The other group that was cut loose from Al Weiss, and whom Meg Crofton won’t have control over, is the secretive Next Generation, or NextGen, organization that has been given a nearly limitless budget to remake the entire Disney theme park experience, at least for Floridians. The NextGen team is led by Jim McPhee (shown below), a well-liked senior leader who worked his way up from a host at the Tiki Room in the 1970’s to a Senior Vice President overseeing the NextGen skunkworks. NextGen, working closely with a team from WDI, has been manifesting itself in its early stages in some of the interactive queues popping up primarily in the Magic Kingdom with varying degrees of success. But the real NextGen goal is to remake how a visitor plans and experiences their stay at Walt Disney World, from pre-arrival to departure.
dThe core of the NextGen concept is something that currently has the working title of XPass, which is the next generation of Fastpass. XPass would work with the backbone of the current Fastpass and PhotoPass systems, but would go far beyond anything offered today as visitors would plot out each day of their Disney vacation weeks or months in advance with XPass. The system would schedule not just the big E Ticket return times for you, but nearly everything about your visit from lunch seating’s and Fantasmic! viewing to meet n’ greets with your kids preferred Characters to the smaller attractions and shows. The attractions that currently offer Fastpass to any park visitor, and plenty of attractions that don’t have Fastpass currently, would be converted over to XPass so that the only way to access a priority boarding slot at the ride would be to book your vacation with Disney and give your vacation plans over to the XPass system in advance.
An XPass card with an RFID tag in it and the visitors own smart phones (or a loaner unit from Disney) and the new QR codes they can scan would be necessary for anyone booking their trip through Disney. With the XPass RFID tag monitoring your every movement around property, every single on-ride photo or video capture device would know which vehicle you are in on rides, and once you walked out the exit it would offer instant picture previews sent to your phone for your purchase consideration through PhotoPass. XPass would seemingly know no bounds when it comes to planning your entire vacation and then shepherding you through day after day of pre-planned reservations and appointments and Character greetings and ride return times.
The entire NextGen and XPass concept is near and dear to Bob Iger’s heart, and the WDW planners hope to be rolling this all out by the middle of this decade. It’s a massive undertaking, and with this management overhaul Tom Staggs wanted the NextGen team to report directly to him instead of going through Al Weiss as it had done since its inception a few years ago.
Not surprisingly, an XPass concept could wreak havoc with many of Disneyland’s Annual Passholders who just drop in for a few hours at a time. DCA already dealt with a stream of enraged AP’s last June when they arrived to see World of Color for the first time and were told they should have been there that morning to get a Fastpass. The AP crowd has figured out how to schedule in a World of Color Fastpass, or purchase a dining package to get one, but it was ugly for those first few weeks last summer. The transition to an XPass type of preferred experience is something best rolled out in WDW, and most people in TDA are more than happy to let the Floridians have at it.