Would You Like Magic with That?: Working at Walt Disney World Guest Relations by Annie Salisbury Read Free Book Online Page A

person. He couldn’t answer all the questions. Walt realized that he needed a group of cast members to answer these questions when he couldn’t.
    Outside the front of Disneyland were ticket booths. Guests would line up outside of these booths to purchase their tickets in the morning, just like they do now at the parks (that is, if they haven’t already purchased them ahead of time online). One day, Walt happened to be standing outside the front of the park, and he was watching the ticket lines. He noticed that one ticket line happened to be a lot longer than the others, and he thought this was strange. Did the cast member inside the booth not know what they were doing? Walt decided to check it out. He was curious as to why there was a line.
    Inside the booth Walt found a young woman by the name of Cicely Rigdon. Cicely was an outstanding cast member, and she knew exactly what she was doing. But, she was not simply selling tickets. Instead, she was planning out itineraries for the guests. She was scribbling on maps, showing what attractions were the best, and where the best places to eat where, and if the family had younger kids, where they could meet characters. Cicely was basically working as an unofficial Disney tour guide, and Walt realized he had found the perfect cast member to lead his newly developed role, Guest Relations.
    Walt made Cicely the first Guest Relations cast member. So now, when Walt wasn’t around to answer questions, Cicely could answer them for him. There were days that even Cicely needed help, so Walt hired more of these Guest Relations cast members until he had a team of them answering questions and planning out itineraries for guests. After a while, these cast members also started leading guided tours through the park, to answer even more questions. Even though this all happened decades ago, it’s still the same job I did in 2010.
    Before I could put on the Guest Relations costume, I needed to go through training. If you haven’t picked up on this yet, Disney loves training. Disney will sometimes find any excuse to train a bunch of cast members, whether they’ve been on the payroll for years or have just been hired. Disney is constantly rolling out training updates, sometimes just for fun. Why not do some more training?
    Training for Guest Relations was intense. It wasn’t just any sort of training, but detailed, guest-orientated training that spanned four days. Seven, if you count the addition three-day ticketing class, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
    There were twenty of us in the training class, all going to different parks. Eight of us were headed to Magic Kingdom, the most out of any of the parks. Before even coming into this session, I had heard that Magic Kingdom Guest Relations cast members could be kind of “cliquey” and “full of themselves”. That is true. In fact, there’s a term coined for Guest Relations cast members who thought they were better than everyone else, and that term is pladitude . Magic Kingdom Guest Relations cast members bleed pladitude .
    The eight of us grouped off and sat together at one table. We did not socialize with anyone else. Within ten minutes, we had inside jokes. We were exchanging phone numbers. We were talking about watching fireworks and parades every day, so yes, we were experiencing pladitude, especially as the two people going to Animal Kingdom sat together, alone, and had no parades or fireworks in their park. Sorry, Animal Kingdom.
    Training was a lot of information to take in over the four days. And then immediately afterwards, there was a three-day ticketing class. My group dwindled down to four, since it was a lot of hands-on stuff, and Disney wanted to teach it to us one-on-one. There were two trainers and three other guys plus myself in the final group. We drank a lot of coffee and made a lot of lame Disney jokes during those three days. At one point, we all looked around and realized that one of the guys, Joseph, had