Touring plans accuracy when unable to stabilize?

Walt Disney World Touring Plans
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Hey, I was looking for some advice. After my question yesterday, I tried optimizing my touring plan for Magic Kingdom 12-7-14 (crowd level 2). Even after optimizing several times yesterday and today, the plan never stabilizes. It alternates starting in Tomorrowland, Adventureland, and Main Street. It makes some recommendations which don’t seem to be a good use of time (to me).

Things it has told me to do that I question include: 1. Magic Carpets of Aladdin in the first hour (which comes up a lot). 2. Swiss Family Treehouse in the first hour. 3. Waiting for Country Bear Jamboree to open at 10:00 am. 4. Not using my fast passes even when I am close to the attraction. 5. Not getting to my dining reservations on time.

Am I doing something wrong? Perhaps trying to see too many “medium-wait” attractions on the same day? Should I just take a break for now and wait until right before the trip (when I hope to will be easier to stabilize)? The same thing happens at all the parks, but it is most random for a full day at the Magic Kingdom.

Thanks for any advice. I appreciate it.

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This is probably a question for @len.

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First, I acknowledge I’m a rookie, so my answer may be bantha poodoo.

I’ve noticed the same thing, but I’ve come to believe (from toying with it and from the reading I’ve done here and elsewhere - esp. @Lentesta & @brklinck) that on low crowd days the variations on what could save you time are so vast that it’s not reasonable to expect stabilization. A trip through Treehouse could be just as time-consuming as a ride on The World Famous Jungle Cruise at that moment and therefore just as good a choice.

I’ve remedied this problem with 2 strategies:

  1. Tighten the Time - Perhaps you’ve scheduled a full day (open to close) with relatively few attractions on your list. My trick is to shorten the day (split it into two TPs - morning and evening), or add attractions. This seems to force the computer to make tougher choices.
  2. Chuck the Plan - On a 2 of 10, perhaps it’s not worth trying to save time in lines. Make your own wise choices during the morning hours (see the Unofficial Guide for the most commonly efficient morning plan - including FPP suggestions), then put your phone down and lazily enjoy the low crowd levels.

I’m planning for a WDW trip in 69 days (who’s counting?) and I want to practice with the app before I get there. I live in LA, so I’m going to Disneyland next week to get used to the process and making changes on the fly. Good news/bad news, it’s a 2/10 crowd level on the day I’m going! This means, I’m going to enjoy an unheard of quiet day at DLR, but I don’t think the app will be of much use to me and my crew.

I’d love to see your plan, if you don’t mind making it public.

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@thechindo makes some good points here - on a CL 2 day there are probably many different ways to come up with a near-optimal plan. Remember, the Optimizer does not find the absolute best plan, it finds the best plan within a certain calculation time frame.

Look at the time category totals after each run. What sort of differences are you seeing? Is one of the results markedly different from or better than the others?

Also, do you have a lot of Free time after optimizing? This would indicate that you either need to add more attractions or tighten up your start/stop times.

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@jac9014 - send along the URL to your plan, and I’ll take a look a it.

The usual reason for instability is that there’s a step (or two) with a conflict that can’t be resolved. In those cases, all the alternatives look equally bad. But send the URL and I can verify what’s going on.

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OK, I’ve looked at your plan @jac9014, including re-optimizing it once to see what happens.

For those reading along, here are the existing FP+ reservations inputted into the plan:

BTMRR at 9:50 AM
Peter Pan at 10:55 AM
Cinderella/Rapunzel at 12:10 PM
Tinkerbelle at 2:45 PM

Also, the walk/wait slider is set to “Minimize walking.”

It’s very likely that the Optimizer is sending you to Adventureland in the morning because of the combination of your 9:50AM BTMRR and the “Minimize walking” setting. There’s no minimal-walking way to start in Tomorrowland, for example, that gets you over to BTMRR in time for your FP+ reservation.

The Pan FP also plays a part in the overall order, since it’s a shorter walk from Frontierland to Pan than from, say, anywhere in Tomorrowland.

You might try setting the walk/wait slider back to the middle, to see how that changes your plan.

All of that said, you’re averaging less than 10 minutes’ wait per step in the plan. That’s not bad, considering the emphasis put on minimizing walking.

Let me know if there’s something else you’d like us to look at.

ETA: That Tink 2:45 PM FP+ also conflicts with the afternoon parade, which runs for ~30 minutes and we’d like to have you at 15 minutes in advance. So the parade takes up 45 of the 60 minutes for your Tink FP+, and the remaining 15 minutes isn’t enough of a window for the Optimizer to feel comfortable with.

We’re working on giving you better notification when those kinds of overlaps happen. We should flag it for you even before the Optimizer gets the request, since we can check that overlap easily. Sorry about that.

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Thanks for all the responses. I’m happy to post the plan, if that helps.

I wish that I could show you all of the recent plans, but the above is the most recent optimize, which looks better than some others.

The wait times used to be less than 10 minutes when I originally made the plan in September, but this week the times jumped considerably which is why I was trying to re-optimize. The wait times now are up to 30 minutes on several of the popular rides which seemed to have been moved from early morning to late afternoon.

I was hoping to minimize walking since I thought that it wouldn’t be so busy that day, but we can all probably walk more in order to decrease wait times. I can also remove the Tinkerbell Fast Pass. I was assuming that we could get one as our fourth, and maybe that is the problem.

Incidentally, I just optimized 3 more times, and the morning seems to be getting more stable than it has been in the past 24 hours.

Thanks for all the tips!

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Did i miss something how did you get 4 fpp

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Yes, how did you get 4?

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@brian95and @SwensonNov2014 I made the assumption that I could get a 4th fast pass to meet Tinkerbell in the afternoon, based on the high percentage probability of fast passes being available at 2:00 pm. I saw this in a different post. If I didn’t make this assumption, the touring plan kept having me start with seeing Tinkerbell, and I thought that it would be more efficient to get a Fast Pass for her in the afternoon. It was the only work-around I could come up with.

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Ok that makes sense. I will be at mk on the same day and i just thought i missed something new

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@brian95 Since you’re going at the same time, I’m curious. Have you recently hit the evaluate button on one of your touring plans that you made prior to this week? Did your wait times go up a lot compared to the times you got last week (or earlier)? I’m hoping that the wait times we’ll see at Disney will actually be closer to the times the touring plans listed when I made the plan and not the times they changed to this week.

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Im just starting to do tps now… i think we will be ok as far as crowds go. We always do rd so tgar helps too

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I’m noticing some weird stuff too for that same week. I laughed when the plan had me going to watch the movie in France as my second step at Epcot, complete with making me wait for almost two hours for World Showcase to open.

I think my favorite is the one that just came up on my Animal Kingdom plan. It has me starting my visit at 9:00 with a 45 minutes rest period. lol

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@MindaC That happened to me a couple times too. I believe that was because at AK, the lowest waits are usually in the afternoon. I found I had to change the end time of my plan to be earlier so it wouldn’t try to utilize that time. Then it didn’t do the rope drop rest break. :smile:

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Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately, when I tried to use that to fix this same problem in my Magic Kingdom plan, the software told me that it couldn’t optimize my plan until I remove the fireworks show, since it wasn’t available during my shortened hours.

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The underlying issue is that you don’t have enough activities scheduled to fill up the day. Add a few more attractions to fill up the gaps and set the end time so that it includes wishes.

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@MindaC - can you post links to these plans? I’d be happy to take a look.

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Hi Len. Thanks for the offer. I’ve been away from Disney planning for a couple of days to deal with real-time stuff. I thought I had saved one of the rope-drop rest break plans, but I’m not seeing it in anything I have on my dashboard right now. If I see it again, I’ll publish it and post the link. Sorry for raising the issue without being able to provide a link.

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