Disney has reportedly been accused of refusing to issue special theme park passes to children with disabilities as it cracks down on fakes who use the passes to skip lines for rides and attractions without paying extra.
Paula Rowland, a Florida woman, said she went to Walt Disney World in Orlando with her husband and 8-year-old son, Noah, on June 5.
The family attempted to obtain a Disability Access Services (DAS) pass for Noah, a non-verbal autistic child diagnosed with a sensory processing disorder. According to the Los Angeles Times.
With the DAS pass, Noah, who hates waiting in line for more than 15 minutes, can shorten the time he has to wait at the entrance to the attraction.
However, according to the New York Times, Disney officials at the Magic Kingdom rejected Noah's application for a DAS pass.
Rowland said her son experienced sensory overload and panicked after entering the theme park without a pass.
She told The Times that she spent much of the day trying to calm him down in the gift shop.
“It was hard to recover from that point,” Rowland told the Times. “We had a bad day there.”
Rosie Kaiser, a resident of Los Angeles' Northridge neighborhood who has been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, said she “cried and shook” when an employee asked her “deeply personal” questions during a visit to Disneyland in Anaheim on July 14, The New York Times reported.
Kaiser eventually got his DAS pass, but said he was “one of the lucky ones.”
“You have to beg to get services,” Kaiser, who became permanently disabled in 2009 and has struggled to leave her home ever since, told The Times.
The DAS Pass system was created in 2013 by Disney.
This allows pass holders to avoid standby lines and access Lightning Lane services for free, while non-pass holders pay up to $35 to wait 5-25 minutes to ride the attraction.
A Disney spokesperson told The Times that overuse had forced the company to change how the passes are distributed.
Earlier this year, Disneyland and Disney World scaled back eligibility for DAS passes, making them available only to “a small number of guests who are unable to wait in convention lines for long periods of time due to autism or other developmental disabilities.” As per updated company guidelines.
Under the previous policy, park patrons were eligible if they “could not tolerate long periods of waiting in convention lines due to a disability.”
Disney said the number of people using DAS Pass has tripled since 2019, but did not say whether it felt the system was being abused.
Some park visitors report that non-disabled visitors are abusing the system by claiming a disability to avoid paying Lightning Lane tolls.
In 2013, NBC News went undercover to investigate. They found that disabled DAS pass holders were selling the passes on the black market to able-bodied visitors who wanted to skip the queues.
Shannon McEvoy, a Florida-based travel agent, told The Times that some potential clients have contacted her about getting a DAS pass, even though they're not disabled.
“I've had able-bodied people ask me how they can get a DAS service pass,” McEvoy told The Times.
The Washington Post has reached out to Disney for comment.
