The Ride Delegate: Memoir of a Walt Disney World VIP Tour Guide (3 page)

Even with Cicely’s detailed maps, guests used to get lost in Disneyland. Wanting to avoid chaos, Walt decided to set up actual guided tours of the park, where trained Cast Members would show you around and help you get on some rides. Soon that evolved into an actual memorized spiel that these tour guides would deliver to guests as they walked through the park.

When Disney World opened in the fall of 1971, there was a minimal guided tour available that spanned three-and-a half hours, included about five rides, and cost adults $6.50, not including park admission. Children were $3.75. For 1972, the price of this tour went up 25¢. Anyone could take that basic tour, but if you were an invited guest of the park (or company, or Johnny Depp) you were given a personal guide to get you around everywhere, and when necessary, sneak you in through back doors to ride attractions much quicker than everyone else.

It wasn’t really until the 1990s that someone had the brilliant idea to open up a true VIP service to the general public willing to pay with blood and their first born. When I started as a VIP Tour Guide the hourly rate was right around $175 for a basic VIP package (six hour max, limited number of FastPass rides), $275 for the premium (stay as long as you want, ride as many rides). When I left, the basic tour no longer existed and the premium was pushing $355.

I started as a part-time hourly Cast Member at Magic Kingdom Guest Relations. I was being paid about $9.35 per hour. I was guaranteed barely one shift as a part-time Cast Member and most weeks I was given one shift: Friday night, 11pm-5am.

That’s a real shift that Cast Members have to work at Disney World. Let that sink in for a second. I was a college graduate with a four-year bachelor of science degree in communications, working six hours a week
overnight
for less than ten dollars an hour. When I got home around 6am the next morning, my roommate was just getting up and leaving for work. I couldn’t tell my days apart and I was so tired all of the time. I couldn’t pay any of my bills with barely $50 a week. I couldn’t afford anything. I was secretly eating my roommate’s food when I got up at 1pm. I couldn’t afford my own groceries.

After about four months of doing overnight shifts, I interviewed with Disney Special Activities, the branch of Guest Relations in charge of VIP tours. It was referred to as a cross-utilization; I’d still be a guest relations Cast Member, but in conjunction with that I could do these tours. I needed working hours, and I needed the money.

I thought my interview went horribly. They asked me easy questions and I completely fumbled through all of them. I left the interview that afternoon and called my mom crying, saying that I was packing up all of my belongings and moving back home because if I couldn’t be a VIP tour guide I was basically a Disney World Cast Member failure and there was no use staying any longer. Instead of driving straight home I drove straight to Menchie’s Frozen Yogurt and got myself a $7 tub of frozen yogurt to eat and I ate it all sitting in the driver’s seat of my car. That $7 was basically an entire hour of work for me, and thinking about that made me cry, too.

A week later I got a phone call from one of the VIP coordinators, and he informed me that I had been chosen to train as a VIP tour guide.

“REALLY?” I screamed into the phone. I jumped up and down out of sheer excitement, lost my footing, and fell into a metal guardrail. I had a blue bruise on my arm for a week and a half.

Lets start with the basics. A VIP Tour. That’s a tour when guests hire a personal tour guide to lead them all over Disney World, and sometimes beyond. A VIP tour consists of one tour guide, and up to ten guests. As soon as the group hits eleven guests, a second VIP tour guide is required, and the guests will be paying full price for both guides. The tour guide is hired by the hour, with a six-hour minimum. The tour can start at whatever time of day, and can be however long, or short, the guests wants it to be. If the tour is less than six hours, the guests will still be charged for six hours. My shortest tour was just about two hours; my longest was seventeen.

The tour guide is the walking park map, park historian, and designated Fun Captain! for the family. The tour guide takes care of everything so the family doesn’t have to; they can just sit back, enjoy their vacation, and watch the tour guide freak out over lost dining reservations at Mama Melrose’s. The tour guide has a car, and can pick you up at the hotel and take you right to the park. If the tour guide takes you right to the park, you don’t have to wait in long turnstile lines at the entrance! No, the tour guide knows the secret back ways into all of the parks, and will drive you right backstage to a designated gate, where you’ll unload and enter the park through there. No turnstiles necessary.

The tour guide is the walking FastPass for all designated FastPass attractions. Do you want to ride Big Thunder Mountain Railroad fifteen times in a row? No problem! You’ll breeze in and out through the FastPass line and you can ride to your heart’s content. There is no limit to how many attractions you can ride in a day, and the tour guide is the best person to plot a clear path through the park to maximize your fun.

Do you want to ride Pirates of the Caribbean? You can’t. See that really long line there? The 40-minute one? The tour guide can’t cut that line. That’s against the rules. Right now if you go to the Magic Kingdom you
can
in fact cut the line. But back in my day as a tour guide, I couldn’t. If the guests wanted to ride Pirates, we had to wait in line. There were a handful of rides across property that we as tour guides just couldn’t access. Pirates of the Caribbean, Small World, Tea Cups, Dumbo, Spaceship Earth. Those rides were off limits unless the guests wanted to wait in line. Those were attractions where there wasn’t a designated “alternate entrance”, so if we were to cut the entire line,
all the other guests waiting in line would see us
. I didn’t have the patience to try and cut these lines.

Oh, are we done with Magic Kingdom? Do you want to go to Studios? Lets go hop into my 15-passenger van and drive to Studios! That’s what we were allowed to do on a tour. We had complete free roam (within reason) of the Walt Disney World property because honestly no one outside of tours really knew what we could and couldn’t do. I had my DSA Blackberry phone on me, and that was it.

As a tour guide, I was in charge of everything. If the guests wanted to eat, I made a dining reservation. If the guests wanted to see a show, I arranged for seating. If they needed something changed at the hotel room, I had to awkwardly call up the hotel and beg the front desk staff to do something for me because if I didn’t do it, the guests were just going to go back to the hotel and yell at the front desk staff anyway. I was basically the messenger. Often times I got shot.

I wasn’t the only one in charge of the magic on a tour. I was in constant contact with the Office and the tour coordinators there who were the ones making things happen behind the scenes. If I needed to make dining reservations, they were the ones to do that for me. They booked parade viewing, fireworks viewing, transportation arrangements to and from the airport, and they took the credit card payments. The guides were like Tom Hanks in
Apollo 13
; the coordinators were Gary Sinese, now of Mission: SPACE fame. If something went wrong, I called the coordinator for my tour. If the guest’s credit card bounced, the coordinator called me and I had to awkwardly ask the guest for a working credit card that could have $3,000 put on it.

This is all just for a regular Joe tour. This is for the family from New York City with money to blow that would hire me for four days at a time to lead them all over the parks and entertain their children. This isn’t a “celebrity tour”. This wasn’t for a PEP tour.

No, those were worse.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I haven’t even told you about Wish Lists. As guides, we were allowed to make a list of up to four people that we’d love to host on tour if they ever came to Disney World. Four people and four people alone, and we had to spell their ACTUAL name correctly, or it got completely messed up in the system. I witnessed one guide throw a hissy fit because he had Pink on his Wish List, but someone else had Alecia Moore. Guess who got to host her?

Most of the time the Office forgot to check the Wish Lists before they assigned tours, leading to a lot of disgruntled tour guides. When I learned I wasn’t the guide for someone on my Wish List, I locked myself in a supply closet at Team Disney and cried for ten minutes.

The coordinators made the task of assigning guides to tours sound like they were akin to Walt synching sound to
Steamboat Willie
. Supposedly, there was some fine science to pairing the two parties together, but their methods escaped me. Usually, I felt that they paired tours by playing darts sans dartboard. One time my best friend, Claire, was assigned a tour that only spoke French. She spent the day trying to Google translate words on her phone, gave up, grabbed a park map in French, and told the guests to circle what they wanted to do. I was less than helpful, since I could only remember how to say the words “dinosaur” and “pancake” in French. Sometimes I’d end up with a tour that clearly wasn’t suited for me, and I’d wonder what I was being punished for.

A question I was often asked was, “Why did you become a VIP tour guide?”

For this question there is one answer, and one answer alone. If a VIP tour guide tells you differently, they are lying through their teeth. You become a VIP tour guide not for the money, not for the freedom, not to ride rides with football players. No, you become a VIP tour guide for the food.

All the free food you could ever possibly want to eat at Disney World. A million corn dog nuggets at my disposal every single day.

I used my VIP dining card like it was a Deluxe Meal Plan, so yes, I
am
going to have an appetizer, an entrée, two different fountain beverages, and dessert and coffee. As soon as I became a tour guide, my company-issued ID was encoded to allow me to use it as a credit card so I could buy food throughout the park. The tour Office understood that sometimes tour guides would be out for 12+ hours, and might not get a proper break to sit down and have a decent meal. So, they paid for all of our food. Sometimes this was just a banana and a diet coke while my guests rode Speedway, and sometimes it was dinner at Le Cellier if the guests were eating there and invited me along. The largest bill I ever rang up was $99. Christmas Day, Nine Dragons, EPCOT.

One afternoon during tour guide training, we were given etiquette lessons because the coordinators didn’t trust us as far as they could throw us. A majority of our tours would be spent with the Joneses and the Smiths, but every now and then we might get a CEO of a company, or an actual foreign dignitary, and we couldn’t use our hands to eat French fries. Our trainer tried to instill into our heads that we were to use the “European” way to eat, and not the “American” way, and certainly not “my way”, which was usually eating right from the take-out container.

Maybe you’re doing some of this math in your head. I’ve already told you what a tour costs, and I’m telling you how much I would spend on food over the course of the day, so you’re probably like, Annie, you are making so much money!

Incorrect.

After a year in Guest Relations I started making $10.63 an hour, the same wage I received for VIP tours. I had pretty good paychecks when I went into overtime. But I was still barely surviving.

What I’m about to tell you will be taboo. Everyone knew it was taboo, everyone still knows it’s taboo, and it was a discussion that happened between close friends when no one else was around, and usually behind shut doors. I mean, I was a tour guide, providing a service to guests, and
what happens if they tipped me
?

When I started as a guide, we were not allowed to accept tips from the guests. It was an unacceptable, unapproved practice. If they insisted, we were allowed to take it, but we weren’t allowed to keep it. We needed to drop it in a safe back at the Office, and we could either donate the money to charity, or to the mysterious “Guide Fund” that would sometimes put on parties for us and sometimes bought us bagels in the morning.

That’s what we were supposed to do. No thank you, no thank you, no thank you, okay this money is going to charity, thanks! It was drilled into our heads again and again during training:
you are not allowed to accept tips. No matter what the guest says, you are not, under any circumstances, allowed to accept a tip
. Disneyland tour guides were allowed to accept tips because the rules for declaring gratuity were different in California than in Florida back in the day. Florida wouldn’t allow for that kind of cash transaction. Way to go, Walt. Thanks for picking the state that won’t allow me to take money for riding Star Tours three times in a row. My repressed motion sickness could not withstand multiple rides of that.

It was an unspoken agreement between guides that no one discussed “stickers”. That’s what we called them. We were living in an abundance of real Mickey stickers, and the term just kind of caught on one holiday season. Stickers happened, like the common afternoon thunderstorm in Florida. That’s how tour guides really made their money: a firm handshake that was full of cash.

There were good days for stickers, and then there were bad days for stickers. Sometimes, the guests were so awful I kind of expected stickers to make up for the horrible day they had put me through. Sometimes the family was so awesome, I didn’t care if I got stickers or not, because I’d hang out with the Smith family a million more times for free. Sometimes the guests would literally toss a $20 at me, and that was kind of a slap in the face, considering how much they had just paid for the entire 10-hour tour. I once had a guest buy me a ton of groceries in lieu of stickers. That was actually pretty awesome.

The worst was hosting a return tour for another guide, having the guest thank me in stickers, and not knowing what the other guide had done with them. Had they turned the stickers in for the Guide Fund? Did the stickers go to charity? Did the stickers go into the tour guide’s vest pocket? I’d stand in the supply closet holding the stickers in my hand trying to figure out what to do while contemplating the price of an oil change for my car. Was the Office keeping close tabs on the sticker flow? It was something that kept me up at night, and every time I was called over to a coordinator’s desk I just assumed Mickey knew what I was doing and I was going to need to surrender my ID.