I’ve been to WDW about 15 times since 1997 so I know the parks very well. This year I decided to see what kinda plan Touring Plans would give me and how it would differ from my usual touring tendencies. The plan I generated was as follows, Space, Mansion, Laugh Floor, then Counrty Bear. I can’t for the life of me see how criss crossing would save time. I’ve re optimized several times and received similar results, often criss crossing back and forth. I’d like to give the plan the benefit of the doubt but I can’t see it how. Can someone tell me if I just need to follow blindly and in the end I’ll be a believer too? Any advise would be greatly appreciated. TIA.
Welcome! There’s an option to “minimize walking” that I always use. That will help. You can also manually move steps around and then “evaluate” to see what your changes do to the wait times. Some people do love the fully optimized plans, but I prefer to personalize mine to find a happy medium between what makes sense to me and what the software thinks is most efficient. Just ask if you get stuck!
Thanks for the quick response. The waiting/walking slider did make a little difference although space to mansion still came up and as well as big thunder to laugh floor. Maybe i’m expecting something unreasonable. Unfortunately my manual moves by sliding up and down wouldn’t hold after optimizing. Suppose I’ll keep clicking. Lol. Thanks again for your help. °O°.
Once you move your events where you want them you can’t optimize. You have to “evaluate”. Optimizing will always move the events where the TP thinks is best.
Remember that the Optimizer looks at your plans as a whole, so there are probably things later on in your plan that make the “criss-crossing” the best strategy. What you can do is put the attractions in a order that makes sense to you and click on Evaluate and see how the results compare to the Optimized plan. It is very rare that I am able to make a plan that works out better than what the Optimizer suggests.
Also, if you share your plan we may be able to better understand what is going on - instructions on sharing are at How to Share Your Touring Plans
I feel your pain. Like yourself we have been in the parks several times before and knew the layout pretty well.
When I started using the TP’s I would optimize each time and get results that seemed a little screwy, zig-zaging all over the park. I also thought…trust the plan…trust the plan, computers are smart…right? Finally I stopped over optimizing and just did it on my initial attraction selection and then moved to evaluate only mode. I would go through several iterations of a TP, moving the attractions up or down, before finding something which seemed to work. I usually look for the best fit that gives me the short wait times and minimize walking. It takes some tweaking but it worked for me.
Being curious, I have optimized a COPY of a final TP just to see the difference in wait and walk times.
This will only be our second time going to WDW so I’m new to the parks but started using & playing around with TP months (like 9!) before our first trip (Dec 2013) I knew when we decided to go again this year (Nov 2015) I was going to use TP because they worked so well for me in 2013. I did however find that the Optimize feature was hit & miss for our family & used the Evaluate 99% of the time. I love moving events/attractions around & tweak according to what works best for us, including walking speed, I always go for Very Relaxed.
I love to optimize ahead of time, just to have a general overview of which order might be best, based on my walking speed and waiting vs. walking time.
But, since my girlfriend loves checklists, she gets to mark each attraction as “done” when we’re in the parks, and hit Optimize to see what’s next, based on current wait times + location in the park + crazy Len Testa maths.
It’s sort of fun to see what the “next best” item may be after each attraction, but it’s also very reasonable to never hit that optimize button — enjoy the moment more, so to speak — and just follow the “best optimized plan” as it was before you started your park day.
A lot of folks here on the forums enjoy nitpicking a touring plan (if you like), so feel free to share one and ask for opinions.
Cheers!
Move your items to suit your needs and then “evaluate”. That should keep your steps in the same order that you placed them but just recalculate the times.
It helped me tremendously to do two touring plans - one for the morning and the other for the evening.
For my morning TP, I only selected the attractions that are in Liberty Square, Adventureland, and Frontierland.
My evening TP only included rides in Tomorrowland and Fantasyland.
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