I've been to Disney 4 times in the last 3 years and just had my first complaint. There's been other missteps, but I usually just move on and think of the other good stuff that's occurred. Nothing was ever intentionally done - late buses, poor check-in - I never begrudge mistakes. Once they didn't activate our tickets or link it to the magicbands correctly, after 2 tries, and I had to walk with 2 kiddos across the park twice - and even then I didn't complain. I just asked them to fix it, and guest services gave us a free fastpass since walking back to their office made us miss our original time. I never asked for anything 'extra'.
On our most recent trip, I decided to travel solo with my 4 and 6 yo for the first time. On our travel day, there were some check-in delays, and I was developing a sinus infection. Fortunately I was able to get a prescription from urgent care before I left, but what this meant was canceling our Disney Springs dinner reservation that night in about 1.5 hours. It wasn't even a busy restaurant - there were still reservations available that same day - but I still felt bad. When I called to cancel, the automated service made me enter my reservation # twice, and by the time I got to a representative, she asked me for it again. So I made a comment about how this seemed a little redundant but in the same breath, gave it to her again. However, based on that lone comment alone - she had a very sarcastically polite tone afterwards and refused to cancel our reservation without charging us $30. At this point, I asked her why she couldn't make an exception like I know they've made for other people, and she wouldn't explain. She just repeated policy.
Look - I know what some people are thinking - it's policy, get over it. I've worked in customer service in high school and college, and in no way, do I try to make things difficult for representatives. At the end of the day, it was going to be $30, which is a drop in the bucket for all the other Disney expenses, and I would have been fine with it had she simply handled it with some decency. Here's where it prompted my complaint.
Once I realized she wasn't trying to be helpful, I asked to speak to a supervisor. She said sure, and put me on hold. 5 min go by. 10 min. My kids are getting tired of waiting... I knew something was amiss after waiting 10 min. Ultimately, almost an hour goes by until the phone started ringing again. By then, I thought I'd get to talk to the supervisor finally - but guess what? She patched me through to the restaurant. Right at the time of the reservation. The restaurant has no record of what was going on - they think I'm just a no-show at first. After I explained what happen, they were incredibly apologetic and shocked at what happened to me - all just to cancel a dinner reservation. I told them it was not their fault but that I was as surprised as they were. They explained that unless a person is a no-show, they typically cancel reservations for everyone. (Still, that's not my expectation that it would get cancelled every time - this was the only time on this trip that I needed a cancellation. There was literally 1 other time in all of my previous other trips where I had to cancel as well - it was due to weather.)
The worst part is, I never got to the survey at the end for the representative, and what prompted me to complain was bc she gamed the system designed to catch bad behavior. She not only didn't help me, but tried to make things worse for me by making me wait for an hour. I wanted to make sure Disney was aware of the loopholes that she exploited to get out of this.
After I reached out to Disney, the response I got, after a week, was via email. They said 'please know' that she was following policy - then went on to lecture me about the impact of no-shows on their bottom line. It seemed like a canned email. It was so disappointing that they missed the point of my complaint. Not only that - when a customer makes a mistake, the policy is quick to charge us for it. But when Disney employees makes an intentional point to make things worse for the customer, nothing comes of it. I didn't ask for any reimbursement or incentive - I literally only want to make sure her bad behavior was picked up. What kind of customer service is it that points out the 1 thing the employee did right but doesn't address the other points that they did wrong?