Going straight to ILL rides

Hello everyone,

When staying on site - if we aim to arrive to a park about a half an hour before “early park entry” and go straight to the ILL rides (SDMT, FOP, RotR but not GotG since you need virtual queue), what would the average wait time be? Just trying to save some money by not purchasing ILL. However, perhaps it is worth it to buy so we can zig while everyone else zags.

We will buy Genie Plus.

Thanks for your help!

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Mm… I feel that half an hour is a bit late to take full advantage of rope drop, especially at AK where the line to FOP gets ridiculously long super quickly.

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I agree that if you want the ILL rides this is a bit late. Perfect for all other rides.

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If you arrive on the first buses, or when the parking lot opens an hour before early entry, your waits will be reasonable. The one big issue is that Disney attractions can be delayed at opening. RotR has been delayed 50% of the time I have rope dropped it. Each of these times they knew it would be an extended delay and they did not allow for guests to enter the queue .

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Last summer, the only ILL ride we rope dropped was FOP and that worked out well enough. Think cattle herding.

We saved ROTR and 7DMT and just waited for those. ROTR was only about 80 mins and 7DMT about an hour IIRC. With virtually no wait for anything else all day (except a Mickey meet and greet) it really wasn’t a problem.

We also did a fair amount of waiting at UOR in May. Saving time in so many rides with a good TP makes the occasionally waiting not as painful.

The youngest in my group was 9.

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Also depends on time of year, how busy the park is.

For 7DMT as long as you arrive for Early Entry my experience is you can wait a reasonable amount of time (under 30 mins)

For FOP, you really need to be there when they open the tapstiles. It gets long fast. Although some people enjoy the walk in the morning (my family is weird - they had zero complaints about 2 hour wait because we arrived at the park too late)

For ROTR - best to be there before tapstiles open and it is down often so have a backup plan. If it’s open, the wait is not bad (we even ended up first on the ride during our last trip as we got to the front of one of the tapstile lines - and went straight to the ride line, bypassed the stormtroopers.

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Isn’t this one of the best parts, though?? :astonished:

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Thank you!! I will make note of that and show up earlier! FOP is my favourite ride. This trip we are going to AK just one day and I know I will want to ride FOP twice. So likely we will do RD and buy an ILL. How early do you suggest arriving to RD FOP?

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This would be disappointing to waste that time getting to the attraction to find that out. Maybe we just need to bite the bullet and buy ILL too lol.

Rise is down this morning and they are not allowing guests in the queue. I have gone to EE and found Rise, MMRT, ToT and RnR all down. Sometimes, no matter how great you plan is, it can fall apart.

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That would be nice!! What time of the year did you go? We are going the last week of March which I am anticipating it to be busy. However, we leave WDW the weekend before Easter. So I am hoping the week won’t be that busy since so many will be arriving the following week! Fingers crossed!!

Our last trip was during Mardi Gras and we had crowd levels of 10! It was so busy and I didn’t expect it/realize when I booked the trip because we come from Nova Scotia and Mardi Gras isn’t a thing lol.

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How do I find out when the tapstiles will open?

The room is impressive once. A huge open space with a countless number of stormtroopers. But the stormtroopers are almost entirely static statues and if you stand there more than 30 seconds, you start to realize the fakeness of it. It is actually best to pass through it quickly so that you don’t have time to notice such things. (I’m kind of surprised they used up so much space for a room that doesn’t serve much purpose.)

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A few weeks ago for 7:30 EE, we left the room at 6:15 and arrived via bus. We were front of the pack at the TAPS. Unfortunately, we chose the wrong line. Several groups ahead of us had trouble tapping in. We lost a good chunk of time and may as well had been in the back of the pack. However, walking to FOP, getting through queue and riding only took 35 minutes. Hope that helps.

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I’m not sure what is going on, but we saw a LOT of this doing on at WDW during our trip…way more than any previous trip. I don’t know what kinds of issues they are experiencing, but it certainly is a problem. The entrance into MK before the party guests were let in (at like 3:45) was so backed up, there was almost no room to move. Every tapstyle it seemed ran into a problem resulting in another CM coming over having to help. It slowed down the process horrendously.

Your experience just illustrates how, despite best efforts, you can never guarantee where you will end up in line at RD!

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Very helpful! So I will plan to leave our room about an hour and 15 minutes before EE! Very helpful!

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That can be so frustrating! It never fails…I always pick the worst line lol…Disney, grocery store - you name it :rofl:

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What about grocery carts? I always pick a bad one. :laughing:

DH surmised the problem as being on WDW’s end.
Very annoying.

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I tend to agree. I saw a few times where it was the fault of the person in line, where they were told they couldn’t come in. (I didn’t hear the exact reason…presuming that perhaps they didn’t have an APR, perhaps, or that kind of thing.) But most of the time, it just took time before they were finally let in…which does seem to indicate it is a problem on WDW’s end.

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For ROTR you can also hop in line at the end of the evening. You should be under 60 mins. But you do risk the ride being down. If itnis a must ride, I would plan on buying ILL. It was must ride for us on my last trip so I bought ILL for the first day and then we jumped in line at 8:30 on the 2nd day. If the ride had been down the dirst day I would have bought ILL for the 2nd.

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