We are booked into our WDW holiday late Sept. When is the best time to start making actual touring plans using all the information re crowd levels, wait times etc. I’ve already played around with it a fair bit. When is the best time to start making a solid plan. It takes me a long long time to shuffle things around and work it all out… so I guess I was wondering if I am wasting hours and hours of time doing all of this now,. Should I organise it all before making my FPP reservations, (because TP’s would tell me which FP’s to get)… ?
I try to have a general idea in order to make FPs but right now there is so much missing info (fireworks at HS, AK hours) that I find it impossible to plan. I have been able to plan MNSSHP! I figure I will try about 75 days out but be prepared to make adjustments.
I say: Start now. Even if you can’t add some things, you can add all the things currently available that you know you want to hit. As you get closer, as other things are made available, you can add them and tweak your plans. But at least much of your work will already be done. It will give you a good idea of whether or not you’ll be able to put everything you want to do into your plans, or if you’ll have to prioritize and eliminate some. Once you are within your FPP reservation time frame, things should be pretty solid on the Disney schedule, so you can adjust then.
I generally try to do what you have done - set things up the best I can so that when FPP day rolls around I know what I’m aiming for.
I would still go with that although you may find you need to make some adjustments as your travel date nears, as you’ve pointed out that so many things are still rather up in the air.
That said, I think there’s never a bad time to play with TPs. I have several in the works and no travel dates in sight
Although I’ll “play around” with TPs as early as 180 days (after I have my ADRs), I don’t “get serious” until after I have the FPPs that I want. Two weeks out is when I make the “final” TP that I take with me (and then ignore most of once I’m there). I’m not a tweaker. I make my ADRs at 180 (or as soon as I have a definite date if less than 180) and rarely change them. I make my FPPs at 60, and rarely change them. But if there’s one of either that I really want, I will continue to check until the day before).
I am expecting there to be quite a few TP “disconnects” over the next months. TPs are based on empirical data, and there will not be any to determine the impact of the Frozen attractions at EP, the PM activities at AKL, and to a lesser extent the new SW PM show at DHS for at least a few months. If I were going between now and Christmas, I would expect to have to be “flexible” in my planning and be open to changing things up “on the fly”.
