Has anyone ever seen data for what time on average a fastpass return time becomes available for a particular ride throughout the day.
I tried charting this for DCA, but it was a lot of work and wanted to know if this information was already accumulated. On a past trip my family loved going to DCA at night, but with the crowds we ended up riding the Silly Symphony Swings about 5 times and didn’t do a lot of the bigger attractions.
Tentatively, I believe with MaxPass and park hopping, I should be able to plan for a day where my family spends the day at Disneyland on non-FP rides (I’m going for 5 days, and with one of the children being young), then using Maxpass to accumulate DCA FP’s throughout the evening. For example, likely by 10-11 am Radiator Springs FP return would be the evening already, then after the 90 minute blockout from getting another FP I could get another FP for Toy Story Mania, and so on, as later in the day the return times for a less popular ride would get closer to the evening.
Based on the last few days I’m pretty sure we’d be able to come back to DCA after a nap around 5, holding FP’s for Radiator Springs, toy story mania, soarin’, incredicoaster or guardians, and then still be able to get one for Goofy’s sky school while there. I would just need to be cautious that the return time windows are spread out enough that we’re able to get to them all.
Very excited to try this, but the trip is still a year away.
We did something similar on October 26 when we had to leave DL for the Halloween Party. We did use a couple of FP’s at DL early in the day, but then switched over to book big rides at DCA later in the evening (using MaxPass). We were able to get Guardians twice, Soarin’ once, and Incredicoaster twice. Not bad! Plus we went on a couple of smaller rides to fill in and rode Radiator Springs using the single rider line. I think you can definitely do it!
Several of us tracked FP return times over the summer for RSR, IC, and GotG on chat. No one did anything with the data that I am aware and if they did, not sure how applicable it would be. The dynamics of the parks are very differ not during the summer than in winter.
My personal answer to this was to go spend and hour viewing the DVC and was able to get 4 FPs per person, then carefully stacked FPs In the afternoon for RSR, IC and GotG. I had a beautiful night of rides planned and then my family got tired and had to scrap the whole thing!
Thanks for the input everyone. Ha, yes, I will need to ensure it is still a pretty early evening or my kids might get too tired as well.
I was new to the Lines app when asking, and didn’t realize that you can at least see the expected FP return times for today and the next day. Still haven’t been able to find where you can see data to that level for a future day, but using the personalized touring plan I was able to trial it for the day I’m going (took some trial and error to get the Planner to book FP’s with maxpass over the afternoon…had to break up the time away from the park into 90 minute segments). Have a solid plan for being able to do a lot at DL in the morning, then starting at 10:30 begin accumulating FP’s for DCA, even if back at the hotel. Was easily able to return by 4:30 with all the FP’s we’d need.
Every few weeks I plan to manually check the FP times on the Disneyland app to verify the plan would have worked that day. Really wish I was on TouringPlans and had maxpass available during our last trip in Feb 2017. My wife laughs at me for planning this early, but was amazed by the estimated number of attractions compared to wait times when she saw the personalized plans.
Cheers,
I was one among those who tracked the FP data from this summer, but DL has so many different factors contributing to unexpected changes so I wouldn’t rely much on the data that isn’t immediately near to the dates you are going as trends may be different. For example when I was tracking FP times this summer, Soarin/Star Tours/Guardians of the Galaxy had very big fluctuations in their FP distributions. Some days they seemed to last for very far into the day, hardly moving the needle & then other days they were among the first to go. All of them have multiple theaters/loading areas and if a portion of those are down for the day the FP capacity will be impacted causing FPs to run out much quicker than anything else, just because of the diminished capacity.
Also, when Space Mountain or Haunted Mansion have an overlay or to a lesser extent, are recently returned to their original forms following an overlay they tend to run out much faster. In a similar vein, anything that’s new (like Incredicoaster was this summer) is faster to run out & it’s a combination of the overall capacity and the public’s reception to it that causes it to steadily be the fastest to run out, or if it dips again after the initial newness wears off (RSR while it is not nearly as bad as it was its first years, has very rarely since it’s opening been de-throned as the 1st FP to run out between both parks).
All of this combined with less user input to the Lines App makes the fastpass return times predicted in a plan to be MUCH different than what actually occurs. I do still like making a plan to have a checklist in front of me, but if it’s a plan that we really are wanting to stick to (and if I have the time) I will stalk the Disneyland app for the FastPass return times to see how my plan would work out & add notes of what Plan B or C may be if we need to adjust to fluctuating FP times.
When checking the app for the FP return times it’s important to note that you want to pick a day with the same operating schedule as the day you will be touring - so you’ll want the same opening/closing time for both parks & a day that the park with early entry is the same as the day you will be touring.
If your day’s hours haven’t been officially announced, use TouringPlans’s predictions of the hours for the day, but really, echoing what I mentioned above, I wouldn’t rely on data from that far out. Disneyland will release the park hours 6 weeks in advance & that is probably on the outer edge of dates that I would rely on for tracking my plan. And also try (as much as can be done since Disneyland’s scheduling can be announced as late as 2 weeks before the planned event date), to account for any non-ticketed special events/offereings that are known (i.e. Food & Wine or Holiday Festivals, Lunar New Year Festivities, AP Days events, new seasonal decorations accompanied by changes in entertainment) as the first day of these events will draw a lot of bloggers/media to the event to share with their masses of followers & report back.
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks. I understand there will be a lot of fluctuations. I’m trying to look at like for like weeks, which is why I’m looking at this exactly a year out. The biggest wild card I suppose will be Galaxy’s Edge and how that changes the entire resort.
Luckily for me, with the age of my kids, I’ll be concentrating on getting RSR first, and Toy Story Mania only, then if possible get Goofy Sky School and/or Incredicoaster. We have 5 full days in the park, so not necessarily worried about missing out on anything else…just want to make sure we have a special first night, which FP’s for RSR and TSM would be great. We’ll have plenty of opportunities to do Soarin’ during a day, and Grizzley when it is warmer.
This is so much true. There’s been talk that the MaxPass game will change with this too, especially in terms of its price/availability (the current $10/person/day was announced as the “introductory” price so the expectation’s already been set as to a price increase, but who knows what that will translate to & if Galaxy’s Edge will actually be the catalyst of that).
I also figure that Galaxy’s Edge will bring major changes to the operating schedule and (I know I sound like a broken record here, but with something as big as Galaxy’s Edge coming into play, it becomes even more important) but the weeks leading up to your dates with that have the same operating schedule as your dates will have much more insight on the patterns than the similar dates a year out. Disneyland is very purposeful in the way they set their hours & they know their crowd patterns & how their operations will handle them best, so I find that looking at a day with the same hours near the same dates is likely to be the best bet I get in a prediction of how my plan will go.
But anyway, with this much time to go, you’re at least 5 steps ahead & I am confident you’ll be able to figure out not just a plan and a Plan B, but also C, D & E and will be really on the FP game when the time comes!!
