I was unable to score a FOP for for our AK day in November 
I did manage to grab one for our last day. Unfortunately we had planned that as a ‘free’ day to reride my DD3’s favorite stuff. We really don’t need a 2nd day at AK, and it’s not really how we wanted to end our trip. I’m struggling with the best plan. Keep our current AK day & then last day do FOP then hop OR shift all of AK to our last day. Or try to RD FOP on original day?
Do you think finals hours are released? Also, if night time hours are extended will that work for your AK day?
We had a similar situation for our early Dec trip that I just had my FP scheduling day for. We had AK scheduled on day 2 but I aimed for FoP FP on day 6, which was a planned park hop day for things that we had missed. For me, it would be worth it to get a FP on the last day, hopefully earlier AM or later PM, then you could skip RD for FoP on your regular AK day. My group has 5 children under 6 and 2 strollers - we really weren’t looking forward to the crush of people headed that way if we could avoid it. We will not be back at Disney for years, probably, so we want to ride it but we want to do so with as little stress as we can manage. For us, that means we will park hop to AK and probably only grab a snack & ride FoP - maybe do the Boneyard so the kids can run around & stretch legs, or possibly EE if the line is decent - but then we’ll park hop again.
I’d keep your current AK day but keep searching for a FoP FP on that day & if you find some, just rearrange your plans that day to fit it in. And, if you CAN get a last minute FP for that day, then you won’t need to park hop there on your last day. But, if you CAN’T get an earlier FP for FoP, keep the one you have on your last day & just park hop there for that, hopefully earlier or later in the day. It’s true that you either wait in line at RD for FoP, or you might eat up a similar amount of time by park hopping over to AK & back just for FoP, but for me, it would be a lot nicer to do transportation with a small child than to stand in a mad dash of people. Just my opinion though. Good luck!
I found an FPP for FOP about two weeks before our trip. It wasn’t on an AK day. In fact it wasn’t even on a WDW day — we were scheduled to be at Universal.
Greedily we already had an FPP for FOP a few days earlier in our schedule. So the plan was to see how good FOP actually was and then decide what to do with the second FPPs then.
FOP is everything they’ve told you and more. We actually took an Uber from Universal to AK just for FOP. Well, and for lunch at Satu’li, because that’s pretty cool, too.
I would hate to rope drop FOP. Sounds grim. That being said, if you FPP FOP you miss out on some cool queue stuff.
Personally I’d keep the FPPs. GIve yourself options.
I’d probably RD on the original day, and FP then hop on the last day.
We RD’d FOP on our scheduled AK day (Sept 21). It worked out fine. We arrived about an hour before 9am park opening. Even with Rider Swap (so it took longer to ride FOP), we were able to ride Navi next with almost no wait (was it 10 minutes?).