Disneyland and Walt Disney World are two of the best known and most highly visited recreation locations in the world. With this visibility and audience reach, the action of the Disney Company extends well beyond the boundaries of their theme parks. Not only is Disney a multi-dimensional entertainment conglomerate, but its profile gives it prominence that no other recreation manager has. Anything conducted at Disney has the potential to flow on to other locations. That is, the standards that Disney sets in the management of its park environments have the potential to become the standards against which all environments are judged. Similarly, the visitor expectations and experiences that Disney constructs can become models to which visitors would have all recreation managers aspire. Disney is often acknowledged …show more content…
As Connellan (1996) suggests, "Your competition is anyone who raises customer expectations — because if someone else satisfies customers better than you, no matter what type of business, you suffer by comparison" (p. 20). Recreation resource managers, then, can find themselves compared to the success of Disney’s approach. Disney World and Disneyland may be nearer to what people want than anything given them before. The more that managers publicly aspire to be meeting those expectations, the more the public will apply the standards they know of from Disney. Disneyland and Disney World are prime examples of a completely constructed environment, and a fundamentally prescribed visitor experience. It is this that could be problematic for land managers. If visitors use Disney as the norm, as the standard of how things should be, then they will expect our natural resources to be similarly constructed. If the natural environment doesn’t conform to those standards then there will be expectations to reconstruct nature to fit. It is doubly concerning that Disney may become what people expect things to be. That is, Disney’s construction of nature becomes