Inside the Magic – How Technology Drives Immersive Entertainment and Experiences at Hong Kong Disneyland?

By integrating the latest technologies, HKDL effectively immerses guests into their favorite Disney stories through experiential offerings. As the world’s first and largest Frozen-themed land, World of Frozen opened its gates to Arendelle back in November of 2023, combining exhilarating attractions inspired from film scenes and character backstories.

Leon Chan, Vice President of Technology, Digital & Data of HKDL said, “In particular, Frozen Ever After features Walt Disney Imagineering’s fully-electric Audio-Animatronics® technology, which gives visitors a glimpse of Queens Anna and Elsa with amazing realism. In other parts of the land, we also saw the opportunity to incorporate more interactive experiences with different Frozen characters, using Augmented Reality (AR) technology built into our mobile app. These types of technology-forward immersive experiences bring value to guests not only when they are in the park, but also when researching and planning their visit.” The resort’s website and mobile app now feature “Magic 360” virtual tours, making it easy to explore different products, such as themed hotel suites and F&B offerings.

However, the in-park experience wouldn’t be complete without a personalized touch. The launch of Disney Premier Access products has no doubt helped visitors maximize each visit and prioritizing fun with premium access to the park’s top attractions. In response to evolving guest consumption habits and filling the digital transformation gap, the team has made a conscious effort by engaging different AWS offerings to build a wide range of microservices, which gives the team great flexibility in adapting them into different digital products, or scaling up existing ones. Chan added, “This architecture based on microservices allows us to respond to market needs at a much quicker pace. For instance, with the increasing popularity of our character greeting experiences and live entertainment offerings, we rolled out a digital ‘standby pass’ service for guests to secure a place easily. We also piloted F&B mobile order earlier this year so guests can order and pay for food from the convenience of their phones.” 

According to statistics from the KPMG International Transforming the Enterprise of the Future report conducted in 2024, digital transformation is now more of a continuous reinvention, rather than an episodic project, demonstrated by 88% of enterprises with at least US$500 million in annual revenue running two or more transformation programmes concurrently. For a well-established brand name like HKDL, all roads lead to customer satisfaction, and the journey to construct unforgettable moments for fans extends past one individual park visit. Chan said, “One of my team’s key areas of responsibility is to sustain our data infrastructure and tools, which lets data consumers and decision makers in different lines of business access relevant data. Since our business has so many guest touchpoints, identifying and consolidating this useful data is challenging at times. Therefore, in 2023, we formed a cross-functional data working group to improve communications and collaboration in this area; subsequently, we could see tangible improvement in terms of generating actionable and timely business insights, sometimes on a daily basis when we roll out new offerings like World of Frozen.” The resort’s diverse cast also means that members from different regions and cultural backgrounds are involved in daily operations. This way the company continues to stay abreast of recent market trends, picking up on guest behaviors as soon as possible to reflect their preferences in upcoming services and applications.

Furthermore, the adoption of cloud technologies and microservices have made the company’s digital infrastructure more scalable, in turn driving response to market needs in a more timely manner. Not only does AWS make data storage and analytics easily manageable and affordable on the cloud, the microservice and event-driven architecture complement each other in opening space for trial and experimentation when developing brand new ideas to enhance the overall user experience. Given the autonomous and specialized nature of each service component, the team can evaluate and scale features independently, with the freedom to select appropriate tools depending on specific needs, reuse code and communicate through well-defined APIs, thus shortening development cycle times substantially to roll out advanced functions. Even more importantly, the transition to an event-driven architecture design allows the app doesn’t crash during times of peak demand, which is essential for public holidays and festivities such as Halloween and Christmas. When one service is unavailable, the rest will keep running, decoupling services and monitoring any anomalies, so the team can truly let it go and focus on what it does best: providing unparalleled entertainment through enchanting storytelling.