disappointing people on the VIP tour pales in comparison to the disappointment of paying for a VIP tour and not even getting a chance to ride it with your tour, IMO.
Again, I don’t understand this as a business decision, since no matter how much merchandise and food a guest purchases, most guests won’t spend the amount per person per day that a person spends on the VIP (though some people do love their merch
). I can’t see how letting VIP tours on the ride (maybe limiting it to 1 ride only or something?) would impact the wait time for guests by much at all. So making the ride unavailable during the tour seems like a bad business decision to me. Obviously others disagree...