At 12:01 a.m. Shanghai time on March 28th, tickets and hotel bookings for the Shanghai Disney Resort went on sale. While Resort’s site went live at that time, many of those attempting to buy tickets (including many Westerners where it was still the morning of the 27th) or book rooms experienced a bevy of glitches. This included the English site still displaying in Simplified Chinese, tickets for various dates showing as unavailable, users sometimes being taken to digital queues, and the inability to pay once items were added to carts.
Disney made some reference to the issues in post on the Disney Parks Blog this morning which touted the “tremendous excitement” surrounding the launch. According to them, the ticketing site saw upwards of five million hits within the first half hour.
Eventually the issues seemed to be fixed and many were able to start planning their trips. It now appears that tickets for the Grand Opening on June 16th are no longer being sold and that rooms at both of the Resort hotels — the Shanghai Disneyland Hotel and the Toy Story Hotel — are booked as well. Those who managed to get rooms at the Shanghai Disneyland or Toy Story Hotel but did not purchase tickets will still be able to as the site promises that the ability to purchase park tickets is guaranteed for hotel guests.
Tickets for the Resort’s stage production of The Lion King were also set to go on sale although many users still reported having trouble purchasing seats via the Shanghai Disney site as of earlier this morning.
Many sources including KTVZ are reporting that, predictably, scalpers are now attempting to sell tickets to the opening festivities at steep markups. Although tickets have a face value of 499 Yuan (about $76), tickets are apparently being resold on Alibaba’s Taobao platform for nearly double that. As KTVZ notes, it is unclear if all of those attempting to resell tickets are legitimate and we were able to secure Opening Day passes.
Also of note, is that the initial strong demand for Shanghai Disneyland has raised several stocks in the Chinese stock exchange that are connected to the resort.
Shanghai Disneyland is set to open June 16th, 2016. Tickets and rooms are still available for many other dates at ShanghaiDisneyResort.com.