We will be visiting Epcot the first Monday in February, walking from Beach Club to IG and arriving 30 minutes before early entry. I love Becky’s touring plans teaches videos. In one of them she predicted you could ride Remy and get to Frozen before official park opening. The touring plan I created predicts a 44 minute wait time for Remy during early entry. If I switch to Frozen first it’s still gives a 30 minute wait. Why do the p
And I create have such a long wait time getting there so early, when the tutorials for all the parks I’ve watched predict less of a wait ?
It is always tricky predicting the wait time for that first ride, because what it means to rope drop is variable depending on where you are in that rope drop line. So, if you are literally at the front of the pack, that predicted wait time is going to be way high. If you are in the middle or back of that rope drop pack, it might be more accurate.
So how committed you are to being at the front of the pack can determine a lot. If you do plan to actually be front of the line, you might not want to actually put the ride in your plan, but instead some nearby eatery, and a note saying it is a placeholder for the ride. Set your “meal length” to be what you estimate will be actual wait and ride time. Then, you can set your second ride normally and expect a more accurate arrival and wait time.
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Len suggested that you create a plan and then optimize it after you complete that first step. That way the plan will know that you are actually in the front of the crowd.
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100% this
Which is why I would never count on a high-stakes, high-demand attraction being a low wait after riding the first one (in this case FEA after Remy). I know others have had this stellar rope drop experience, but even arriving with very few people ahead of us (I would need to look at time stamps to know what time that actually was) we never had a wicked short Remy wait and I guarantee that FEA wait time was maxxing out by the time we would have gotten over there
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Your post has me thinking… what time zone are you in? I see weird things in my touring plans when I select a start time, it sometimes assumes and calculates from that time in my time zone (Central), so really 1 hour later at Disney. So wait times are all showing as if the park has been open for another hour. I have tried to fiddle and start an hour earlier to correct for the time zone but it doesn’t always work because in numbers, that makes it earlier than posted park hours. Just wondering if that same issue is effecting your plans at all.
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I’ve caught this before, although this is not the case currently. This tends to happen on the website, not the app, so I generally create the plans on the app and tweak them on the website. You can add ILL and LL on the app but not the website, and it’s easier to move things around on the app for me. I will always swear by touring plans, since 2014 over multiple trips.
I had the same problem. One of the nice folks here told me to set my first attraction as that crepes restaurant that’s right in that same little section as Remy.
Here’s a snip of my TP:
8AM was our early entry and I’m pretty sure I remember them letting us in about 15 minutes early. I think we were walking to Frozen by 815 and did get there just prior to normal park open.
I also remember leaving BC about 1 hour before early park entry. I think we walked out of the hotel lobby about 7a. This was in August. Maybe 30 minutes is good enough for Feb.
EDIT: edited to show a bit more of the TP because I certainly DID use BG1 to get the very first TT LL and got boarding group 2 for Guardians. I think we might have hit up space LL after checking into TT and slipped that in before Guardians.
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Setting your plan as a break or a QS in the area and estimating the wait used to be the usual work around. Len suggested people just keep the first attraction “as is” and then mark it as done and re-optimize . That will give the software the data it needs to adjust the rest of your plan. All three of these actions (start with a break, start with a QS, start with a completed step) have you ending your first attraction after the first step but marking it complete and optimizing, in theory, should make have a greater impact on your whole plan. I have not tried this yet, but it does make sense.
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Len suggested people just keep the first attraction “as is” and then mark it as done and re-optimize
That all good and fine for the day your are executing the plan.
It’s not that great of a work around for planning your whole day a head of time. Half the attractions get pushed ahead in time and it snow balls very quickly. All because of that very first one being off by 15 or 20 minutes.
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I guess I don’t understand your concern. Could you help me? You should re-optimize multiple times to adjust to in-park conditions? Optimizing could change the steps and expected time, but it will also have any unexpected closures considered in the plan.
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Rather than “optimize” you can still “evaluate” in the parks, if the order of the rides matter (such as walking distances, or eating…although, optimize should keep those things in mind if you have your settings correct).
Personally, I’ve never used TP while in the park. I just use it to create a plan ahead of time to get an idea of what the day can look like. But if your entire plan is going off the rails from being off 15 minutes, you probably need to have more buffers inserted into your plan with breaks, etc. Otherwise it will quickly become unrealistic…not to mention rather pressure-filled when you find yourself behind the plan.
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Sorry for the late reply on this.
I guess I don’t understand your concern. Could you help me?
Yes, let me try to explain. Bare with me on this one. I think what the original poster is trying to convey is in regards to using TPs for future planning. They said:
We will be visiting Epcot the first Monday in February
I find that I like to use tour plans to plan my entire day weeks, if not months, ahead of time. If I can only spend one day at Epcot, I might want to try and fit in as much as possible in order to get my best bang for my bucks. When the TP does this:
The touring plan I created predicts a 44 minute wait time for Remy during early entry
It can have an effect on the entire day. It’s not just a single 15 or 20 minute impact.
Follow me please.
Now your predicted arrival time for getting to Frozen is later. Because you are later to Frozen, your predicted wait time is longer. Then later arrival again to TT, which again now predicts a longer wait because you’re getting there later, and so on, and so forth throughout your day. It’s a ball of something rolling down hill picking up more and more wait time. Sure his can happen anyway for a variety of other reasons (bathroom breaks, broken foot, whatever), but we should have better control over it in the planning stage.
When you are following one of Becky’s video’s (or similar) and they show you that you can ride X attractions in Y hours, and then the TP you just built is telling you that you need “Y + Z more hours”, you wonder and ask the question in the forum like our OP (and I did too).
When I was creating my plans, this happened to me. I’m making up numbers because I can’t remember them, but when I left Remy as my first attraction during EE with a 45 minute predicted wait, at the end of the day my plan had 300 minutes of “waiting” in line for the grand total. It dawned on me that this was the snowball effect of Remy. I asked, and was recommended to do the break/QS workaround. I did that and magically the rest of the plan fell back into a much more accurate picture of waiting 200 minutes for the entire day (for example).
This is just for planning.
I don’t live locally. I’ve never been to WDW multiple times per year. I don’t stay up to date and in tune with all things WDW regularly. I’ve been to WDW 5 times in my lifetime. My kids aged 15 and 12 have been 3 times and my 7yo twice. I’m lucky to remember the name “Epcot” when I sit down 4 years from now to plan the next trip. Types like me need these TPs to remind us the cadence of park touring and to help us figure out just how much we can hope to accomplish (because we can’t remember!)
What would be nice, is a new slider for early entry on the tour plan that let’s you select your best guess of how agressive you expect your timing to be. I.e.: front of the pack, middle of the pack, barely ahead of normal entry. That’d be cool and better (IMO) than the TP just plunking down an assumption that you’ll be middle of the pack and therefor middle of the averages for arrival time and wait duration.
I have to go see if I can find my question on this and see if I posted any real numbers. I probably should have done this before hitting Reply!
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I found my question on this same topic and it was you Ryan1 that helped me out!
I neglected to post any real timing numbers though. But that worked and worked well.