A recent update to the crowd calendar changes the predicted levels on a few of my days in August. I could swap an MK day with a HS day and decrease the crowd level by 1 on each day, but I would have to change a dining reservation (which should be easy to do).
My question: is it worth changing from 3 & 2 crowd levels to 2 & 1? Or is there not enough of a difference?
Never change parks based on crowd levels. Especially not when your highest one is a 3.
Is there a reason for that rule?
Don’t change your day. The Touring plans website eve states that a good Touring Plan is 5 times more important than the park you pick.
This is the link I found this in. don’t change your day.
Crowd levels are a prediction, and can be 2 levels out even without anything unusual going on. One ride being down for several hours can cause them to be even further out. A good touring plan beats crowd level every time. And even if they are as predicted and you end up with 1 & 2 instead of 2 & 3, you’re probably talking about a difference of about 10 mins waiting over the day. If you were changing from a 9 to a 2, that might be different.
I remember on one trip, the park changed from a 4 to a 9, I still didn’t change it and I didn’t see much difference in what we encountered. I agree about the Touring Plan, a good one will beat any CL.
I also remember having touring plans and sticking them in my pocket because the crowds were so low that it didn’t really matter, but that was something like 10/12 years ago, maybe longer.
Ok, I’m convinced. I’m not going to change anything. Thanks for the feedback.
When you refer to a “good” touring plan do you mean that it is based on being optimised to get the shortest wait times? Mine have been influenced by so many different factors and I have done a lot of evaluating rather than optimising…
I’ve mentioned “good touring plan”, to me is, first off that you have a plan on what you want to do and you have it laid out. Using the software here and listing out what you want to do and to Optimizing it, however you can alter it, move things around and Evaluate it. Both would be a good plan.
I just mean a proper touring plan. Obviously the best plan in terms of shortest wait times in total across the whole day is an optimised one. But as long as you’ve re-evaluated for the new crowd level and you’re still happy with it, it will be fine.
Thanks both.
We’re newbies to both WDW and TP. We had a list of things we wanted to see and do and I created optimised plans but then did lots of tweaking and rearranging to take into account lots of factors - ie not wanting to do Jedi Training at the hottest time of day, not wanting to leave must-dos until the end of the day in case we were flagging and wanting to go back to swim and relax, trying to arrange some of the air conditioned shows early afternoon, juggling around show times, eating at off times to avoid food queues etc And I did start to wonder whether all my changes have meant I’m not really benefiting from using the software!
But maybe the biggest benefit is just making a plan full stop? We didn’t really have any idea what we were doing when we went to DL Paris 5 years ago, and in hindsight we would have seen a lot more (and queued a lot less!) if we’d had a bit of an action plan.
It’s still calculating your waits, so if you’d seen a really long wait for something you’d have moved it. You’re getting the most out of it according to your needs.
Yes. Just having a plan at all will go a long way in making your day go smoothly. So many people lose so much time playing the: “let’s go ride X”…walk…see long wait…“Now what?”…“let’s go ride Y” game.
Totally, you’ve learned so much in the process that you’ll be able to tweak on the go when needed. I’m the same in that I never optimise, sometimes I make a copy to see what TP suggests but I usually prefer my own plan. I wouldn’t switch days based on CL because it could change the other way before August. I do pay attention to EMH though.