Our in-park person just waited 82 mins for Mine-Cart Madness in the Express line with two ride stoppages.
The posted wait was 72 when they got in line at 9:34 am.
The first outage happened within 15 minutes of them getting in line. Then the posted wait jumped to 210.
This is not the current system, is it? Can’t an AP only buy discounted tickets for other APs and themselves?
For themselves, up to 6 tickets per day. So, for example, my DS would be able to buy 1 ticket for himself, and then 5 more. That’s how the fine print is written at least.
ETA: Oh, wait. I think you are saying that an AP can buy 6, but only for other AP holders??? That’s an odd arrangement. Each AP can buy their own ticket. Hmm. If that’s the case, then I guess we won’t be able to take advantage of discounted rate.
I thought it meant that the AP can buy 6, and would have to be there when you enter the park. But I think you might be right.
The rules are written in an odd way. I think it was more focused on the beginning when they didn’t want APs bringing the rest of the world with them to AP previews. Maybe it will change in the new year.
APs can buy tickets for others at US and IoA but not Epic.
I’ve updated the Meet Toothless model to indicate people line up early for it outside the portal. That moved the visit to later in the afternoon, after the crowds drop.
I’m doing a full re-run of Mine-Cart, Wing Gliders, and Bowser’s Challenge now. Should be done later today. I don’t think we have enough data for that modeling process, but maybe something interesting comes out of it.
Below is the current version of the full one-day plan.
I’m normally against using any kind of Early Entry just to line up at an unopened attraction. In this case, with Ministry actual waits around 95% of the posteds, and posteds of around 180 minutes at peak, I can see how that might make sense.
There are only around 1.3 trillion possible touring plans for the 15 steps here. It’s possible to iterate through all of them using test code we have, rather than use the optimizer’s standard heuristic methods. I might do that just to see if anything else pops up.
I know all the caveats to answering this question, but I’ll ask it anyhow.
In February, we are doing two park days at Epic, and staying off site, so no early entry. (We also want at least one of the days where we come in later and stay to close, rather than rope drop.)
Anyhow, are you getting any Spidey sense as to what the best way to split the park might be?
My sense is you should start at Isle of Berk one day, and probably Ministry the other.
You’ll be behind the guests already in the park and lined up for those portals. But you won’t be behind the thousands of other people already in the ride lines at Super Nintendo and Darkmoor.
Save the shows for mid-day, and Celstial Park for late afternoon. Celestial’s attractions seem to get busier after dark.
It’s impossible for offsite guests to rope-drop anything popular at any UOR or WDW park with early entry these days. The companies know how to monetize short waits in line, through onsite hotels and paying for priority queue access.
Cool! Thanks. That pretty much aligns with what we are thinking!
Was my riding Ministry at 3pm with a 25 minute wait a fluke?
I’m just gonna say that if I want to know what it’s like to be God’s favorite, I’m asking you first.
Diagon Alley/Escape from Gringotts/Mummy is the outlier there, as USF rarely has EPA. I know off site guests really appreciate that.
For Jan 2026, we’ll probably park-hop between Epic and the other two parks. I’ll be watching for the best time to arrive at Epic for a partial day. Maybe around or just after lunch time?
Like at VB, we’d arrive for early entry and leave lunch-ish when my beloved Kraka-Whatever started giving out 4+hour wait times and we’d ridden everything we wanted.
Also, this is supposed to be a slow-time for crowds. I can’t imagine that they’ll be ready for the flood of AP holders in Jan 2026 if the waits are this long now.
It will still be hard to find lower waits at Epic, since it’s so new yet. Especially compared to the other parks:
Here is a current visual of average posted waits throughout the day:
And we’ve learned that January/February has really changed over the years regarding crowds/waits time.
Tell me more!
I believe it’s a combination of less off-season park staffing and more people wanting to visit in the dry season/not hot season.
For example, mid summer waits have been less than mid winter waits the past number if years. (Not looking at data currently, just what I’m remembering)
I’ve also been to the parks in January/February non holidays 4 times the past 7 years. Let me tell you, its difficult to find those low CL days, even at UOR!
This rings true to what I’ve been seeing as well. It seems like the first two weeks of September, and maybe a week or two in Winter or Spring has lower (not low!) crowds these days.
Tomorrow we’re testing the plan I posted yesterday that uses Early Admission to line up for Ministry first thing.
It turns out we do have enough posted and actual wait times from Epic to use our new monte carlo simulation modeling process. I ran those yesterday and will review them this weekend.
Assuming they look good, we’ll test those models next week in Epic as well.
The models we’ve been using start with the 90th percentile of the posted waits at each 15-minute increment throughout the day, and estimate the actual wait based on the ratio of actuals-to-posteds we’ve seen at that hour of the day. So two different processes.
We are now stuck with working around a college calendar. (Problem I am happy to have) I looked at post Spring exam time and averaged the overall crowd numbers for our possible trip dates and the post-exam crowd is 0.4 lower. That is surprising, but good to know.
I think we will stick with January because we have a local-ish 4-day trip in April and another local-ish 5-day trip in July. But if the crowd difference had been 2 lower, I’d probably be considering switching.
This morning’s plan seems to be going much better. This is the one where Amy’s sacrificing Early Admission to wait in line at Ministry. She’s slightly ahead of schedule after Ministry and Wing Gliders.
Next step is Mine-Cart Madness. Fingers crossed there’s no monkey business there.
