My boyfriend’s niece has been a CastMember for the last 5 years. When I told her me and her uncle were coming down to WDW and I found this great web application she opined often and loudly that it was a scam and that I was wasting my money. Well I’ve been a computer programmer for 42 years and I know that what I paid for utilizes 3 IT areas:
Operations Research - been around before computers but it helps immeasurably to let a machine do the calculations. Used in things like assigning drivers to bus routes. Given input - rides, prior wait times and parameters - historical park volumes, EMH, calculate and optimize
Big Data - I work at a company that does corporate moves and they are sitting on 65 years of moving employees for other companies from point A to point B. They could bring in a team to crunch that data to accurately predict for their clients just what any given move might cost.
Outside Data purchase - I moonlight maintaining a fantasy football web site. My client pays a grand a month to the NFL to get game and player information via XML pushed to his server - data in excruciating detail. Disney must sell their wait times data - probably in a similar manner. At a pretty penny, no doubt.
Why would Disney want to do wait times predictions - it would undercut sales of their VIP tours and allow visitors to reduce the number of days in the park. Why would they not sell data (not sensitive) that they are collecting anyway.
I don’t think you can. People either follow the TOuring Plan or they think we’re wack for making one! LOL.
As far as is undercutting VIP tour sales…that’s a definite niche market, especially considering it’s a 7 hour minimum and it’s anywhere from $325-$675 an hour. The biggest day for tours was last holiday season, they had 165 tour guides (or somewhere in that neighborhood) out one day. Most days it’s 50-70 tours out.
Welcome to TP! You will find insane Disney fans and a lot of random and useful knowledge. Me, I deal in the unuseful, as I just go and wing it these days. (I’ll have spent 130-ish days at WDW in 2019, and probably 3-4 dozen at Disneyland. I’m a disneyland local but spend more time in Florida)
You will find a lot of varied opinions here- many of us love touring plans for many different reasons. I never use a touring plan in the park. I also completely ignore the crowd calendars . I do rely on everything I learned about touring from this site. I also think some of the planning tools (reservation finder, room request email) are amazing.
Whatever. It’s $15 a year. If that $15 is making you happy, why does she care at all? I don’t think Mickey ears are worth $30 but I don’t think people paying $30 and having fun are being scammed. It’s not like you’re paying a $5000 membership fee or something.
Well I never convinced her - and I still loved my Touring Plans, even though I ended up not following any of them! The first night had a way bigger crowd so the wait times were way off. On other days I ended up going to earlier shows - but my printouts showed just when they were. The maps were GREAT. What they really did was to give me an idea of how much I could get done in the amount of time I planned to stay in each park before I set foot in any of them. Well worth the $15.
That’s awesome! I feel like the real value in the TP is playing with it so much for months that you understand the park layout and which rides are highest priority, and then you can navigate yourself around the park on instinct!
This exactly what I do, I create a plan and then throw it out the window! The information I gained making the plan is always worth its weight in gold. Sometimes I follow it in the morning and the. I wing it.
When you are spending thousands on a Disney trip, what’s $15 more? Even if it was a scam, its would certainly be no worse than any of the overpriced souvenirs, $4 bottles of water, or $6 Mickey bars that people buy daily.
Now, what I wonder has swayed her into thinking TP is a scam is Disney’s internal planning software that is supposed to go live as part of My Disney Experience later this year. I personally believe that this software will more be about traffic control within the parks and less about actually steering people to queues that are shorter so they experience more attractions. I wonder if your BF’s niece feels the same way.
(I’ll have spent 130-ish days at WDW in 2019, and probably 3-4 dozen at Disneyland. I’m a disneyland local but spend more time in Florida)
. I do rely on everything I learned about touring from this site. I also think some of the planning tools (reservation finder, room request email) are amazing.