Disney Animal Kingdom Impressions
My wife and I were in Florida visiting relatives and we decided to celebrate our 36th anniversary a little and go to Disney. As we are both having some minor health problems, we decided to keep it as low-key as possible, mostly due to the record heat. So, we opted for Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park, which well, wasn’t what I personally thought it was going to be. It was far less zoological park and more amusement park with some animal displays, but I will get into that a little later in this post.
I thought the park wasn’t as clean as I expected a Disney Park to be. Sure, the trash on the ground was being actively picked up, but overall, the park just wasn’t that clean. Following on the heels of COVID-19, I expected more, and it just wasn’t there. It wasn’t cleaner than any other amusement park and frankly not as clean as some of the zoological parks that I have been to. And to be honest, there wasn’t any reason it couldn’t be spotless. The park closes at 6 nightly, so that there is plenty of time for power washing, painting, and other maintenance items.
Just to be clear, this is the first Disney Park that I have visited since I was a kid, so really, I’m a Disney virgin.
When we got to the ticket counter, we didn’t purchase tickets in advance, because every website that I researched on the internet stated that I qualify for a military discount as a veteran, and well, that wasn’t the case. I was denied a discount for the only reason we were only purchasing a single-day pass and that was a little disheartening. Now, I’m not a discount seeker and I certainly don’t feel that I deserve it by any means, but it was listed everywhere I went online. No worries, we purchased our tickets and made our way into the park.
At the gate, I was surprised to see that Disney wanted to collect my fingerprint, they stated that it was for security so no one could steal our access card, but that isn’t likely the case as we never used our fingerprint anywhere else in the park, nor did we see any other readers near any of the card scanners, but maybe if a card is flagged as stolen, they require a fingerprint at that time, I just didn’t observe them.
When you enter the park, there are animal enclosures in the Oasis Gardens section, leading you to think that it is a zoological park. There are mostly varied species of ducks and other aquatic animals, but the display isn’t really that large or diverse.
We wanted to hit the Safari first, so we made our way to the back of the park to the Safari line and waited 40 minutes for what was a huge letdown for me. They make you think as if you will see animals up close and in the wild, but the animals were often a fair distance away from the truck we were on. The illusion is there that this is wild, but it was often broken by animal keepers who were on the safari interacting up close and personal with the animals, which often broke the illusion. You would certainly see the animals much closer in a regular zoo or Safari Park, as well as they are usually more active in a regular zoo or Safari Park.
I have been to about a dozen or so different zoological parks (Zoo Miami, Toledo Zoo, Smithsonian National Zoological Park, Cincinnati Zoo, Virginia Zoo, Columbus Zoo, and the Detroit Zoo to name a few) and at least one Safari Park (Virginia Safari Park) in my life, excluding this Disney visit, so I’m by far no expert on this, but I do have a little experience.
But I found that the “Animal” part of Disney’s Animal Kingdom Theme Park, was lacking, the aviary was nice but small, and the reptile exhibit was lacking as well. Outside the Safari part of the park (which is about 1/4 of the park), there were two large tigers, both behind thick glass and one (the male) was in a very much smaller enclosure than his female counterpart. There were also two silverback gorillas at the park, but neither was active during our visit.
Disney states that animals like Elephants, Giraffes, Hippos, Lions, Rhinos, and Zebras are all available at the park, yes, they certainly are, and the closest we got to any of them was at least fifty or more yards, which was a huge disappointment.
While waiting for many of the rides, more than 1/3 of the fans that keep people cool were either off or broken and it was above 90 degrees the day we visited. That took me a little back, figuring out the amount of money Disney makes from these parks. I didn’t see one water mister in the entire park either, but that is all likely by design. Disney knows what it is doing and it is all designed, along with a few water fountains (and the water was not very good tasting either) all to get you to spend more money.
As I stated earlier, the park wasn’t super clean, but maybe a more accurate statement would be the park was very well used and it showed, though I don’t think any of the amusement rides were down or broken during our visit.
We found things like some of the food pricing to be very confusing and the choices were lacking, depending on where in the park you were at.
What I found lacking was the Disney Experience App, which was, well, certainly an experience to say the least. First, you have to create an account, with way too much information to just use the damn map. Then we couldn’t get the map to work half the time. We couldn’t get my wife’s account to link up to the app, and then we couldn’t upgrade either account. We spent 25 minutes along with a Disney experience helping employees trying to upgrade our tickets to include the ‘lightening line” which allows you to move through wait lines faster. After 25 minutes I stood up and told the employee to thank you for their help, but the app just didn’t work, she was very nice and upgraded us on her tablet and at Disney’s expense, which she didn’t have to do, but it was the right thing to do.
Apparently, the app doesn’t play well with some Android devices like the Google Pixel 8 that my wife and I both have. We also had GPS problems with the app, which were caused by sunspots, but it certainly was very frustrating when we were trying to make our way through the park, when the app wanted us to go left and we should have turned right. I can say that the Busch Gardens Williamsburg has an app that works well and we never once had navigation problems and we have only been there once two years ago.
Overall the experience was decent, but not great, Disney seemed to be lacking in the “great” department, except for the employee that helped us both with the app issues and we weren’t the only people having app problems.
This is just my impressions, your experience might be different. My wife and I spent many years in the Mystery Shopper world so we tend to look at things in a very different light than most people do.
But the end result we did have fun and made some good memories.
