We’ve made a lot of progress this year on the data, app, and site, to the point where one of the more common questions/complaints is “why does my plan have so much free time in the middle of the day?”
It seems like the default behavior of minimizing waits with midday pauses is not intuitive to a lot of people. We can change that by enabling the “Put free time at end of plan” setting by default. What do y’all think?
Should we enable the “Put free time at end of plan” setting by default?
I think I’d rather you add an option in the building of the custom plan asking the user to choose either “Put free time wherever is best to minimize total waits for the day” or “Put free time at the end of the plan” (with the ability to change it later when you’re playing around with the plan).
There have been so many times where at the end of the entire plan I can see there’s “150 minutes” of free time in the plan. Then I have to sort through every step trying to figure out where / why I have a 2+ hour gap of time. It is often due to meals / breaks with gaps before or after that I don’t want.
I think you will get the same questions, “I told my plan I was staying until 10pm, why didn’t it schedule anything after 6?”
I personally like the way it is set up now because you can immediately tell you have too much time scheduled/not enough attractions. On chat we tell users to either shorten hours or add attractions. New users seem to understand this concept/solution right away.
I have used the plan settings to set my own plan to have free time at the end and it does work well but I usually do that after I see what the optimizer does with my initial plan.
Maybe, but I think that is a narrow interpretation. I think most people would be happy to know they can finish everything in less time overall vs. making use (or non-use) of every minute based on the somewhat arbitrary end time they entered.
Whelp, I was today years old when I realized why the option to put free time at the end of the exists, thanks to this thread. SOOO, for slower people like me, perhaps make it the default and explain why a few words.
I don’t think it’s waiting less to stand around in the middle of the day with nothing to do while waiting for the lines to go down
I think most users would like to see how they can get their planned attractions done with the shortest waits but also the least amount of time overall. If the free time is at the end it’s much more obvious that you can add more attractions.
What happens if you have Luminous or Fantasmic or HEA in the plan? Will it still put free time at the “end” of the day? I think I rarely start out with much free time in my plans…
I have used TPs a lot for actually touring the last few years as I won’t pay for LMNOP. I usually select free time at the end of the day for the reasons @melcort10 states - I get a sense of how many more attractions I can add.
My technique for creating a plan is as follows:
Tick on each item I must have.
Have TP optimize.
Have TP optimize with extra time at end.
(I can see generally how much wiggle room I have best case scenarios.)
Then I look at the walking pattern. Am I ricocheting? I’ll start to drag things to better order for walking and keep evaluating. I start jotting down on a notebook page how it is affecting totals (wait, walking, remaining, etc.)
I don’t optimize again unless I am feeling overwhelmed or feel like in need a redo. But in that case I copy to a new one and then start again with “free time at end of day.”
I guess I’m saying I always use that feature. BUT - I don’t need it as the default bc I know to look for it.
I think preferences for what part of the day you’d rather have free time depend a lot on season. In the summer, it makes a lot of sense to have free time in the middle of the day and get out of the parks and into AC. At other times of the year, it’s nice to have that free time at the end of the day. It’s not one size fits all.
I think this is key. If you KNOW then you probably don’t care. But it is a recurring question that pops up so much that they added the feature to begin with. It is not intuitively obvious that TP will plop free time in the middle of the day in various spots and not consider free time as waiting. Even though that’s what it is.
I was glad the feature was added, because it becomes my default now. But I think it is how people intuitive think it should work anyhow I less you have been using TP for a while.
It also is useful when you are park hopping because it give you a sense of what time if day you can expect to be able to hop…which then can aid in specifying your start time for the subsequent TP for the same day.
There would still need to be a default, but I agree that it should be a configuration option as well if possible so a user can override the default behavior.
Interesting!
When I know I am going to leave a park (has only happened twice when we had deluxe after hours with RD mornings) I just made two different plans. One starting at RD and one starting at 3PM.
Should we enable the “Put free time at end of plan” setting by default? 
