We are traveling to WDW in September. We are definately looking to have our kids partake in the Jedi Training Academy. I understood that you are supposed to arrive 30 minutes early your showtime. However, whenever I use the Touring Plans optimization feature, it always has us arriving less than 30 minutes before showtime. Is this a feature or a bug?
Do you really need to get to Jedi Academy a full 30 minutes early? How long do you have before they give away your spot? And why do you arrive 30 minutes early, that seems unnecessarily long. And how do you force Touring Plans to optimize around arriving 30 minutes early?
The only thing I could think of is maybe adding in a 30 minute break right before JTA on your plans. That aside, I wouldn’t worry about your plan down to the minute. Trust me, you’ll go crazy if you try to get everything down to the minute. My guess is if you’re using the plans, you’ll probably be ahead of schedule anyways. But even if not, at worst, you’ll have to move things around or cancel something. I say this because if you focus too hard on your plans, you’ll forget to have fun. Plans are great but don’t let them get in the way of enjoying the great vacation you’re about to experience!
I would arrive 30 min early regardless of the touring plan as they do keep a standby list. I figure once I know what time the show will be, I’ll add in the 30 min break.
I also set my start time for that day to 9:30 as it was a 30 min line to get registered during my last visit.
Thanks for the feedback. I wasn’t really trying to plan the day to the minute. But, as I tried multiple touring plans, the software was usually advising us to attend one of the shows (say Beauty and the Beast) that would end less than 30 minutes before we would have to be at the Academy. So I was trying to figure out if the software was wrong on that regards.
I would say in that case to plan a 20 or 30 minute break (however short the touring plan leaves you) right before your Jedi Academy time.
Yes you need to return at your allocated return time which is around 30-35 mins before. You get a 10 minute grace period from the time they tell you. After this they reallocate your slot The kids are organised into lines given robes a prep talk dos/don’t s etc. Adults are told what they need to do before during and after to collect kids. You have to hold your kids hand to walk them out 1 adult for each child. With 24 kids and up to 48 adults they need all the time to ensure ut goes smoothly and on time.
The software is assuming you are watching the show, not participating in it. So you need to manually insert a 30 minute break at that time, though of course you don’t know until that day what time you will get. So be flexible in your plan 
They ask you to come back 30 minutes before the show. They use that time to organize the kids, give them robes and instructions, and walk over. There’s a lot of waiting too, but that’s what’s needed to make it work. We showed up 30 minutes beforehand to check in and told them we were going to the bathroom. By the time we got back, it was just about time for them to organize the kids, so it worked great.