Taking two teens to Universal for 3 days. I bought a 3 day park to park pass.
My thought was that we could do either US/IOA in the morning, have a lunch time rest break and then move to Epic late afternoon until close. Does this make sense? Will it give us enough time to see Epic or should we just do a full day in Epic and the other two days shared in the other two parks? Thinking we could take advantage of the evening crowds thinning. Going next week.
I haven’t really seen any strategies about split days so wondering if people have tried it.
Yes it sure does. Just getting off your feet for a while will really help to break up a long day, may as well include it in the traveling to Epic.
I would do this on day 1. Day 2 start at USF or IOA, and then decide later if you want to go back to Epic another evening, or Rope Drop Epic on day 3.
If you plan to visit Epic only one full day, you may feel rushed and not be able to do everything, with the longer waits compared to the other parks and attraction down time.
If you plan two full days at USF and IOA, you may feel the other way, like you have plenty of time to experience everything you want and wind up just repeated rides.
The other thing is the wait times later in the day. Arriving around 3pm looks great.
We did a long trip in early January with 4 park passes but no EA. We did multi-park most days. If you look at the tail end of my trip report with “Epic Epic” in the title, I talked about starting at each of the parks and which I thought would be best. Spoiler: What really seems to matter is open hours for each park. We had some days with 3-park single-use express passes where we did all three parks in one day. If you can swing even one day of those, I’d recommend it particularly since you have a short trip and are interested in Epic. Only caveat on the mid-day break is I wouldn’t do it too late. When we did that we got sucked into the comfort of our airBnB and didn’t have the oomf to leave.
We’ll be in UOR for the first time in July with three park days, so I’ll be curious to hear about your experience.
My tentative plan is to focus on USF/IOA for the first 1.5 days (we are big Harry Potter fans), then hop to Epic on day 2 afternoon for hopefully lower wait times and seeing the park all lit up. Then day 3 just Epic, with Express Pass.
Have you looked into the multi-park express passes?
Epic only offers one-use express passes, and there aren’t that many things in Epic that need EP’s (but the lines are really really long otherwise) My thought is that it is worthwhile to spend a tish more and get the multi-park EP’s even if only for one day. Spend one day running around doing the EP-worthy rides in all parks. Another day going slow and admiring the theming.
I did initially think about getting these for our 3 days, but they were super expensive - so I went with 1-day Express Pass for Epic (still so expensive!) and then got a great deal for one night at RPR room ($460), which gives us unlimited Express Passes at USF/IOA for 4 people on both of the other days.
We just got back from our trip to Universal/Disney last week. We did 2 days at Epic and 1 day at IOA/USF. I won’t really discuss IOA/USF because we made a big mistake going there on the Saturday of Presidents weekend. Never seen such horrific crowds. But our Epic days were at the start of the week, so there was no President’s day crowd involvement.
I wrote up a thread about our impressions of Epic (Look for the Epically Magical Trip thread). But the short of it is…even across two days, and focused on taking advantage of evenings, when crowds are lower, we still faced massive crowds, and while our group split up to tackle different things at different times, we still didn’t end up getting on everything (although we did get more than one ride on Stardust and Monsters Unchained).
We arrived at Epic Universe around 1 pm or so each day. (We knew we couldn’t handle two rope-drop to close days, particularly with the 2 grandkids involved, so we decided to focus on afternoon into evenings to take advantage of the reduced evening crowds.
I think this worked well for us in terms of seeing the crowd levels drop. But many of the rides had such high wait times all day even into the evening that getting it all done across two days really felt out of reach. I’m sure Express Pass becomes a game-changer…but definitely out of our price range!!!
Be prepared for long waits and extremely crowded lands (aside from Celestial Park), and set your expectations. As my family likes to say, “Put on your patient hat.”
I think by doing all THREE days at Epic in the afternoon into evening, it will be come do-able. It will probably be exhausting if you are doing all three days back-to-back to tackle all three parks from open to close, so that afternoon break I think will be very important.
Thanks. That is helpful. We do have one rest day so maybe it is doable. No one in my party knows what Epic has, so I do have the advantage that they can’t be disappointed missing something they didn’t know existed. Must remember to pack my own “patient hat”
This is my plan, right now, for our spring break trip!
Late AM arrival to do our favorites at USF/IOA on Day 1
All HP on Day 2
Epic (minus HP) on Day 3.
I don’t know that I have anything more to contribute I was just excited that we have the same-ish plan.
I’m nervous we’ll want more time at Epic and it’s the end of the trip.
