[akprasad]

The article agrees:

> Of course, businesses have long segmented customers

The article's argument is that:

- This kind of segmentation is more widespread and automated than it was previously.

- It's appearing in areas it wasn't in before (e.g. Disney World).

- It's extending to public arenas like vaccine queues, access to public lands, and TSA queues.

[tiahura]

Disney introduced Fastpass during the Clinton presidency.

This isn’t exactly news.

[adrr]

Fastpass didn't cost money till they rebranded it DisneyGenie+ in the last couple years. It was just a way to get a reservation for a ride that anyone could do.

[henrikschroder]

No, they're charging money openly for it now. It's long been possible to skip ahead of the queues at Disney by paying for it, it was just hidden for most people, since it required that you booked expensive suites at their on-property hotels. If you did that, you could magically get a lot more fast passes than everyone else.

[adrr]

You get one hour early access if you book at a Disney property. There's VIP tours for $500/hr min 6 hours that lets you cut all lines.

[tiahura]

My recollection is that in the past, staying on property on the premium floors got you access to the club room and 3 or 4 fast passes per day.

[henrikschroder]

> and 3 or 4 fast passes per day.

Yes, this is how it worked.

Remember that the fastpass system was completely opaque, you put in your tickets in the fastpass machine, and it gave you a fastpass ticket and timeslot. Everyone with normal tickets were told they could only have one fastpass at a time, so if you put your ticket in again, or into another fastpass machine, you'd get denied.

But they knew the ticket numbers of people staying in the right rooms, so they could have the system work differently for them, and hand out as many fastpasses as they liked. And the people staying in those rooms generally didn't blab about all their perks.

And the general public was used to a small trickle of people passing them in the fastpass lane, the number of rooms that had more fastpasses than normal was limited, so regular visitors would pretty much never figure out that certain guests pretty much always used the fastpass lanes.

[aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA]

Do you mean Club 33? Because I doubt that.

[henrikschroder]

Yes, those things were/are openly advertised.

There was a lot more hidden perks for people who shelled out for suites.