[YorkshireT]

Clever of Disney- surprised that they haven't done it before. At the moment MBs are supplied at a cost to Disney- maybe under a dollar I would guess (edit, probably more, the chips ( a custom NRF24LE1) can be bought singularly for about £2.50 on eBay- Disney will not pay anything like that, but there is the manufacturing cost of the band itself, the battery (20 pence), shipping etc- each one must cost about £3 to Disney) . Even selling these heavily discounted, they turn a loss into a hefty profit- they just work out what they would lose on the sale of them anyway to hotel guests and knock that off. They must have crunched the numbers and realised this will make them lots of extra $$$$$$$s. The fact they have a character printed on them will result in pennies more in production charges for them I imagine.
Something of a win/ win- hopefully not a precursor to all of them being charged for.
I anticipate at about $10- $15 each after discount these will be very popular, so it turns all the people who buy them from around a £3 cost to about a £10 profit- nice.
There are 30,000 hotel rooms with an average nearing 90% occupancy. I estimate maybe an average of 3 guest per room, an average stay of 5 days (guesswork). Roughly 6 million magic bands a year. Imagine if 25% buy this, say 1.5 million people, and they make £10 each. A cool £15m extra revenue per annum. Plus annual passholders. Could he higher, what will be the conversion rate when it is popping up on MDE for only $10- $15 each (?). Although not as profitable as car parking.