Universal Orlando Resort has made some significant adjustments to its ticket allocations today as it looks to entice even more visitation to the new Epic Universe theme park. In this article, we’ll take a look at the latest changes, and how it will impact crowds moving forward. Let’s jump in.

In what turned out to be a rather controversial take, I pointed out that Universal wasn’t capping attendance. In fact, tickets have been available every single day that the park has operated since May 22nd. Simply put: if tickets are available, Universal isn’t hitting an attendance capacity. Except, it’s not that simple.

Yes, it was true that Universal wasn’t capping attendance – or more correctly, wasn’t hitting any attendance caps – but what Universal was doing effectively limited the number of people in the park. Enter: ticketing friction.

Universal has been managing attendance not by capping attendance, but by creating friction for guests looking to visit. An example is that single-day tickets may not have been available to purchase before the day of your visit. Instead, 3-day tickets or 4-day tickets were the only ticket types available to purchase that would allow access to Epic Universe. Even then, those 3 or 4-day tickets would only include one day at Epic Universe. Simply put, Universal was forcing guests to purchase higher-priced, less desirable tickets if they wanted to visit Epic Universe.

The strategy of ticketing friction was smart for two reasons. First, it limited the number of people in the theme park because guests were unwilling to purchase the undesirable ticket types. Second, it increased revenue to the existing theme parks by making guests buy into theme parks that they might not otherwise have visited.

That said, we questioned whether or not the strategy was smart, or cause for concern. I think the jury is still out on that.

Another factor in the extremely low opening day crowds was likely the fact that many guests simply stayed away for fear of large crowds. Remember, tickets were available, just either undesirable or not made available until the day of the visit. Both of those friction points resulted in very few people visiting Epic Universe.

There is yet another factor, and that is word of mouth. If locals had been on the fence before, they may have seen the extremely low opening day crowds and decided to make a last-minute decision to visit. That meant that they were scooping up some of the tickets that went unpurchased in the opening days, leading to more feet in the park – even if there wasn’t a material increase in the number of tickets made available for sale.

Finally, there is the question of ride reliability. During the opening days, rides were running really well at Epic Universe. In fact, there were more than a few rides that remained walk-on or very little wait throughout the day. All of that led to a wonderful experience for those guests who were in attendance.

As we continue to monitor “leaked” ticket data (via thrill-data), it looks like Universal Orlando Resort has made a massive change in the number of tickets made available for purchase. Whereas we have seen an average “ceiling” of ticket “capacity” around 14,000 to 16,000 over the past week, today, the ceiling jumped to 40,000+. So, what happened?

In short, Universal removed some of the ticketing friction that has existed up until today. Namely, they have removed pre-sale “sellouts”. Right now, there isn’t a single day that is marked as sold out for any ticket type that includes a day at Epic Universe (minus the 4-park ticket). Single-day tickets continue to have low pre-sale availability. The exception being single-day Annual Passholder discounted tickets, which have limited pre-sale availability over the next 2-3 weeks and then are wide open after mid-June.

If you’re willing to purchase a multi-day ticket that forces you to buy into the other Universal Orlando Resort theme parks – Universal has removed all friction. Here’s what that looks like.

Ok, but what actually changed, and will it impact your upcoming visit? Basically, Universal decided to massively increase the “capacity” of the multi-day ticket allocation. Whereas they may have been allocating somewhere between 3,000 to 6,000 tickets for a 3-park, 3-day ticket type before, they have increased that “capacity” to 15,000!

Now, will it impact your vacation? Maybe, but probably not. This goes back to the question of if all of this friction was a smart strategy or cause for concern. While Universal has certainly opened up the floodgates as it relates to ticket “capacity”, they are doing so with ticket types that the general public has decided are undesirable.

Remember when Universal wasn’t hitting attendance caps before? They still won’t hit attendance caps with this change. Think of it this way. You’re at a buffet and they are out of crab legs. Right next to the crab legs are pieces of 5-day-old dry wonder bread. There are 3,000 pieces of this dry wonder bread sitting there and maybe 100 people take a piece. Instead of putting out more crab legs, or lobster, or steak, or whatever your food of choice is in this scenario, the proprietor of this buffet instead puts out 15,000 pieces of dry wonder bread. Nobody is rushing to get dry wonder bread when they really want lobster.

That’s what Universal has just done with this change. There are now 5x the number of undesirable ticket types. This is where the “concern” comes in. Universal simply isn’t selling very many of these ticket types. Perhaps the flowchart created by Universal’s star accountant says that 5x’ing the number of undesirable tickets is the next move, but until Universal starts to sell ticket types to Epic Universe that people actually want to buy, they are probably going to underperform at bit.

By the way, I’m not writing this with my head stuck in the sand. I see wait times increasing at Epic Universe. Wait times can increase for a variety of reasons, including fewer attractions operating during weather delays, lowered capacity for attractions due to maintenance, increased downtime, or, yes, an increase in crowds.

I certainly do think that there has been an increase in crowds at Epic Universe over the past few days, but there has also been an increase in other contributing factors that could drive up wait times as well. I would still say that Epic Universe has fewer visitors per day than the existing Universal theme parks and all of the Walt Disney World theme parks, and perhaps by a wide margin.

All of this is to say that Universal is changing its ticketing strategy a bit, just not enough to significantly impact expected crowd levels. We likely will never see the low crowds that were created by the perfect storm of factors for the grand opening, but this change in ticket “capacity” likely won’t move the needle just yet. If you’re on the fence about visiting Epic Universe right now, check out our “pros & cons” article that still rings true after this recent “capacity” change.

As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com for not only the latest Disney Parks news, but also news, photos, and info from great offerings Outside the Bubble!