I feel lucky to have this community, to have visited WDW many times, and to have Liner knowledge to help me plan. Because I feel that TP can no longer help me plan and it makes me sad.
I wanted to play around with a few different touring options for a morning at MK on a CL 7 day. EE is 7:30 so park open at 8:00. My TP tells me if I get in line for JC at 8:31am I will have a 3 minute wait. And if I get in line at PPF at 7:56 it will be a 9 minute wait. Neither of these are even remotely realistic.
I know I can go over to Thrill Data and extrapolate it all myself. But I don’t want to. It’s very time consuming and it’s hard to play around with all the variables. I miss my days of tweaking and evaluating on TP before a trip.
I think TP has done their very best to zig and zag as the changes at WDW - specifically as related to G+ - have evolved. That said, try as they might it just doesn’t work as well as it once did. I agree, that is sad. I’ll never forget the moment I was at MK when it was accurate to the minute and how I found that absolutely amazing and even a little creepy LOL
Hopefully with future iterations of the G+ program - specifically with the advanced selections that are anticipating - it will shine once again.
For now, I think it helps me to put in everything I want to do that day and see if even without G+ we could do it. Because then I know that with the added layer of G+ on the days I choose to use it, the day becomes even easier.
I’m trying to figure out in what order we should ride a few things SB that first hour or so before starting our LLs. We have a few rides we’d like to do twice so we plan to hit them early via SB and then get LLs later in the day.
I think then you need to send it to the TP help desk for clarification. I wonder if TP doesn’t have updated hours? Because if you hit that right at park opening (and not 30 mins later) I think that would be accurate for JC
I’ll do that. I deleted and started over and got something like 8 minutes again for JC at 8:51. PPF was more what I expected this time. I do recall seeing other people say JC times seem very off. Maybe a ride specific bug that needs squashing.
I seem to recall not long ago that a lot of folks complained that when they rope-dropped, TP would always give the wait time to be very long for that first ride by assuming you were NOT near the front of the line.
Perhaps after enough complaining, they modified it so that it more accurately reflects the wait time IF in fact you do rope-drop???
Trouble is…you can’t get it right for everyone. Although, I suppose it MIGHT be possible to have a flag to check to indicate whether you plan to be front of the pack or not.
Make sure the park opening time is correct on your TP as well. And Adventureland isn’t open for EE like PPF so the wait times take a little longer to build in the morning. I dont think 8 mins almost an hour after park open is accurate for JC though.
But if TP has the park hours just 30 mins later than actual opening time this could be problematic.
I made some touring plans today for July that I didn’t think looked right. For me I wouldn’t worry about it but they’re for my parents. The crowd levels are lower than I’ve ever had though, so maybe they’re right. They have 2 weeks anyway, they’ll get everything done at some point.
Interestingly, when I started over (again), the TP seemed to assume I’d be really rope dropping as it has a 5 minute wait for PPF at 7:36am for a 7:30 EE time. Which is great. But it shows a 7 minute JC wait at 8:51am. Which would be great if it were true!
I have enough Liner knowledge that I can manage this without too much trouble but I really enjoyed planning and tweaking and planning some more in the past.
I wouldn’t even consider G+ so TP telling the optimal order to ride rides is still the best. SO (significant other) hates the heat so we travel off season - late fall, beginning of year.
The trouble with that is that if you wait twice as long as the plan says for a ride, it may no longer be the best time to ride the second one. But if you’re optimising in the app as you go, that would help. I’ve never done that.
Thus the sadness.