Why Disney’s Magic Wristbands Aren’t Going To New Shanghai Park

The MagicBand wearables in use at Walt Disney resorts in Florida won’t be making the trip to the new Disney park in Shanghai, where the magic will come from smartphones instead.

As Bloomberg shares, Disney spent $1 billion over several years developing the electronic wristbands that allow guests at the company’s Orlando resorts to enter the Disney parks, buy merchandise and access rides and attractions. Two years after the MagicBands’ Florida debut in 2013, it appears that Disney feels that mobile technology has advanced to the point where the wearables’ functionality — at its newest park, Shanghai Disney Resort, scheduled to open this spring — can be outdone by visitors’ own phones.

“When Disney was first making their investment in Orlando, the mobile revolution was still at a very early stage,” Douglas Quinby, a vice president of research at the consulting firm Phocuswright in Atlanta, told Bloomberg. “Nobody knew how all these technologies were going to shake out.”

“What you’ll see in Shanghai is a park that, from a technological perspective, is more advanced than anything we’ve ever built,” Disney Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Bob Iger said in an interview with Bloomberg last month. “The consumer will be able to buy their tickets, use their mobile devices in far more advanced, compelling ways than any other place, from a theme park perspective, than we are today.”

While Disney attests, according to Bloomberg, that the MagicBands have been a success in Florida — where they have to date been used by more than 13 million guests in the company’s four theme parks and 18 hotels in Orlando — leaving them out of the plans for the Shanghai park, in favor of building their capability into existing smartphone technology, will save them the cost of manufacturing the devices.

“If they move this same type of application and do it on the customer’s devices, that would be a cheaper way to do it,” Robin Diedrich, an analyst at Edward Jones & Co. in Des Peres, Missouri, told Bloomberg. “It would be more seamless and get into more people’s hands.”