Yeah that’s in the daily blog posts. It’s good information for comparison to previous weeks/months. But again, it’s comparing Posted waits not Actual waits, which depending on the attraction can be miles apart.
But is that the longest wait? So if it was ranked 3 for the week it means 2 days had longer waits and 4 days shirter waits?
ETA: And is the week the preceding 6 days or literally Sunday-Saturday or what? Ambiguity.
Yes
I want to start by saying I’m a huge fan of TP and haven’t been on a trip without using it - and wouldn’t go on a trip without using it. There is much more TP offers than just the element of posted vs expected waits. However, I want to share my recent experience in the parks in light of the article.
First, the premise of the article: “We’ve gotten many variations of a single question (or complaint) recently, and they all go something like this: “I used Lines for my family’s day in the Magic Kingdom. It said that I should expect a 24 minute wait at Big Thunder Mountain, but I got there and the sign said it was going to be 60 minutes! I swear that TouringPlans used to get much closer to those waits, and now I’ve wasted hours of my vacation walking to rides that I expect to have short waits only to be turned off by the high wait times on the signs.”
I don’t think any of us Liners would balk at walking to BTMRR because TP expected said 24 but WDW posted was 60. I believe Liners are balking because TP expected said 24 and actual was 55, contrary to Chrissy’s experience. Some people are experiencing what Chrissy experienced while some (like myself) are not. Suggesting the difference is because I didn’t refresh the app is an inaccurate assumption.
“That adjusted time is what you would see in Lines if you refreshed the attraction list or your plan right as you entered line – it takes into account our mid-day updates. (Spoiler: train yourself to do this!)”
“But if you had refreshed the Lines app as you entered line, that prediction of your actual wait only averaged 5 minutes longer than your actual wait.”
“If you refresh your Lines app as you enter, that estimated wait time will probably be within 3 minutes of your actual wait.”
“But the estimated wait time in Lines if you’ve updated recently is just 1 minute longer than your wait on average.”
I continuously opened and closed, refreshed, and optimized throughout each day of my trip. At one point, I actually made a trip note to stop optimizing because a) I thought thought that may be what was messing things up; (I’ve always just used my paper printed TP, and never had issues, but…Covid…) and b) halfway through my day I noticed TP dropping off steps, meaning it was selecting attractions to delete from my TP, one was a dining reservation, which is how I noticed it was happening. I happen to be looking for how many more things we needed to do before our meal and our meal step was gone. In essence, that day, I spent the morning doing 2nd or 3rd choice things and the afternoon attempting to redo my TP and recover my priority attractions.
I’d like to point out that while there’s an instructive element of ‘refreshing’ in the article, in the illustration, it never actually compares the difference the ‘refreshing’ made. Another observation I made is that the only screenshots where the clock (top left) is shown is on the BTMRR screenshot. I’m not implying anything since actual times are documented in the article, but it’s a detail I notice since I used the actual clock to measure the difference in Expected wait time compared to submitted actual wait time. I would’ve preferred to see the actual clock in the photos.
I also wanted to share a personal observation. My trip was myself and DM in an ECV. Park days were 6/28-7/3. (TP seems to have missing days during my trip of wait time recap posts. At least they did last time I looked.) I’ll point out two extenuating circumstances that may or may not have effected TP predictions:
- The return of HEA and EF in the middle of my trip
- The tons of rain we had the week prior to Elsa
However, if TP makes daily adjustments, hence the need to refresh, would these be accounted for during the trip? I don’t know.
We headed to FEA with a Lines App Posted of 60ish and an Expected of 25. (I didn’t check WDW posted, I’m not in the habit of doing that because I assumed they are always the same. I learned after I got home that if WDW posted doesn’t match Lines posted, Lines Expected will be off.) I arrived in the Norway area before my DM who was navigating the crowds on her ECV trailing behind me. I stopped to wait and gazed over at the line. It came out of the inside part and went to the first corner of the protruding part of the building (Akershus). As I was standing there waiting for her to arrive, find a spot, park, and cover ECV (and walk over), which, overall probably took…3 minutes? but felt like forever, the line built, wrapped around the front of Akershus, all the way down the opposite side of the building and started to form another 90 degree angle in the inner cove area. So my wait ended up being 47 minutes.
Now, I know that Lines functions as a software system. There’s no way for it to adjust to that quick of a build unless a human enters info. A refresh would’ve done what, exactly, at that moment? I’m not a tech person, so, I’m trying to figure this out. Maybe right after that WDW updated their posted, causing Lines to update their posted, which would’ve updated the expected? Either way I didn’t experience what Chrissy did.
I confess I don’t look at all TP data/articles because I’m not a data person. The graphs above make very little sense to me, and now I learn that words do not mean what they say. So, I have even less reason to look at this info.
To wrap up, I’m a huge fan of TP, but not so much of this article. It paints an unrealistically positive expectation for some Lines users that are bound to get disappointed. I’ve been around long enough to look beyond this benefit and experience all the other benefits of TP, and also knowing TP will get it figured out, or this trip was a fluke, but new users who haven’t been around long enough for that may be short term subscribers.
In theory, nobody is going to complain that WDW posted 60 minutes, Lines expected was 24 and wait was around 24. They’re instead going to tell all their friends their new secret.
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Thanks for sharing!
I remember that too. I think Len was on vacation that week and could not do the daily blog articles.
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WDW inflating wait times even more…
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Where is Disney trying to herd us to? 
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I guess the gift shops 
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but I don’t want to wait in that line either 
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At least they’re air conditioned. 
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…um… the line outside doesn’t have AC 
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Oh I thought you meant inside to buy stuff. I forgot that waiting in lines to get in stores was a thing.
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OR they want to send us to the snack carts, fatten us up to the point where we can’t handle anymore rides, so then we just aimlessly mosey around until we make our way back out the entrance. 
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“This is the [Disney] way.”
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Good article worth a read.
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Wait time testing info:
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