Does anyone use the premade touring plans? Looking at the HS ultimate plan it has SDD & TSM at the end of the plan. Why is this? HS has several headliner rides and they can’t all be first in the plan, but why would you watch the Muppet show before SDD?
Also, this plan doesn’t have FPP taken into account and that the plan can be optimized…but having visited WDW over the last 2 decades it seems that the best thing to do now is to:
Get FPP ASAP
Arrive at the park early
Look for same-day FPP drops
Generally, know which rides have longest wait times and ride those as early as possible
Use the app to look for “Ride Now” attractions
I spend a lot of time modifying my FPPs once in the park which seems to be the best strategy when the lines are long.
Some of the best tips come from the great users in the chat. So monitoring the chat is also important - you never know what you might learn. But I want to make the best use of the site and all the great info, so I’m trying to understand how to use the touring plans.
For TSL, if you can’t RD or use FPP the lines get crazy very early on so you are actually better waiting. If you’re going to wait an hour regardless, do it earlier when lines elsewhere are shorter (although nothing is short in HS). TSL also gets less crowded in the evening so if you can stay late, you will see lines drop.
This isn’t necessarily true. Often, everyone is running to get to the same popular rides at rope drop. If you are amidst that crowd, you will end up with a longer wait than if you hit the less popular rides with almost NO wait, and THE do the popular rides. The wait for that particular ride might be longer, but you save a lot of time by not waiting for a bunch of lesser rides.
I guess that’s a personal preference, if you want to ride lesser rides first…but in my experience, it’s best to ride the tier 1 rides first and get same day FPPs for the tier 2 rides.
True…HS has long lines for everything. I wonder if more people park now with ROTR? Show up and get a boarding group then leave or if they stay in the park making HS more crowded then ever.
It isn’t really personal preference, just how the math of it tends to work out.
Let me illustrate…and I’m making up numbers here just to illustrate, but the principle applies.
Let’s say you want to start in Tomorrowland and you are there at RD. If you, and everyone else going to TL, heads to Space Mountain first, you are with a longer wait. In the meantime, you bypassed Buzz, Astro Orbiter, and People Mover with virtual no wait. Now, you wait with all the other SM folks. Let’s say 20 minutes. The, you get off SM and decide to do Buzz…but the Buzz line now is filled with those who came after RD, as well as those who got off SM. As a result, the wait for Buzz is 20 minutes. After that, you do AO, and wait another 20 minutes. Total wait time to do three rides: 1 hour.
However, if you did, say, AO first, you had no wait. After that, you do Buzz with a 10 minute wait. Then you do SM, which is now a 40 minute wait. Total wait time? 50 minutes for three rides.
Now, there are exceptions to this, such as if you are first in the RD crowd, etc…but generally it is true. This is why even the TP software will often NOT put the more popular rides first.
Interesting, but generally I see the lines back up and just get longer and longer. They might die down late at night or during a parade, but I just left WDW last week and it was super crowded and if you didn’t ride the popular attractions first, you were going to wait hours later in the day to ride. Lines were long all day.
I was able to ride the most popular rides multiple times using same day FPPs, but not standing in line. We went right after the New Year which tends to be crowded. We waited once for an hour and another time for 45 min…other than that our waits were always less than 25 min. We even rode FOP twice on a crowd level=10 day.
I understand what you’re saying, but it doesn’t seem to play out like that when I visit.
I’m wondering if anyone has used the plans exactly as written when the park was crowded.