Throughout the pandemic and the subsequent reopening of Disney’s parks, former Disney CEO Bob Chapek made a series of deeply unpopular decisions. He raised prices and removed previously free perks all moves that have resulted in Disneyland being the most expensive and least accessible it’s ever been.

At the time, Chapek seemed to the public’s eye to be Disney’s latest cartoon villain. Now, in his new book, “Behind the Castle Walls: My Thirty Years at the Happiest Place on Earth,” he fully embraces the caricature.

Chapek ascended to the CEO job in February 2020, with Bob Iger stepping down from the position just ahead of the pandemic that shuttered Disneyland for nearly 14 months. Through the most challenging situation imaginable, Chapek steered the company to new financial heights for much of the time between assuming the job and his November 2022 firing. He also left behind a wake of aggressive financial decisions that the company is still trying to recover from four years after his firing. Not only is Disneyland still the most expensive it’s ever been, but it’s become the scene of consistently bad guest behavior, a problem the park is struggling to solve.

During his tenure, Chapek made a string of controversial decisions, like nearly doubling the cost of annual Disneyland passes, implementing a restrictive reservation system, and eliminating free perks, like FastPass, and replacing them with costly add-ons. By narrowing access to the parks, making the experience more expensive and limiting capacity, he claimed to be working on behalf of the guest experience. The people who could still manage to get inside Disneyland or Walt Disney World would inherently have a better time, he argued.

But, in reality, as Chapek emphasized over and over in his book, the money he earned the company was the most important thing. The result of all those changes was record profits and legions of unhappy fans including California’s most ardent park supporters.

“Because of our annual pass program that allowed guests to pay a one-time fee for unlimited visits throughout the year, the people who wanted to show up spontaneously were also paying the least per visit,” Chapek wrote in his book. “Since I was committed to overseeing the parks with a business objectivity and an obligation to maximize shareholder value, I understood I couldn’t abandon the most profitable market of long-distance vacation planners just to not disappoint the local annual passholders who visit dozens or hundreds of times a year.”

When Disneyland reopened in April 2021, it did so without annual passes. During the park closure, the company canceled and refunded any passes that had been valid when it shut down in March 2020. Instead, people had to pay full price for day tickets and in very limited quantities. When a new Magic Key annual pass program debuted in August 2021, it was nearly double the cost of the passes available when Chapek took over as head of the parks in 2015. They were significantly restricted in number, and not everyone who wanted one was able to get one for several subsequent years.

That was by design. The annual pass system “suboptimized revenue and unnecessarily constrained the business’s financial performance,” Chapek wrote. He felt that vacationing guests should be prioritized because they were spending more money to be there, and they were less likely to come back if they encountered long lines.

Naturally, that thinking made the CEO hugely unpopular among returning Disney fans.

Describing every annual passholder as a Disney adult in his book, Chapek wrote: “The love for Disney is one of the most, if not the most, central parts of their life. They deeply believe in it, cherish it, and protect it. Not everybody who comes to a theme park is a Disney Adult, though. Upon reviewing the numbers, I found the math didn’t lie: as appreciated as they were, local Disney Adults didn’t drive the economics of the park with their annual pass.”

It actually could have been worse. Chapek wrote that his first instinct was to cancel passes permanently. “We understood we would get blasted if I attempted to eliminate annual passes altogether, so we moved to shift the math,” he wrote.

The profits bore out. Many people who love Disney still loved it enough to pay hundreds more to hold a pass, and to shell out an average of 40% more money per visit from increases to in-park costs. To Chapek’s credit, many guests who could afford to absorb the extra costs did report a better experience; buying a $30 pass to skip most lines seems like a drop in the bucket for the chance to double what you can do in a park day, especially if you’ve paid over $200 for a single-day ticket.

And it wasn’t just about park guests. One of Chapek’s main justifications for the price hikes is that he was able to give cast members (Disney’s term for employees) in the parks a raise. “The cast members are the magic of Disney Parks and, as feasible, should be compensated handsomely for the magic they imprint on those guest memories,” he wrote. The raise he touted himself for executing was an increase to a “living wage” of $20 per hour.

A 2018 study by Occidental College and the Economic Roundtable found that 11% of Disneyland employees reported experiencing homelessness in the previous two years, 68% were food insecure, and 73% said they did not earn enough for basic living expenses. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, the current living wage in California is $30.48 for a single adult with no children, and $53.54 for an adult with one child. In Florida, it’s $24.09 for a single adult and $39.87 for one with a child. The more children, the more those estimates rise exponentially.

What Chapek omitted was that despite the modest pay increase, the years since the parks’ pandemic closures have been plagued with widespread company layoffs, reductions in benefits and cuts to in-park entertainment, emptying the stages at Disneyland’s once-vibrant performance spaces like the Golden Horseshoe, largely because of staff costs. Cutbacks in maintenance led to worsening quality of ride experiences. In 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported that ride stoppages and breakdowns had increased almost 60% at Disneyland since 2018.

But the money flowed in. During his years running Disney Parks, Experiences and Products, Chapek reported an 18% overall revenue growth. In the first fiscal quarter of 2022, Chapek reported that the parks division “achieved all-time revenue and operating income records” during that time period. As of May 2022, per capita spending among Disneyland guests was up 40% from the same quarter in 2019. “The 18 percent growth rate during my tenure in parks was another win-win,” he wrote. “[Then-CEO Bob Iger’s] only concern was that we might raise prices too high, hurting demand, but that never materialized.”

While attendance has stayed relatively stable at Disneyland, the overwhelming consensus is that the prices are far too high, especially in a time when guests are getting less for their money. The once-free FastPass, which allowed guests to skip long lines on select rides a few times a day, is now the Lightning Lane Multi Pass, a paid service that can cost nearly $40 for the exact same benefit. (Not all rides fall under the Multi Pass. Some rides require Individual Lightning Lane, like Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, which costs upward of $30 per ride per person on busy days.) Disneyland has also replaced early park entry for hotel guests, formerly a daily benefit, with one single Lightning Lane per person per hotel stay. The cuts weren’t just at Disneyland. At Walt Disney World, the company ended Magical Express, a free shuttle to WDW resorts from Orlando International Airport, in January 2022, and also implemented paid line skipping.

In addition to the changes being costly, they were also difficult to navigate. New complicated systems for how to make park reservations and how to utilize Lightning Lane Multi Pass (formerly Genie+) added frustration and confusion for many guests.

When Chapek was fired in November 2022, former CEO Bob Iger reclaimed control of the company and publicly started walking back the price hikes. “In our zeal to grow profits, we may have been a little bit too aggressive about some of our pricing,” he said at the March 2023 Morgan Stanley Technology, Media and Telecom Conference. “I think there’s a way to continue to grow that business, but be smarter about how we price so that we maintain that brand value of accessibility.”

But the precedent had been set, and the profits were too enticing. Disney may have softened some of its aggression on price hikes its annual ticket increase, rolled out on Oct. 6, didn’t include raising Magic Key prices for the first time in years but costs within the parks continued to grow in everything from ticket prices to the cost of food within the parks, which has led to adults ordering kids meals to save money. Many of those scaled-back offerings, like cutting early entry, happened during Iger’s second tenure as CEO.

In 2025, the Wall Street Journal reported that even within the company, employees expressed concerns that Disney “has become addicted to price hikes and has reached the limits of what middle-class Americans can afford.”

With wallets stretched so tight for so many people trying to give their families a magical day at Disneyland, it’s no wonder guest behavior seems to have reached a nadir. If people are scraping their pennies together and going into debt to afford a park visit, every single element of the experience had better be perfect and some people’s fuses have become a lot shorter if it’s not. The shifted focus toward out-of-town guests has also eroded the park’s historic connection with those who care about the place, especially its traditions and culture, the most.

Reports of adults acting badly often appear on social media and seem to be getting more and more frequent. In 2023, two families at Walt Disney World came to punches over who had a claim to a photo spot first. On Dec. 30, 2025, when a dad tried to stop a large group of guests at Disneyland’s Indiana Jones Adventure ride from cutting in front of his family, a man in that group punched him, sending him to the hospital for stitches.

In an effort to course-correct on guest dissatisfaction with rising costs, Disneyland has recently offered some enticing incentives. This summer, the company sold limited evening-only tickets for $59. (The tiered pricing system means single-day tickets for one park range from $104 to $224, depending on the day.) Since May, renewals of Magic Key annual passes have also come with a Disney dining card, good for food purchases in the parks.

On Oct. 6, when Disneyland announced its annual price hikes, they were the mildest increases in years. None of the Magic Key prices went up, and a few ticket tiers went up by just $5 per day. The company also scrapped no-show penalties for its much-maligned reservation system, which Chapek explained in his book was a measure implemented to restrict the number of annual passholders who could attend in a day, preserving a better experience for higher-paying guests.

In March 2026, just after Josh D’Amaro took over as CEO of Disney following Iger’s second time stepping down from the role, an attendee of a Disney shareholder meeting asked him how he planned to balance earnings with guest satisfaction at the parks. “That is an important question,” he said, per Deadline. “I guess I’d start with the fact that I know that a Disney park visit is a meaningful investment for families that visit us, and our goal is for every single guest to feel that their experience is worth it.”

Chapek’s price hikes aren’t going away anytime soon, but it does seem like Disney has backed off from that level of aggressive increases. Still, though he claimed Iger and the company attempted to erase his legacy after his termination, his leadership lingers at the parks and fans haven’t forgotten how Disneyland got to its most expensive point. But the former Disney CEO doesn’t see things that way.

“My abrupt dismissal hurt my reputation, leaving those close to me, outsiders, and some within the kingdom trying to figure out what I did wrong,” Chapek wrote. “The answer, again, is nothing.”