Pretty much every report from prior HS After Hours events this year was that they were glorious with largely walk-on attractions throughout the event. However, most feedback from last week’s (Wed, 2/22) event is that it was terrible with hour long waits at multiple attractions.
This is giving me significant pause in the lead up to the 3/22 event I have booked.
Does anyone have any good insight into why this one was such an outlier?
The only two obvious things I’ve been able to note are:
Park close was bumped from 9pm to 9:30pm, so there was no longer any buffer between the originally scheduled 9pm close and the 9:30pm event start to work through the backlog of day guests in lines. Worth noting that Disney has bumped the park close to the event start time for several upcoming event dates.
Crowd levels were exceptionally high this week (although one would think this wouldn’t really matter).
I’m curious as to whether there were ride downtimes or operational issues that could have presented problems? Could they have sold more tickets than prior events? That would seem to be a terrible policy. Could staff have been less aggressive in checking wrist-bands?
Genuinely confused as to why this event seemed to be so bad compared to the prior ones.
I don’t recall there ever being compensation when rides were down for the early morning events they used to have. I doubt they’d do much unless the outages were significant, like multiple rides being down.
When did / does RnR go down? Was that a possible cause?
Yes, that’s true. And I don’t always agree with compensation for ride outages
For some reason - which is not completely rational, I realize - hard ticketed events strike me differently. Perhaps because the per-hour cost of them tends to be much higher than an all-day ticket per-hour cost.
RnR being down is another possibility, for sure. But prior events had ToT at half capacity but had returned to full capacity for this event, so it seems like that should be close to a wash and not a major stumbling block.
I wonder…do we have any hard data on wait times (posted or otherwise) during the After Hour events? Sometimes anecdotal accounts tell a very incomplete picture.
With the exception of Slinky and Rise, not bad. But even using DAS on Rise (which was posted 50 min) we didn’t get to do Smuggler’s Run or Aliens Swirling Saucers.
