AK plan help needed

We will be at AK on Saturday, 2/16…a very busy day. Our FOP FP is at 8:40am. The park opens at 7. Touring Plans wants me to RD EE but I think we should RD Na’vi. I have Dinosaurs FP at 9:50 and Safari at 12:25.

Do I really have time to RD EE then head to Na’vi? I don’t want to wait in line an hour for Na’vi.

Or should I just get another hour of sleep, skip the 7am RD and start at 8am?

Thanks!

I’d RD the EMH for Na’vi and head to EE. You should get through Na’vi quickly and the lines at EE will still be short due to all the people waiting in Pandora. You might be able to get Dinosaur in before the non-EMHers start showing up at 8 which would let you modify that FPP to something else.

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Thanks so much! I appreciate the advice!

Take my advice with a grain of salt because Ive never been there in that season, but I would always go as soon as the park opened under any circumstances. Lines will build while you are still en route.

I think the logic TP is using is that if you RD Na’vi, you are hitting it at the LONGEST time immediatley after RD when everyone rushes there, while EE has NO WAIT. You walk on EE. While you are transitioning to/from EE, the initial RD lines for Na’vi start to die down and you get a slightly shorter wait on Na’vi than immediatley at RD.

I think that’s right. TP assumes you’re not at the front of the rope-drop line. So they estimate the wait time for what happens right after RD… If you’re at the front, you’ll walk on. If not, you’ll get an average of an x-minute wait, which may be longer than they will be after the initial RD crowd dies down and before the heavy arrivals happen in the 10-noon timeframe.

Hmm. This makes me wonder, and perhaps it is something @len could answer. But I wonder if TP takes into account AVERAGE SB wait time when calculating a RD, rather than wait time.

I mean, immediately after RD, the SB time shoots from 0 wait to 30 minutes. But for ALL of those people in the SB line at that moment, their wait time will be LESS than 30 minutes. It is only ACTUALLY 30 minutes for those who get in line BEHIND all those first across the finish lines folks.

So, when calculating whether to RD Na’vi or not, it seems like it depends wholly on if you are in the front of the pack or not! Perhaps using an AVERAGE (median) wait time on the RD would be a better estimation. And maybe they already do this.

Just curious, now.

I should have specified that this is an assumption on my part. Because as we all know if you executes RD well, there’s no wait. But if you are at a back in the crowd, or you don’t move quickly when they open the park, you’ll get a wait. It could be the peak RD time, could be mean, medium, some percentile… Now I’m curious too. Maybe @len or @fred could shed some light on it.

One way to check this is to swap EE and NRJ in your plan and see how the walk and wait times change.

I made a copy of the plan to do this. It shows the same amount of waiting in line and 11 more minutes of walking.

That’s not terrible - you’re only waiting in line around 75 minutes for the entire day. If you’d feel better riding NRJ first, and you’re willing to do a bit more walking, it sounds like a good strategy to me.

And regarding wait times at RD, we assume you’re not going to be at the front of the line. I wasn’t comfortable assuming the best-case scenario would happen here.

We have to make an assumption. In this case we assume you’re somewhere in the middle of the crowd. If you happen to get there earlier, re-optimize your plan when you’re done, and it’ll tell you what to do with your extra time.

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Super helpful! I will see where we are at RD. It is our first morning of the trip so I am hoping we will be up and out early!
Thank you!

Thank you Len!. I was wondering the same thing. Since Navi is so close to FOP and both tier 1’s it makes sense to try to RD Navi first. But, if we aren’t in the front of the pack that won’t work. I’ll leave the standard plan as is, and drop Navi if we can RD it quickly. Love that optimize button.