Pixar Place, I have been trying to get in touch with you about your elevators

One thing all guests of the Pixar Place Hotel can agree upon is that the elevators are the worst. They are the worst part about the entire experience. The elevators feel like they were designed to be terrible on purpose.

Why might you ask? I don’t know.

What I can tell you is that if you complain to a cast member, you can see their soul crying in their eyes as they already know what you are going to say, and there is nothing they can do to make your elevator stay more magical.

The elevators don’t have buttons inside, so when you get to the elevators, you press a button on a screen to determine what floor you want to go to. This sounds simple enough, but the design is terrible for both light and heavy traffic.

Let’s start with heavy traffic. Heavy traffic comes during the morning and at night.

During the morning, people are going to the parks, and some people are checking out. So the elevators have to deal with luggage, strollers, and wheel chairs. The challenge is that the algorithm just adds more floors; it doesn’t ask how many people or items need to get onto the elevator. So the elevators fill up at the top floors and still stop at the other floors. The result was many stories of people waiting 20 or 30 minutes for an elevator.

At night, there is a rush of people coming back from the parks. Then you have to wait for your specific elevator, and it doesn’t quite feel like first come, first serve. Especially when the computer some times assigns a floor to more than one elevator.

The problem was exasperated for us because one elevator was probably out of service.

Here is the hack when you are in a struggle to make it down from higher floors and all the elevators are arriving full: select a higher floor. As the elevator goes up, you will hop on as others are hopping off, and then when it comes back down, you will be on it.

I don’t know how they designed these elevators or the algorithm, but this is also in the Pixar themed hotel. Could you imagine Steve Jobs trying to get on an elevator there?