I am wondering if 'photo validation' and 'facial recognition' are two different things. From this WESH2 article:
Crews make progress on groundbreaking Orlando theme park Epic Universe
this is the part that got me to think this:
"Our guests expect us to create as seamless a process as possible," Sprouls said. "So, photo validation, facial recognition, whatever you want to use, is part of that. It's not a requirement. You don't have to have facial recognition, but it does help. We've done this at our park in Bejing. We have facial recognition for everything. You can connect your credit card to your face and basically spend the entire day in the park, without ever having to take anything out of your pocket."
Not sure, but it seems to me that the photo validation shows the attendant a photo of the guest, I would think facial recognition would use AI to do the validation? Maybe photo validation is a way to start testing/fine tuning recognition.