Food Kiosks: This is probably the most difficult one to solve. As I'm sure we all noticed, the demand for these kiosks was through the roof. I see a few different factors at play:
A) Location: while there's not tons of spots to choose from, lining up close to 10 tents next to each other in NY creates a massive logjam of people.
B) Too much variety: The ideas that HHN comes up with for F&B are incredible at times, but it's a double-edged sword. When you have 4-5 different drinks, and dozens of unique food items that are only available for 2-months at one stand on select nights, it drives the demand. Guests want to try them all, influencers need to make their #content, etc. There's also a segment of guests who will get in line with no clue what's on these menus, expecting cheeseburgers and French fries, only to find out they're in line for arepas. Now they've gotta figure out what to get off this new menu, or bail out and wait another 20 minutes. It may be time to simplify the offerings?
Express: Opening weekend crowds are essentially the "stress test" for HHN as a whole, and express is no exception. There's no real way to replicate the crowd sizes and intensity during employee previews, and just from my observations, it doesn't seem like a position that employees are signing up for year after year, which means its a fresh staff learning the ropes every fall. My best solution, the express portion of "(insert multi-night ticket) w/ express" is not valid opening weekend. Those guests can still come in and do standby, but make express for opening weekend "single-night express" tickets only, so that the ops team can start with a smaller pool of express guests the first 2-3 nights. I don't fault multi-night w/ express ticket holders for using what they paid for, but that's why you see express take 60 minutes or more the first few nights. It's too much at once.
House Staffing: The pandemic has left a drastic and permanent mark on the job market. In a job that was already grueling, exhausting, and tough hours, scare acting is no exception. The event continues to get longer, which means more staff will be needed as some tap out. Do you raise their pay? Get a third cast for each house? How do you stand out from SeaWorld's management of scare actor employees? Tough questions that I don't have the answer to, but I bet if Universal surveyed their current pool of scareactors, they could get some quality feedback on what changes they need to make.
