On Wednesday, July 23, at exactly 6:55 a.m., Scarlett Cressel, a 60-year-old school bus driver, opens her Disney app on her phone with nervous excitement. She is traveling with a group that includes her daughter, her grandchildren and her mother to Disney World the following week. In five minutes, Ms. Cressel will gain access to Disney’s ride reservations system, where she hopes to snag three bookings for their visit.
This moment was years in the making. Ms. Cressel requested Disney gift cards for several birthdays and Christmases, dug up discounts and paid for her park tickets in installments. Her mother arranged space in a timeshare nearby, and a friend will take Amtrak’s Auto Train from Virginia to Florida with the group’s luggage to avoid airline baggage fees.
Yet for all her planning, Ms. Cressel enters the reservation system at a disadvantage. The system dispenses front-of-the-line spots and gives priority to travelers who book a guide, purchase expensive passes or stay at a Disney property. As a visitor on a budget, Ms. Cressel is near the bottom of a pecking order in which, on many days, thousands of spots for the park’s premier rides are reserved for the big spenders.
The recently renovated 1,863-square-foot King Kamehameha suite at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort, which offers a huge bi-level great room, views of Cinderella Castle and a soaking tub, can go for $3,000 a night. The sleek GEO-82 Bar and Lounge in EPCOT offers a package that includes a tower of small bites, champagne or cocktails and a table with views of the park’s fireworks show for $179 a person (entry to the park not included, but required). A wine-paired prix fixe meal at the Michelin-starred Victoria & Albert’s at Disney’s Grand Floridian hotel starts at over $1,200 for two. And so on.
For most of the park’s history, Disney was priced to welcome people across the income spectrum, embracing the motto “Everyone is a V.I.P.” In doing so, it created a shared American culture by providing the same experience to every guest. The family that pulled up in a new Cadillac stood in the same lines, ate the same food and rode the same rides as the family that arrived in a used Chevy. Back then, America’s large and thriving middle class was the focus of most companies’ efforts and firmly in the driver’s seat.
That middle class has so eroded in size and in purchasing power — and the wealth of our top earners has so exploded — that America’s most important market today is its affluent. As more companies tailor their offerings to the top, the experiences we once shared are increasingly differentiated by how much we have.
Data is part of what’s driving this shift. The rise of the internet, the algorithm, the smartphone and now artificial intelligence are giving corporations the tools to target the fast-growing masses of high-net-worth Americans with increasing ease. As a management consultant, I’ve worked with dozens of companies making this very transition. Many of our biggest private institutions are now focused on selling the privileged a markedly better experience, leaving everyone else to either give up — or fight to keep up.
Disney’s ethos began to change in the 1990s as it increased its luxury offerings, but only after the economic shock of the pandemic did the company seem to more fully abandon any pretense of being a middle-class institution. A Disney vacation today is “for the top 20 percent of American households — really, if I’m honest, maybe the top 10 percent or 5 percent,” said Len Testa, a computer scientist whose “Unofficial Guide” books and website Touring Plans offer advice on how to manage crowds and minimize waiting in line. “Disney positions itself as the all-American vacation. The irony is that most Americans can’t afford it.”
In a statement, Disney said its goal is to make its experiences available “to as many families as possible.” “No two experiences are the same, which is why we provide a wide variety of ticket, dining and hotel options, enhanced throughout the year with promotional offers,” it said.
Ms. Cressel grew up watching “The Wonderful World of Disney” and reruns of “The Mickey Mouse Club.” Her first visit to Disney World was in 1993 with her grandmother. “You pass under that Walt Disney World sign, and all your worries and cares fade away,” she said.
On her previous trips as an adult, Ms. Cressel could use Disney’s free FastPass system, a program started in 1999 that allowed visitors to skip the line if they agreed to wait and return to the ride later within a specific time window. Wielding those passes, she could hop on most any attraction she desired without having to wait forever. Those days are long gone. “I really, really miss that,” she said.
It is 7 a.m. when Ms. Cressel logs on to the Disney app. She and her daughter, a special-education classroom assistant, together earn nearly $80,000 a year, almost exactly America’s household median income. For this trip, they’ve already spent over $2,300 on Disney tickets — more than the average middle-class family spends on all travel for a year, according to Mr. Testa’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. So Ms. Cressel decided to book just one of what are sometimes called Tier 1 attractions, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure. That plus two lesser attractions will cost the group an additional $160.
Adding a new credit card number (so her daughter can take advantage of rewards points) takes a precious seven minutes. Ms. Cressel is able to secure skip-the-line-access for Bayou Adventure only for 3:40 p.m. She knows what that likely means. Her group may have to wait in the far-longer standby lines for any of the park’s top rides for the rest of the day.
Regardless, Ms. Cressel says she cannot wait to take her grandchildren to Disney World for the first time and “see it through their eyes.”
Disney was never cheap. A family day at the original Disneyland in California, including tickets, some rides and food for four people, was about a $30 affair when the park opened in 1955, which was a lot of money when the median family income was $4,400. But $30 — roughly the cost of a week’s groceries — was still an attainable number for much of America’s rapidly growing middle class.
In the early years, Disney ticket prices rose so slowly that at times they got cheaper after inflation. An employee handbook from the 1950s quotes Walt Disney as saying, “We roll out the red carpet for the Jones family from Joliet just as we would (with a few embellishments) for the Eisenhowers from Palm Springs.” Versions of Walt’s “Everyone is a V.I.P.” credo were in Disney’s new-employee training materials long after his death in 1966. Fortunately for him and his shareholders, embracing everybody made good business sense. That began to change in the 1990s.
Michael Eisner, Disney’s chief executive at the time, created a bevy of products for the affluent — including fancier hotels, a cruise line and white-tablecloth restaurants. But he rejected the idea of allowing customers to pay to skip lines at the parks, according to a Disney historian, Aaron Goldberg. When a rival, Universal Studios, introduced paid line-skipping in the early 2000s, Disney — perhaps fearing backlash from its large fan base — stood firm.
In the mid-2000s, however, the growing ranks of the affluent presented a profit source that could not be ignored. According to Datos Insights, in 1992 there were 88,000 households worth $20 million or more in 2022 dollars; by 2022, there were 644,000. Those who could pay almost anything for a vacation were becoming their own mass market.
At the same time, smartphone apps transformed how companies connected to their customers. In 2012, the My Disney Experience app gave guests an easy way to check wait times, show times, restaurant bookings and more. In return, Disney gained a trove of information on exactly where guests went, what they purchased and how much they spent in its complex. The app eventually became so integrated with a visit that much of a Disney park day can be dedicated to checking it; savvy guests bring an external battery.
More than ever before, Disney and companies like it have access to data showing them who is willing to spend what for which experiences. “Disney is an analytics company that happens to do movies and parks,” Mr. Testa said.
Over my three-decade-long consulting career, I saw industry after industry use this kind of information to shift their focus to the big spenders in its customer base. Banks, retailers, hotels, airlines, credit card issuers, manufacturers and universities all learned that their richest customers didn’t just spend more than the rest, they spent multiples more. Many companies found that if they didn’t focus on their richest customers, they couldn’t provide competitive salaries to staff, increase returns to shareholders and attract capital to invest in new products. Whereas in the 1970s and before, the revenue driving corporate profits came from the middle class, by the 1990s it was clear that the big money was at the top.
The pandemic was the final blow. Covid shutdowns and the streaming wars delivered staggering financial losses. In October 2021, Disney killed its free FastPass system, upsetting many hard-core fans, and started offering ride reservations for $15 each at Disney World. Over the next three years, the line-skipping options multiplied in number and in price. Disney also offered perks for those staying in its properties — one of them being the ability to make ride reservations before those staying elsewhere.
The result is a complex, multitiered structure in which a large number of low-wait spots on the best rides are handed to those who pay dearly either for a private guide, or for a pricey pass, or for a room in certain Disney-owned properties. (Mr. Testa notes that Disney’s hotels charge significantly more than those in the rest of the Orlando market.)
Pricing tiers have been healthy for Disney’s bottom line. Last year, a hacker got access to the company’s internal Slack channels. The exposed data indicated that Disney had made $724 million from skip-the-line products from late 2021 to June 2024. Since then, Disney has introduced a highly popular Lightning Lane Premier Pass; pricing varies, but can easily be over $400 on a given day.
I returned to Disney World in April to see the new system in action. Much about the place feels middle class, sometimes refreshingly so, with everyone running around in shorts and T-shirts.
When you are at a Disney park, you will inevitably hear “When You Wish Upon a Star,” Disney’s unofficial anthem. Disney adopted that song in the 1940s; its second line, “makes no difference who you are,” encapsulated its egalitarian ethos. Now the song reads to me like nostalgic, middle-class cosplay that helps us relive the Disney that Walt created. The roughly $90 to get your family cut-the-line access to a premier ride (on top of what, for a family of four, could easily be over $700 dropped on tickets already) is the real Disney, the one the market created.
Mr. Testa says he receives around 10 emails a day from customers seeking travel help, but a middle-class family like Ms. Cressel’s, one that crosses several state lines and spends multiple days at Disney World, is relatively rare: “The last time I helped someone like this plan a trip? I don’t know. It’s been at least 10 years.”
The vacation Ms. Cressel has been dreaming about for years is finally here. On Monday, July 28, she awakes at 6 a.m. at the timeshare and drives to one of Disney’s cheaper hotels, where her daughter’s friends are staying in order to secure free parking in the park complex. Ms. Cressel, who has mobility problems, assembles her rented scooter. The group then boards a free resort bus headed to Hollywood Studios, arriving at the gates by 9 a.m. (This park, like the others, had already been open to those staying at Disney properties for half an hour.) It’s going to be a scorcher; the temperature has already hit 88 degrees. Ms. Cressel deliberately chose this time of year as the broiling weather slightly reduces both ticket costs and crowd levels.
Soon after they pass the gates, Ms. Cressel’s scooter breaks down, and the rental firm representative struggles to enter the park and find Ms. Cressel to replace it. With the heat and humidity making the temperature feel closer to 108 degrees, she takes refuge in a restaurant. Ultimately, it consumes three precious park hours to resolve the problem.
Due to the delay, Ms. Cressel is unable to ride any of the major “Star Wars”-themed rides. Missing Rise of the Resistance, a crown jewel, is particularly frustrating. Ms. Cressel had considered trying to reserve the popular ride in advance, but decided against it because of the price tag ($110 for five people when she checked the prices).
A perennially positive person, Ms. Cressel has very few downbeat moments. This is one of them. She warns me later that if visitors go to Disney’s parks with a rigid plan, they may be “extremely disappointed.” She vows to stay flexible.
On Thursday, her Magic Kingdom day, Ms. Cressel awakes at 5 a.m. in hopes of arriving at the park at 7:30 a.m. Delays stemming from the scooter and from lodging in a non-Disney property mean she and her party show up at 8 a.m. instead, which isn’t ideal in light of the looming crowds. They head to the Peter Pan ride and are able to do it after 15 minutes. By the time they emerge, the lines have already formed. They next head to the carousel, a less popular attraction, and she also checks out the Hall of Presidents.
Fourteen hours later, Ms. Cressel has experienced nine of the park’s attractions, three in the Tier 1 category, plus a parade and the fireworks show. She and her companions leave, exhausted, at 11 p.m., when the park closes.
It was a different kind of Disney day for Shawn Conahan, a California tech executive who took his 13-year-old daughter to Orlando around New Year’s — one of the busiest times of the year to visit the parks, according to Mr. Testa.
Getting Disney’s Lightning Lane Premier Pass, which ushers its holders to the front of the line at each ride once, was a no-brainer, Mr. Conahan decided. Given he was already in for $7,000 for the four-day trip, “it’s not that crazy to spend another $900” to see the Magic Kingdom. (The pass’s price varies based on the day and the park in question.) Pass holders don’t need to worry about booking reservations online in advance; the system is holding all their seats for them.
The result was even better than Mr. Conahan had imagined. Their spots assured, he and his daughter awoke at their leisure and walked over to hop the monorail to Magic Kingdom. It may be a bit slower than the bus, but it is “a big part” of the Disney World experience, Mr. Conahan reasons. The weather is nearly perfect: about 70 degrees with a light breeze.
Arriving at the notoriously busy hour of 10 a.m, Mr. Conahan and his daughter sail through to Big Thunder Mountain Railroad, waiting just nine minutes despite a posted wait time of over an hour. They then hit Tiana’s, the ride Ms. Cressel had prioritized, before heading to Haunted Mansion, waiting just seven minutes while everybody else saw a standby wait estimate of 75. They stop for lunch at Skipper Canteen, a “Jungle Cruise”-themed restaurant known for waiters who tell corny jokes (like the ride’s operators) and one of his daughter’s favorite dishes — a $30 entree of fried chicken with a chili-soy glaze, jasmine rice and pickled vegetable slaw.
Post-lunch, they hop on the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, in a line that took four minutes instead of 65. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train took 5 instead of 85. They finished off the day with the new Tron roller coaster, waiting eight minutes instead of 120. In all, Mr. Conahan and his daughter were able to visit 16 attractions, including all five of the park’s Tier 1 rides plus its two most coveted attractions — Seven Dwarfs and Tron — that charge separately for passes. They did all that, plus the lunch stop and a Dole Whip snack break, in just seven hours. His daughter declared it “the best day ever.”
One of the economic puzzles of the last five years has been the persistence of serious consumer negativity at a time when nearly everyone has a job, median household incomes are historically high, and we are spending more than we did before the pandemic. Yet all but the most affluent are seemingly not happy with the economy or their own place in it.
We all judge our well-being against something, typically our past and our peers. Through either of those lenses, the Disney parks — and many similar institutions of American culture — may offer a piece of the puzzle. Compared with the past, a Disney trip is more expensive, to be sure — but perhaps more important, it feels much more expensive, because at every turn one is being invited to “level up” and spend more. Thanks to social media, we can now see the experiences that divide us. Go to Instagram and search on #Club33, the invitation-only clubs hidden within Disney properties. What you see there will not make you feel a kinship with your fellow man, unless you are one of the very few invited in.
America’s 20th century was a fortunate moment when we could rely on companies like Disney to deliver rich and unifying elements of our culture. Walt Disney hoped that his audience would have “no racial, national, political, religious or social differences” — he wanted to appeal to everyone, in no small part because appealing to everyone was profitable. It was a time when big institutions were trusted, and the culture they created was shared by nearly all Americans.
The economics of appealing to the middle class aren’t what they used to be. The market, and increasingly the culture, is dominated by the affluent. And technology is enabling companies to see these previously invisible class divides and act on them.
Based on what we earn, we see different ads, stand in different lines, eat different food, stay in different hotels, watch the parade from different sections, and on and on. What’s profitable today is not unification. It’s segmentation.
Despite the setbacks she experienced, Ms. Cressel says she still had a good time. A few elements of the old Disney vision remain, like the opportunity to meet characters like Mickey Mouse, which is still offered first come first served. When one of her grandsons wanted an individual picture with the Elsa character from the movie “Frozen,” reminding her of her love of Disney characters when she was young, “it brought a tear to my eye.”
Ms. Cressel figures that her seven days in Orlando cost about $8,000 for two adults and three kids — around 15 percent of what she and her daughter earn each year after taxes. But she is already thinking about a return trip. And if she does return, she vows to bump up her budget to stay at a Disney-owned hotel. She’ll also buy more reservations as well.
“All magic has a price,” she said.
Daniel Currell is a management consultant. Paola Chapdelaine is a photographer.
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