By Robert Niles: As theme park fans, we love great rides and shows. Many of us phone and email early to get a table at favorite themed restaurants. We queue to meet beloved characters.
But there's one more, very important, factor that affects how well we enjoy our theme park vacations. It's the customer service we get (or don't) from our favorite parks' cast or team members.
For great customer service in a theme park, visit the best theme park restaurant in the world, the S.S. Columbia Dining Room at Tokyo DisneySea.
Talk to anyone who's built a career in the theme park business, and chances are the inherent conflict between creative and operations will come up in the conversation at some point. The ride designers and entertainment directors thrive on creativity while operations demand command and control. No one wants a creative roller coaster operator -- we want someone who will follow the procedure to get the trains loaded and dispatched safely and swiftly.
But the best operators aren't automatons. They know how to read a guest's needs and how either to find a solution, or, better yet, to head off a problem before it happens. Great work in theme parks isn't simply about moving ride vehicles, ringing up sales or keeping the streets clean. All those tasks are important, of course, but a great theme park operation requires providing great customer service, above all.
So who's doing a good job of that? And who's not? And, more importantly, how is that situation changing? Is the staff at your favorite theme park getting better or worse at customer service over the past few years?
That's our vote of the week.
Please share your best — or worst — recent example of theme park customer service, in the comments. And, as always, thank you for reading, and for being a part of the Theme Park Insider community. Have a great weekend!
Update: Yeah, I'm pushing the leaners by not offering a "It's the same" option. How about this, then? If you think the service at your favorite park is consistently good, please vote "better." If you think the service has been consistent, and bad, please vote "worse." And if you think service has been getting better at some parks and worse at others, vote on the basis of the direction it's heading at your favorite park, the one you care about most.
This article originally appeared at http://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/201308/3607/. All rights reserved. If you are not reading this on a personal RSS reader (such as Feedburner) or on http://www.themeparkinsider.com, you are reading a scraper website that has illegally copied and stolen http://www.themeparkinsider.com's content. Please visit http://www.themeparkinsider.com/flume/201308/3607/ for the original version, along with all its comments.