Feature recommendations

This is my 3rd time using Touringplans for my Disney World trips and I have to say it’s great and that there is nothing else like it out there. However I am feeling a little frustrated in using the custom touring plans. I long for a couple new features that I’m not sure if they’ve ever been requested before.

For example this is my first time to the park without our car because we have choose to fly and are staying at Pop Century. Touring plans has been incredibly helpful in picking the room and building I want to be in at the resort with their in depth knowledge and is awesome at telling me when to do rides in the parks but lacks the “whole” day planning that I really want. What I’d like to see is a custom touring plan creator that allows me to plan out when to leave the resort, how long Disney transportation takes on average(which buses to take) to get to my park The other aspect of this would be the ability to add out of “park” dining reservations, for example we have dinner at O’hana at 8:30pm on the same day we are at the Animal Kingdom. It’s be great to know if I have to leave early from Animal Kingdom or if we can stay till it closes and still make our Dinner.

I guess what I’m saying is I’d like an ALL Day planner. Something that shows when I should/want to leave my resort, what transportation to take, what to do at the park, what I need to do to arrive at the correct time for non park ADRs and how to get back to my resort to go to bed. This way I can pull up the planner and use it to plan out the whole day not just when I’m inside the individual park itself. Disney offers so many amazing experiences outside of the parks themselves to their guests that it would be awesome to plan out stuff like this all in one place. Right now I basically have to use an Excel/Word doc with my plans written out till we arrive to the park. Also the transportation thing I think would be huge because it seems to be a black hole on the web, it’s extremely hard to get info on which buses go where and till when. actually the same thing with the boats, but there are a lot less of them then the buses.

I hope this makes sense and would be something that Touringplans may want to look at doing in the future

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I usually use a spreadsheet to track the rough plan for each day like that, but agree it would be nice if TouringPlans offered something similar to what you suggest.

Tagging @len so he sees your suggestions…

I feel the need! My thought, though, is that it’s probably not included because WDW transportation can be so unpredictable. WDW doesn’t even seem to have transportation timetables - just generic, buses run every 20 minutes from this time to this time; and same with ferries. Then of course there is the time things are supposed to take vs the time things actually take. Some people are comfortable leaving for the parks with 45 minutes allocated, others leave 1.5 hours ahead depending on how important it is to get somewhere by a particular time.

It would be cool though to have a “suggested transport time” form or something - kind of like you see in the road atlases (yes those are still a thing!).

I know i have seen some time studies that TouringPlans have done on bus arrivals and timing in articles. It’s a valid question if they have enough data, but they might to be able to publish an average and worst case type estimates which would certainly help in planning some of the park-to-park and park to resort timings that we all do throughout our park visits. Overall adding some things just to track resort to park would be useful and putting data behind it to provide time estimates would be next level…

I’d hope that if they add the smart travel time estimates to the park option it would work similar to what they do for walking times. Something like worst case/avg time toggle. They could probably even best guess the selection based off expected park attendance. If a park is a 3 during that day transportation will probably have less deals vs a 9-10 we everything is jammed pack.

Yeah, I’ve just seen and heard the nightmare experiences of “gave an hour for busses to get to RD, no busses came for 45 minutes”. Would feel bad for TP to have to take the flack for that. Think they would just have to make it very clear that the transport estimates are only suggestions. Goodness, even WDW says allow 1.5 hours to get from resort to resort… travel time should typically be nowhere near, they just don’t garauntee that the busses, ferries, etc will be there on a particular schedule.

It would be nice to have this, but I think the basic answer is that there are just too many variables to be able to make accurate predictions.

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Bswan26, I personally thought planning out all the ride variables would be too complicated to make accurate predictions to do what Touringplans has done, but yet some how they have and it’s amazing. To me the resort to park planning would bring touringplans to the next level, but honestly all I want is a flexible custom touring plan editor that allows me to enter the info into so I can remove the step of needing to create a spreadsheet to use like so many of us do for our trip planning.

I’m glad that I’m not the only that does this. My wife thinks I’m being obsessive/overkill when I plan out everything from the time we get up to the time we go to bed for our Disney vacations. BUT after each vacation she admits how easy everything was and thanks me for putting some much time into the planning of the vacation

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I’d really just like the ability to plan out full hopping days (in other words, put two parks in one plan), but that too would require a more precise prediction of WDW transport times.

There are many more lurking variables when it comes to transport within WDW… in addition to general WDW CL there’s also road traffic, possible road construction, weather conditions that cause traffic to move more slowly, the varying number of people using hoppers (for example, school/sports groups account for large numbers who typically don’t use them but often leave the parks earlier and that can affect monorail and ferry crowds in addition to the fact that they arrive en masse at the TTC in the morning… then there are the large foreign tour groups that arrive in midsummer, who might use hoppers and those would have a huge effect on bus wait times because they travel in large packs), and weather in general (because more people would be likely to head back to the hotel when the weather gets nasty). All of those happen frequently, are largely unpredictable and could have a large enough effect on transport times that an “average” time would be inaccurate to the point that the entire plan after the transport would be completely wrong, and it would actually be more of a hindrance than a help in many cases.

TL;DR version: I can understand why they don’t include transport times in TPs

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I totally understand this point, but to honest Disney has the data, I just don’t know if it’s available publicly for Touringplans to use. I actually work for a company that is in the traffic data industry and know for a fact that Disney has the GPS and real time tracking on their buses. I actually even found an article from a few years ago talking about the system Disney was testing at the time. http://www.wdwinfo.com/walt-disney-world/bus-arrival-monitors-at-select-walt-disney-world-resorts/

Even with the data I can totally understand why touringplans may not want to include transport times. My main thing is I’d really like the custom touring planner to allow me to input in the extra info with my own duration for the time being. I just want to get away from using two different systems and have it all in one place. The value add for touring plan customers would really great and it wouldn’t need the more complicated “prediction” services we’d all wish for some day.