Member Services is a disservice.

[DebbieB]

Like it or not .. This is how DVC works.
It will never change. It has been this way for 30 years .
Disney does not care about IT, only the front of the house /'show'.
DVC only has about 500 agents and they HAVE to have agents off each day.
Remember the saying... YOU DON'T BUILD A CHURCH FOR EASTER AND CHRISTMAS.

It’s how all of Disney works. For example, the recent Oogie Boogie ticket disaster. I was lucky to get mine after over an hour, others never got them after waiting 10 hours.

 

[Sammie]

Imagine if Amazon‘s website crashed every Prime day. No excuse for Disney’s IT issues in 2023.

https://www.theverge.com/2018/7/16/17577654/amazon-prime-day-website-down-deals-service-disruption

Amazon’s website crashed as soon as Prime Day began.​

 

[RoseGold]

Still dwarves this morning. This website is embarassing.

 

[The Prophet]

Just use the app

Oops … I forgot there is no app

 

[New Mouse]

Before this Disney had amazing IT. So no, it has not always been like this. Dh is in the field and used to comment about how awesome Disney’s IT was.

The quality of the IT department really hasn't changed over the years. Before the layoffs they were also below average at best. I think the issue they ran into involved the world becoming more digital exposed one of their forever shortfalls.

 

[MyDogTink]

Didn’t want to start a new thread. Just went to log on and saw a notice that certain areas of the site will be down between Aug 8th & 10th.

 

[TinkB278]

Didn’t want to start a new thread. Just went to log on and saw a notice that certain areas of the site will be down between Aug 8th & 10th.

I wish they would say which certain areas these are.

 

[TCRAIG]

I wish they would say which certain areas these are.

That’s easy to figure out…it’s whatever area you need!! (couldn’t resist).

 

[kes601]

I wish they would say which certain areas these are.

Since it also says Member Accounting will be closed for training on the 8th and be unable to accept dues payments on the 9th I’d say that is likely the part of the site that will be inaccessible.

 

[zachatak]

Over the past decade, I built an IT services business and we host various servers/apps for some of our client base. We don't have to take an entire function out of operation to do updates and maintenance. No modern platform is built like this. We have redundancies and failover options with ways to update on the fly. Why can't Disney, whose budget is much much greater than ours/our client base, figure this out? So ******* frustrating when I need to modify trip dates for a Grand Californian stay that is nearly impossible to book to begin with.

 

[TinkB278]

So I just got the Olaf screen… does anyone know if MS has access to the booking tool during this maintenance down time? Really stinks for those of us right at our booking window.

 

[Sandisw]

So I just got the Olaf screen… does anyone know if MS has access to the booking tool during this maintenance down time? Really stinks for those of us right at our booking window.

Sometimes, they still have the ability to book rooms when the maintenance is for the website specifically.

 

[tjkraz]

No modern platform is built like this. We have redundancies and failover options with ways to update on the fly. Why can't Disney, whose budget is much much greater than ours/our client base, figure this out?

Basically because it's not a modern platform. AFAIK, DVC and the resorts themselves are still running on a 30+ year old AS400 foundation. MDE, the DVC website and other newer components rely on APIs to trade data between various systems.

With that knowledge, it probably works better than one may expect. Some people seem to have recurring problems with DVC accounts which I cannot explain. And there are occasional outages. But if I reflect on my personal interactions with the DVC website, My Disney Experience website and app, checking in for hotel reservations, making ADRs, entering parks, redeeming Genie reservations, reserving and managing cruises, reliability is easily over 99%.

My employer runs on an older AS400 system maintained by a third party. They invested millions in developing a new platform, only to abandon the project after concluding that the project cost many times more than projections and clients didn't want to absorb the time and expense of migrating their own operations. As a 30+ year IT professional, I long ago came to terms with the fact that having one seamless, unified platform was simply an unobtainable goal.

We could argue that Disney has deep pockets and should be willing to invest in the best of all worlds but the migration headaches alone are enough to make my head spin. Millions and millions of DVC, hotel, park ticket, ADR transactions being moved to new systems...

 

[Narcoossee11]

In 1970, Las Vegas used a front desk system.
WDW purchased that system in 2000 because it was NEW for them.

Disney IT does not use anything that is new and advance. This has worked for them so they will never spend the money they should. Both systems and programmers' cost have to on the cheap .

 

[tjkraz]

Disney IT does not use anything that is new and advance. This has worked for them so they will never spend the money they should. Both systems and programmers' cost have to on the cheap .

Many components of Disney's IT are newer and obviously built from the ground up to support their unique business needs. It's just that there are multiple pieces trading data between each other rather than one unified platform. AS400s are still quite viable today.

I don't have any specific insight into Disneys systems. From the outside, it seems like better QA could solve some problems. Just saying "it's old, stop being cheap and replace it" doesn't really take into account all of the challenges involved in such a move. That includes problems for customers when some number of transactions are invariably mishandled during a migration.