Marathon snafu article now up

[cstephens]

Excuse makers and blamers should be ashamed of themselves, period. Whether they get paid for it or not. The executives and their representatives have a choice in how they regard their guests. If they regard their guests with contempt and denial, it says a lot about their character.

I still disagree. I guess you figure they should just say whatever they want to the people and media and disregard any directives from their company. There has been more than one occasion when I could have said more to an employee about a situation because I knew more, but I didn't because I wasn't authorized to. Doesn't mean I didn't try to treat them nicely or do what I could for them, within the confines of my job.

[teri]

I stand by my opinion. People who are in a position to make things right should do what is necessary, and not declare themselves as "just following orders" when dealing with solutions to problems like these. Otherwise, you have nothing left but groupthink. We all know where that leads.

[Mark Goldhaber]

AVP says the decision was made that day though, and the director was not told for 15 minutes.

That doesn't seem plausible. This was not a snap decision - the train shows that people in charge of the park had full intention of shutting down the gate for weeks prior - back when I learned it was gona be stage at Frontierland.

If i knew it was gonna be at Frontierland and that a morning show was going to happen at 9am - why didn't the director?

The decision was not made that day.

Then in that case, a proper question would be "Why did they decide to do a full train show when they knew that people might be running across the train tracks (they couldn't be sure how long it would take for everyone to cross the starting line) instead of doing the trainless show that they do on Extra Magic Hour days, so that the runners wouldn't be in conflict with the train?"

[Alex S.]

This is late to the conversation, but:

WDW has very strict operational policies for safety. No one gets through backstage gates during park operation without a photo ID, not even folks wearing runner's numbers. Park operation began at 9am and they had intended for that to be the close of the window.

Is not exactly true. For the full marathon course, runners are backstage at both Animal Kingdom and MGM Studios with just their numbers giving them ok. Similarly, the race goes through Animal Kingdom, MGM Studios, and Epcot public areas during hours of regular operation and they manage to combine the runners with the guests without any great difficulty. If they wanted, I'm sure this could be managed in Magic Kingdom for 30 minutes (all that should be necessary to get the last person through mile 9 through the park). Blocking walkers for a few minutes while the train went by probably would not have been a huge issues for any of them.

Are some of the upset people whiners? Perhaps. I'm sure that every year, no matter when Disney cuts things off there are people who cry that they did it early, rudely, or otherwise inappropriately. But this year, at this sweep point, I agree with them.