Do I book FP for expedience or desire?

i always get splash, btmrr and HM because those are my favorites. i do like PotC, and JC is okay, but i would not fret if i missed it…however if you have never done it, you should try

If you get a FP for a ride you don’t want to ride or don’t need a FP for, you are playing right into their hands. Stick it to the man! :wink:

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I appreciate that everyone’s going to have opinions! It’s also good to hear from people who’ve done things in this order. If I did try to do BTMRR first, I wouldn’t exactly be rope dropping, because I want to stand where we can see the welcome show at the castle, and then head over to Frontierland. So we definitely wouldn’t be in the first wave of people getting to BTMRR. But we’d only be a few minutes back. I take it this isn’t going to be a deal breaker, like it would be for SDMT?

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I like to burn my first FPP asap, so as to burn my 3rd asap, and get to my 4th, 5th, into infinity asap.

you are correct

Tiki Room is a favourite. I don’t know how it compares to California, I think it’s the same.

You’ll be fine even with watching the Welcome show. Sooo many people are going to the opposite side of the park first. Watching the show just adds about 10 minutes to each queue. So now, BTMRR will probably not be “walk-on” but a wait of 10 - 15 minutes. But that’s a small price to see the fun morning show. This means that each additional attraction’s queue will go up about 10 minutes during that first hour.

So… You’ll have a standby queue at BTMRR of 10 - 15 minutes, Splash = 25 minutes. Still able to do both in the first hour. Now… PoC might jump up to 40 mins in this time, so maybe that’s a FPP to consider. But again, it’s a indoor queue.

But I do often say here that when going to WDW you have to figure out what you “really” want to do and not feel pressured to “do-it-all”. If you aren’t hyped about JC, then pass on it. There’s so much to do that you can’t really do it all in one day / trip unless you are really trying to complete a “challenge” and just rushing to everything joylessly.

On my most recent trip I didn’t ride Space Mt. once. It wasn’t a priority for me.

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You really got my number here. I have a problem. :joy:

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How much touring time do you have on your second day prior to DAH? You could always plan to FP JC prior to DAH. We intentionally FP a few of the longer duration rides prior to DAH (POC and Splash were the ones we chose). We also rode BTM 6 or 7 times during DAH so dont fret too much about your first day. You can ride a ton during After Hours.

My next trip is going to be my first solo. I’m diving into the challenge pool too - more of a bucket list really. I should have time to do anything I want at a leisurely pace. However, since no one is going to be “slowing me down” I’m going full speed to do as much as I can over & over. :wink:

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Could you possibly to JC, POC, Splash, FP BTMR at RD? Easy WDW does a lot of RD blog posts and says Splash doesn’t build a wait as fast in the morning.
To answer your actual question, I’m somewhere in the middle. All of our FP were in our must-ride list, but they were also the ones most likely to build long waits and harder to get same day FP. I would not FP a ride that I wasn’t excited about. (And JC doesn’t remotely interest me.) We planned our arrival night at MK as well as a full day, because I knew the 6 FP would make our touring much easier. So I think it also depends on what your other must dos are in MK.

We book Fastpasses for our favorite rides, but also definitely focus on the ones which will save us the most time. I will Fastpass Big Thunder Mountain and Jungle Cruise if we’re planning to ride them after 9:15, Splash after 9:45 and Pirates after 10:15. Before then the rides pretty much always have shorter waits than 15 minutes (unless you go at a very busy time), which is as long as we’re willing to wait in line.

I will also add that we’ve never had a problem picking up a 4th/5th Fastpass (usually with a return time straight after lunch in our case) for a party of 3, for either Big Thunder or Splash. You just need to spend five minutes on your phone being unsociable at lunchtime, which my DH and DD are happy to put up with since it’s for a good cause…! :joy:

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Essentially Identical, with a few slight cosmetic differences. The WDW version is physically larger, and the waiting area has talking birds vice the Tiki Gods at DL

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Not a thing wrong with going with that plan. We actually have these exact FP for one of our park days for our upcoming trip. These are rides that our family has prioritized so that’s what we’re getting! Don’t get yourself too concerned, especially with MK. Unlike the tier system in the other parks, there are so many attractions that you can usually get some good FP later in the day after you use your 3. You probably won’t get one for 7DMT and maybe not for the mountains… but I’ve had luck getting a Splash or BTMRR FP later in the day in the summer on crowded day before. Hard to count on, but it can and does happen. You’ll have a good day and I actually do like your plan of trying to hit that left side of the park first. It won’t be as crowded as Fantasyland after the welcome show, so I think you can feel pretty safe in getting over to Adventureland and Frontierland before they are overrun. You might have some waits, but they certainly shouldn’t be anything substantial by the time you get over there and get through those rides.

There’s a wealth of information here and as you mentioned, everyone has an opinion. You’ve just got to do what will work for your crew and if you want the mountains, get those FP!!!

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I’m trying to do both. Due to some glitch, I was unable to book my fast passes but ended up doing touring plans for all the parks. Once I was able to finally do fast passes, wouldn’t you know it, 2 rides are unavailable: Slinky Coaster and Avatar Flight of Passage. Anyway, the plans were optimized for minimal wait times, so I went off the longest waits on some of my favorites. I reduced Space Mountain from 60min to 10min! Probably as long as it takes to walk through to board the ride. For magic kingdom I then also reduced the time on Big Thunder RR and on Astro Blasters. So I did opt for expedience mostly so that I can actually get to do everything at least once. I found that unfortunately, fast passes were mostly putting a dent in my otherwise expedient plans. Crazy huh?

Haven’t read all the answers, but I do it based on desire, b/c if your chosen ride is down, you get an anytime FP for it for later. If you plan to RD Spalsh, it is a high priority, but closed at rope drop, you will have to wait in line later on for it. Whereas, if you DO do a FPP for Splash, rope drop it and see there is no wait, you can ride it standby, and modify the FPP for something like Jungle Cruise later (which you could probably get same-day).

Agree. You can always modify them to something else if the standby waits are low when you arrive!

Thanks for all of the replies! I ended up booking for Splash and BTMRR and Space for that first morning.

This morning was FastPass booking day, and it felt pretty disheartening! I made a list of the hardest to get ones, and struck out on the first few on my list and was only able to get much later times for a few others (SDMT: none on 60+1, only around 5 pm on 60+2 but it’s a night with MNSHHP and we’d planned to bail out of MK by 4 pm and head to Epcot; FOP: none on 60+4, the only day I was considering; SDD: none on 60+3, only 7 pm on 60+5, and 1 pm on 60+7; TOT: only around 5 pm and later on 60+3, but pretty easy to find on 60+5).

So then when I went back to fill in the rest, I decided for darn sure to get the FP for the mountains, rather than Jungle Cruise! I’m sure we could make rope drop work such that we could ride BTMRR and Splash without the FP, but I just feel a lot happier knowing that we have those.

I am very glad that I’d read here about refreshing to get better/different times after booking. If I hadn’t known about that, I think I’d be feeling even more disheartened! It’s not an easy process for a first timer, but I stayed calmed and was able to move a few that I’d booked to slightly better times, even a couple of hours into the booking window.

DH, who is leaving all the planning up to me, told me once it was all done and dusted that he didn’t really want to know about what we didn’t get, just focus on what we did get. So that’s our attitude going forward!

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Wow. Seems like FPs for August are pretty tough. I’ve been checking the Dibbs website every week for so and it seemed like 7DMT and FOP were getting easier to find in June and July, but now (August) it looks much tougher than I have seen in a while. I wonder if/how the SW:GE opening and related crowds will effect FP availability in the fall.

That’s a good attitude and it looks like a pretty good plan in place even if some less than ideal FP situations. Can’t go wrong getting FP for the mountains. In this case, you should easily be able to do Jungle Cruise and Pirates at rope drop without having to rush and worry about whether you’ll make it to Frontierland before the lines back up.