With our trip coming up on October 1st, I’m trying to finalize my touring plans and just can’t wrap my mind how to effectively use a touring plan with so many Genie+ unknowns. I miss knowing my fastpasses ahead of time so I can put those in my touring plans. Without knowing what Genie+ reservation I’ll be able to get and for what time, what is everyone else doing? I’m almost thinking of only planning my first attractions after rope drop, and winging the rest of it, which makes me shudder. I always like to have a plan!
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Good news. This coming week TP is supposed to launch the capability to suggest what LL time to get at a specific time in your plan. (Currently it looks like this, when you tap the G+ on the attractions.)
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I made plans but never even looked at them. We just had to wing it. It’s great that TP are going to try and incorporate it, but we found the times very fluid and I’ll be interested to see how well it works.
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I felt the same way going in to our trip, but after a couple of days, it worked out great this way, and we didn’t even have Genie+! My DS and I had a hard time letting go of the “plan” the first two days, and that made us pretty miserable. Once we let go and started being more spontaneous, we had a great time!
I think it’s good to plan something without so you know what you’re up against. Planning your first few rides is also good. I think the new update with predicting times will be helpful. I’ve also been monitoring return times so I have a pretty good sense of what will be available when. I plugged my guesses into another plan. You will always have to wing something but you have the tools to think on your feet.
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This is great news! Hope I can use this new functionality for my WDW trip in 2 weeks
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Do not expect Genie+ forecast functionality to be released “this coming week.” We’re actively working on it, but the release date is uncertain.
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When I make a TP now, I consider it a list of things I want to do more than a plan. I optimize in real time and add LLs and ILLs when we get them. It works.
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Go to thrill-data.com and look at a few days with crowds similar to what you expect on your park days, and you’ll be able to see the LL availability all day. That’s what I used to help figure out the return times I could expect at specific times of day. I made a touring plan with these hypothetical LLs in the right places in my plan. It worked pretty well!
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I did not like this g+ uncertainty that prevented me to make plans (compared to FP+).
However, it is now my last days here at Disney world and the very good news with G+ and ILL (with low to medium crowd levels) is that I can ride all the headliners in one day without waiting more than 10 minutes in line.
This definitely wasn’t feasible with FP+ where we would have to choose one or 2 headliners per day and add more park days for the other ones.
So G+ is definitely better in my view but I only realized it when I could use it.
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What I think I’m going to do is plan like I did in the days of FP+ , which really means without factoring in Genie+ at all initially.
- Plan what I’d like to do
- Optimise it
- Then rearrange things to my liking and Evaluate
Then have a list of the rides that I’ll try for G+, in a priority order using the info about return times etc here
And then I’ll hopefully be able to work out roughly when we’ll be doing those rides.
For example my first pick might be Jungle Cruise. Knowing our expected park arrival time is say 10am, I’d look to book it with a return time of say 11am. So in my plan I’ll make sure JC is scheduled for around then.
Assuming I book it before the park opens, I’ll know that I can book the next one 2 hrs after the park opens. My next pick might be Big Thunder, so I’ll have that in the plan for sometime around 2pm (if that’s when I find that is a typical return time when booking 2 hrs after park opening).
Because I’m not an “Optimiser” person, that seems to be the intuitive way for me to plan, based on what I did before. I very much plan to do a certain area of a park on each day.
I guess if I wanted to add in the Optimiser, it would be a matter of plugging in the actual return time to the plan and re-optimising at that point.
Perhaps if I got an unexpected G+ return time, whether a different ride or a significantly earlier / later time than expected, I might use the Optimiser or just re-evaluate the plan.
I do know that G+ is not designed to be used in the same way that FP+ was used. It’s designed such that you grab the earliest return time you can and keep doing that.
I also know that’s too stressful for me to do! But I also want to enjoy the parks and not be agonising over decisions. So I might see if there’s a happy medium. Like grabbing the first return time of the rides we want to do that day. I do know some people have found it works better than they expected. 
that’s true for me too!
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Did this feature get released? I read somewhere in the forum that it was supposed to be released from 08/29.
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A little bit later in the thread, @david posted this:
So, it will be a little while longer yet.
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This. I’ll add that thrilldata for the same day of the week as your target date, 7 days or 14 days prior, is probably the best LL predictor.
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So you went to advanced options and added the return times as per thrill-data and then hit optimize? If possible, can you share your plan for reference?
I went to Adanced Options, added return times, checked out what TP recommended by optimizing, but then I also moved things around manually to see if doing things in my preferred order significantly changed overall wait times.
I would personally prefer 4 waits of 15 minutes each, rather than one 45 minute wait and three 4 minute waits for four rides, even though the latter is an overall shorter wait. The TP software is designed to minimize your total wait time for the entire day, but I wouldn’t mind adding a few minutes to that number if it makes most individual waits shorter. So I played around with the evaluate button a lot!
I used the Lines app while I was in the parks to keep track of my actual LLs and check off attractions on my touring plan as I visited them, so my plans show what we actually did (to the best of my ability to check things off), rather than what the original plan necessarily said. But you’re welcome to see them:
Park Day 1 Hollywood Studios
Park Day 2 Epcot
Park Day 3 Magic Kingdom
Park Day 4 Magic Kingdom
Park Day 5 Animal Kingdom
And if you’re interested, you can read my trip report.
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I am struggling with my personalized TP’s. Even though I am trying to put my LL return times in manually by looking at Thrill Data Heat Maps, the software is forcing this step on me to choose a return time. It is not allowing me to get the next LL when I tap in? can anyone help?