Hello, I’m organising our first trip to WDW this Summer. The book and site have been great at helping everything.
I’m now planning out each day and wondering if its best to evaluate or optimise my own plans?
For example, one MK day I have a plan for Fantasyland (only) - I’ve ordered the attractions to be a good walking route and get a pretty good plan. When I optimise I get a really different order which seems to save lots of queuing time - with more walking back and forth.
I’m temped by the optimised plan, but don’t want to get caught out - what is your experience?
Upon first filling in my plan, I will optimize a couple times to get things in order. From there, I manually move things around based on my preferences. Don’t forget to move the walking speed and the balance sliders at the top. This can allow for your preferences also.
I’ll pick the attractions that I want to see and then optimize to give me a baseline. I then look at it line by line and adjust the order if I want to do things differently. then I evaluate after each change to get updated times. Truth be told, if all you are doing is Fantasyland, it’s small enough that I probably wouldn’t worry too much about the order that you do the rides (same applies to any one land). But if TP comes up with something like Space Mountain to PoC to Dumbo to Splash, I would definitely do some rearranging.
I would optimize then change to your preference! Ours kind of went one side of fantasyland to another and as we are walking little mermaid had zero wait so we ended up just doing it, instead of crossing back to it again. Future plans I would try to do rides in order unless it creates a huge wait difference.
Same here. I view walking time almost the same as waiting in line. Still lost time, more tiring for kids, and more opportunity for kids to get distracted.
You can do both, but I’m not sure how beneficial evaluating would be while in the park other than to get more up to the minute time predictions. One strategy that some people use is to reoptimize after every attraction and just go where it tells you to go next. I’ve not tried this yet, but may on my next trip.
This can be a rather tedious strategy, as you run it when you have completed an attraction and are therefore standing around waiting for the results instead of moving to the next attraction. I prefer to only re-optimize if I am going significantly off-plan or have called an audible.
However, if the rest of your party tend to get distracted by shiny things in the exit gift shops, then you can take advantage of that time to re-optimize. Gives you something to do other than glaring at them and trying to herd them towards the exit.
I think like most, I optimize to get a baseline of which lands to do in which order, but then evaluate because I don’t like zig-zagging and overlapping. One of my wife’s pet peeves is when my plan constantly moves between lands because then she can’t get into the immersion.
That said, I have a pretty strong understanding of what the wait time profile for a given ride will be so I’m doing my move/evaluate cycle with a lot of wait-time factors in the back of my mind. Like, I’m not going to take Space off RD and put it at 2pm because it’s more geographically convenient there.
Wow, excellent advice - thanks all. I’ll keep playing about the sliders and ordering.
I’m hoping focussing on one land at a time (3 visits so Fantasy, Frontier/Liberty, Tomorrow (plus some Fantasy) will help reduce the walking. My kids are young so theory is this will reduce the walking, and allow us to relax a little and take in each land without trying to see/do all. We won’t be doing full days, or big rides either, which will free up the long queues.
Me too. Some rides I want at certain times (Safari at AK only early or late, Water rides only in the afternoon, no thrill rides right after a meal), and optimize is not good with those specifics.
Don’t forget Adventureland. My young (3 and 1) loved Magic Carpets and liked Pirates. For some unknown (and unexplained) reason, my 3 y/o refused to go on Jungle Cruise, but I would think most young kids would like it.
Just remember, if you optimize without saving, you’ll lose your old version. So either print out the old version (so you can change it back) or save it to a separate name before optimizing.