Hi,
I’m scheduling my first Disney trip!
I think Touring Plans will help me a lot, but there’s one thing I missed at APP:
What do you think about suggest the best day for each park as well as you suggest best attractions inside them?
How?
We inform the first and last day of the trip ( we already did it before ).
Based on this, you cross information with Crowd Calendar.
Then, you will suggest the best day for each park!
For instance:
Monday - MK
Tuesday - Universal
Wednesday - AK…
I know you said we can do this, based on Crowd Calendar, BUT, you already have this information. Why don’t do this, automatically?
I’m doing this manually, but I would feel myself comfortable, if it was already ready!
I know you said Crowd Calendar is NOT the only thing we must care about - there’s a lot of variables - but, It would be only a suggestion and It would make one more part of the plan, easy.
Think about it!
Thanks!!!
I know the system used to have a recommended park and a not recommended park but because “best” and “worst” are based on so many variables and personal preference, no one was ever quite happy with the parks picked. It seemed like a huge headache.
So there was a suggestion before? I would like to use it!
It would be only a suggestion and you can use it or not
But, for those who likes, it would be great!
I remember that too. Best/Worst are very subjective. Also, many times it was based on EMH. Despite the possible crowds, for some users, the best park is the EMH park simply because the extra time does allow for more flexibility and (obviously) time to get attractions done.
The problem, @Ademir, is that the minute you slap a “best” or “recommended” label on a park, you angered a percentage of your community. I might pick MK as a best park because it has a low crowd prediction. The low crowd prediction might be based on the fact that that night is a hard ticket party but that doesn’t bother me because I can park hop.
Another Liner wants to maximize park hours but my “best” recommendation cuts her hours short. Now my best means nothing.
I think that’s why @len did away with a recommended park, because it kind of depends on what you want.
If you want to share the dates that you will be traveling, then I’m sure some of the message board participants would be willing to suggest what parks they would want to see each day. Of course, we would need to know how many days you wanted to spend in each park and if you have “park hopper tickets”.
Even though most of us aren’t Touring Plans employees, there are a lot of regular visitors to the Central Florida theme parks that like to share their experience.
@NeedaTurkeyLeg, thanks!
Nowadays, when Touring Plans suggest the best way to experience attractions ( first this, second this, and so on ), maybe I cannot agree too!
So, my suggestion is that they give to us a schedule day by day based on crowd, park lot, fast pass+ ( if possible ).
We can decide if we’re gonna follow or don’t
I think It could enrich the app.
I have often heard it said here, and I agree, “A good TP is more important than which day you visit which park”. It used to be don’t go to MK on Monday etc but that philosophy has been debunked.
It’s possible. We have a prototype, which we’re calling the Personalized Crowd Calendar. It ends up being fairly complicated in some scenarios (which I’ll describe below), but we should have it out this year.
Here’s an example of a difficult scenario:
Suppose you’ve got a 7-day trip, and you can choose from 4 Disney theme parks, 2 water parks, downtown Disney, and Universal’s 2 theme parks, plus a “doing nothing” option.
If you have no pre-scheduled reservations, there are 10^7 (10 million) possible calendars to evaluate. And if you have a park-hop option, that goes to 10^14 options (100,000 trillion). So that’s a lot.
It’s actually easier if you have constraints (like reservations), since it reduces the number of possibilities to consider. We’re working on some ways to whittle that down too. But that’s the kind of challenge.
I don’t know @len, seems like a lot of work for relatively little return. Do you think there’s a big “demand” for this? It’s intriguing, but 95% of the time, a mere glimpse at the hours & crowd calendar gives one a reasonably good “first step” towards knowing what to plan when…
…Then WDW changes their hours & adds refurbs & it ends up getting blown up sometimes anyway.
Literally, the last trip we made, I switched two days around to catch the last day some attractions were open before a refurb, & the 1st day another was opened after a long refurb (on our last day there). It worked great, but that’s the kind of thing no software can predict.
I’m like @ejj, back when the recommended park was part of the crowd calendar, I looked at it until I became better at planning. Now I look at park hours, crowd calendar and hard ticket events. From there I take off.
I am always amazed at math people. @len tosses 10 million and 100 trillion out there like, meh. As a social studies teacher, if I was faced with those kind of numbers when trying to resolve an issue, I’d switch careers immediately!!!
I guess there’s the demand. Not everyone is crazy like us and keeps planning often enough to become savvy planners. So for the first time TP user, it could be a valuable piece of data.
@len You made me happy! I agree it is not easy ( especially think about all scenarios ), but, for first time travelers would be REALLY great!!! I think you must consider let it clear: FOR BEGINNERS or FIRST TIME TRAVELLERS! otherwise, it will generate considerable debates / discussions!
Thanks for answer!
