I’m new to the Forum but have been using the Touring Plan book since my family’s first visit in April 2008. For the first visit we stayed at Beach Club but for all our other visits (roughly every 2 or 3 years) we have stayed offsite.
In my experience, being there for rope drop on regular days (avoid the EMH days) and following the Touring Plan makes for an enjoyable trip and allows you to do all the (exciting) rides. My family came around to this thinking after experiencing some of the days where they didn’t follow the TP (and my) advice (I’m the younger sister). And this is coming from traveling with party sizes of 5 to 9 people!
Thanks for the advice, we’re already planning pretty rigorously so I hope that will work into our advantage then. Just to make sure I posed my question and the accompanying information correctly, we’ll be using 8 days for just Disney and 3 days for Universal on top of that for a total of 11 days inside the parks combined. After that we’ll go down South to enjoy the Everglades and Keys for a bit before returning home.
So you disagree with the current TP crowd calendar stating that most of the weekdays during the period I booked should be average to somewhat below average crowdswise? I have seen that crowd level predictions have been quite inaccurate for a significant amount of days this year thus far and that definitely makes me nervous.
We could have also booked somewhere in October but working with the info we had about a month and a half ago we kind of assumed that our current period right after Thanksgiving would be our best bet as far as minimal crowds (as far as that’s possible at Disney) is concerned. Nothing left to do but plan carefully I suppose so it doesn’t matter much anymore anyways, but still.
Thanks for giving me a point of reference from last year given it was a very similar time frame. Too bad you experienced that time as being mostly crowded back then since it’ll probably not be the best of signs for what’s to come this year. We’re definitely prepared to rope drop as much as possible already so that should help out.
With the day-of FP you mean just getting FPs for whatever is available after you’ve used your first 3 for the day? Does this also influence my strategy for getting the initial FPs before I arrive? If I had the choice between a FP for a very popular and hard-to-get ride at around 17:30 (5:30 PM?) 30 days out or just any other FP early in the morning, what would be the most optimal to get? I mean getting the morning one and using all 3 of your initial FPs before 11:30 or whatever would allow you to get more for other rides while inside the park after that, right? But would that really make up for not getting the later FP for the more popular ride in the afternoon, but not being able to use more FPs the actual day you’re inside the park before you used up all 3 of your initial reservations?
I would like to thank everyone for their input and advice, also all of the people that I didn’t reply to directly. I’ve read all of it and I will definitely take it all in while trying to plan our trip.
A lot of the answer here is “it depends”, but in general, I meant “day-of” FP after you’d already used your first 3. I think some people call these rolling FP. Using 3 FP in the morning/mid morning and then opening yourself up for day-of FP after those first 3 FP are completed can definitely be a great use of your time. But, getting a must-have FP for later in the day and therefore not being able to get more day-of FP until that one is finished can work also. For example, my group left our second-to-last day open of plans in the hopes of fitting in favorites and things we missed. However, we scheduled ONE FP for that day for FOP, as we all anticipated liking it. We had a larger party and didn’t get the FP til around 3pm, and we went to EP that AM with no FP. That was fine to us since we knew we’d get our must-have FP later that day. So both strategies work, depending on what your priorities are for that day - either fitting a lot in and taking whatever you might be able to get, or getting your must-have and working the rest of the plan around it.