Hi y’all! I am planning a trip to DL in June and cannot wait! It is my probably 20th time and my wife’s first time!
We are staying off-property so we don’t get resort early entry, so it logically makes sense to go to each park when that park doesn’t have early entry. The catch is, the crowd calendar doesn’t favor us switching our days to avoid the early entry park (we’d remain at a 6 for DL but our DCA day would go from a 7 to an 8). We do have G+. Should I be worried about resort guests getting a 30 min head start on us, and switch our reservation? Would love any thoughts from expert rope-droppers!
There are some sections of DLR that aren’t open for early entry - frontierland, new orleans square, adevtureland and critter country, so if you start on that side of the park, early entry has no advantage. People with early entry do queue up for SWGE (and toon town) and will have an advantage…
Edit:
For DCA the pier will be lowest crowds for the first hour or two of the day. So I would wither hit the radiator springs rides with no LL or the Pier rides with no LL first. And then do the others!
Awesome, thanks for the tips! So it sounds like it’s not worth changing days, but maybe just adjusting strategy and expectations. I also have to remind myself that there is SO much to do at DL so capacity isn’t nearly the same issue as at WDW, so I’m pretty optimistic we’ll be able to tour much of the parks.
Others may disagree, but I think if you go to parts of the park that don’t have an early entry advantage then you may actually benefit from lower crowds at opening because most offsite people are starting at the park without EE.
For my trip at the end of Feb I ended up doing the parks with EE even though I didn’t have it. At DL I started in TL at Star Tours & then Buzz because I figured EE people were done there. Walked on both. My DBF can’t ride Space so didn’t try it. After TL rode Jungle Cruise with a 10 minute wait followed by Pirates with a 15 minute wait. Rode Indy using LL because the line was getting long.
At DCA I rope dropped Guardians, and while the line wasn’t long it was slower than normal for some reason so it took us awhile to finish riding it. Might have been better to start elsewhere but Guardians is my favorite ride so always start there.
I’m monitoring comments on this in advance of our first (!) trip to DLR in June, and some Liners on chat say that so far the park WITH EE seems to have lower RD crowds, presumably because offsite guests (which are far more numerous than resort guests) head there to avoid competing with resort guests. This may change at some point, but for now it means I’ll be planning to RD the EE park. And booking a LL first thing in a morning for Indy in DL and TSMM in DCA, which I would to ride but which are also not unlikely to be down at park open, thereby offering a good chance for a golden ticket and making the use of Genie + even easier.
This jives with my experience last weekend. On-site Hotel guests are a very small percentage of the overall attendance compared to WDW. So it stands to reason that the EE park might be less crowded than you’d think.