Ottawa: The Disney seminar, ‘Service: Disney Style,’ stood out from the ShowCanada itinerary by virtue of the fact that it was slick and packed. Open to attendees from outside the convention at $100 per head, participants jammed Ottawa’s Rideau Centre Cinema to hear Jim Cunningham, business programs facilitator for Disney University, parlay the success secrets of The Magic Kingdom, Disney/mgm and Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida.

As an example, Cunningham explained The Magic Kingdom like this: 41,000 employees (‘cast members’) on site daily, 700 job classifications, a total of 29 labor unions represented, and 11 collective agreements negotiated annually.

‘Success in any business is 10% product and 90% service,’ advised Cunningham. In fact, the seminar was peppered with maxims like ‘If you’re coasting, you’re going downhill,’ ‘If you ever stop growing, you die’ and ‘The front line is the bottom line.’

Cunningham ­ who has helped improve the bottom line of Canadian companies like Jacob and Aldo ­ attributes success to attention to detail and exceeding customer expectations. He also advised the crowd that happy customers act as ‘advocates’ when they head back home.

But it is the front-line service provider, he says, which makes or breaks a customer’s perception of a business. Disney ‘cast members,’ who make about us$5.95 an hour, are asked to ‘stand in 100 degrees, in 100% humidity, in 100% polyester, and be aggressively friendly.’ Apparently, Disney makes the formula work, as 70% of the people in its theme park on any given day represent repeat business.

Disney factoids:

– 5% of all the film Kodak processes worldwide is generated from one of the three Disney parks in Orlando. (‘So you can understand why we’ve got to keep the place looking good,’ says Cunningham.)

– The average family (of 3.2 people) saves an average of 2.5 years for their Disney vacation. Twenty-three percent of visitors hail from outside the u.s., with Canada ranking first, followed by the u.k., Germany and Brazil.

– There are 31,811 parking spots, and customers lock their keys in their cars an average of 17,000 times a year. In 11,000 of those instances, they’ve left the engine running.

– A visitor is likely to interact with 60 cast members within an eight-hour period.

– Despite the sheer size of the existing three Florida parks, only 30% of the land is developed. Walt Disney bought the land at $176 per acre in 1967.

– You cannot buy chewing gum or a newspaper in The Magic Kingdom, and, yes, they really do pump the smell of chocolate chip cookies out onto Main Street. MEA