Brief review of Tron at Magic Kingdom, 3/8/23

Jeff:

When it turns to 7, press the button.

Sucks

Take your eye off the clock and all of a sudden you're f-ed. Depending on the ride reservations fill in less than a minute and there are barely any available when the re-up at noon. When it's your only day at a park you have no plans to revisit it becomes a stressful chore. That can't be the experience Disney is trying to deliver.

Someone who is "really determined" isn't going to take their eyes off the clock.

At the end of the day, not everyone who enters the park is going to ride, because math. So, you need some way of distributing the slots, and a VQ is as good a mechanism as any. That's despite the fact that I'm good without them, and in some ways prefer not to have them, so that I can sleep in on vacation.

We're at Universal this week, and I grabbed the Premier APs, which includes Express after 4 and valet parking. We sleep in, roll into the valet around 1, grab lunch somewhere in City Walk, and then stroll around the parks until close-ish. We did wait for Hagrid's twice--once for a daytime ride, once at night--and actual wait time has been between 1/2 and 2/3 what is posted--the latter included a pause in operations of about 10-15 minutes.

It's not the cheapest way to do Universal, but it's no more than buying tickets plus a day or two of Express a la carte. It's also about the same price as Disney hoppers for the same week, before adding on any of the paid-VQ options.

Brian Noble:

Someone who is "really determined" isn't going to take their eyes off the clock.

Until the dog jumps on your lap, the door bell rings, your kid needs something, etc. If the app crashes — as it has on my phone — it's game over, you better hope the rest of your party was logged in at the same time and was as determined as you to get a reservation.

See also: ADHD. It's very easy to be completely prepared 5 minutes before then realize you've been paying attention to something else at the wrong moment.

I've used it 3 times of 2/3 times were near disasters. One required me going to customer service. I am glad you like it. I just don't. I hate the entire experience from start to finish. It's just not how I want to start my day.

That's what my kids in their 20s are for: phone experts.

Jeff:

We've never had a problem getting a reservation. It's not a big deal.

Honestly, neither have I. But I also know that I'm not best example. When we really cared for Rise in DL, we had 4 people on 6 devices and still got BG40 or so. Consistently getting BG1 with a single person on a single device and having the flexibility to ride whenever you want is nice (not to mention the other benefits for booking LL's, etc.).

eightdotthree:

I am glad you like it. I just don't. I hate the entire experience from start to finish. It's just not how I want to start my day.

I'm on the same page as you.

When I was in my twenties it wouldn't have bothered me. Nowadays I want to roll up at a park and do the rides that I feel like doing without having to plan in advance.

I prefer VQ immensely to the 4 hour standby waits for Flight of Passage. I can't even imagine what the standby wait would have been for Rise of the Resistance in its first year.

In a way this reminds me of the "unfairness" debate that took place on PB in regards to the Winter Chill Out event. There was discussion that the original way of distributing the tickets by virtue of first come, first serve gave an unfair advantage to the basement dwellers living with their parents and could be on the computer at the appointed time, continually hitting the refresh button.

I have been following the give and take on the Disney VQ and it appears to be the same sort of discussion. If you have a 3rd party app that is somehow apparently tied into the atomic clock, and you don't have ADHD, or a dog, or a doorbell, then it seems you have an advantage!

I haven't been to Disney since 1987 and reading this doesn't make me want to return. Nothing about it seems synonymous with "vacation." No amount of "It's not as bad as it sounds" or "it really isn't that stressful, it just takes a little planning ahead" will convince me that I wouldn't sooner give my left testicle to be at a beach resort or a lake house or even my own house instead of Orlando.

Honestly, even as a local, I don't understand all of the gaming and planning. We don't do it, and we do all the things. 🤷‍♂️

Do you still spend full days at the parks, Jeff ? I ask that in the sense that I get to WDW once a decade, or so - if there's stuff I can do to get us on the rides that we want to do, I'll do and spend whatever because it's genuinely a case of miss it, miss out for x years.

If I don't get on anything at my local parks because it's crowded, it makes no odds to me. I just have a beer and go home.

We typically do it when friends or family visit. They're not usually the type to try and do "everything," so they prioritize and stay flexible. The variables are not about planning, it's weather, rides breaking down or kids that are tired. So if they're visiting a park that has that one VQ attraction, we try to both get in, and that works. We've asked guest services to move the earlier group to the later group, but apparently they don't care anyway.

Beyond that, if an attraction has a long line, we go to one that doesn't. I can't say I've ever kept score, but I know the outcome is that we generally have a good time.

As another local, I can say that as far as quantity of rides/attractions experienced per visit, my park visits are nowhere near as "productive" as they were prior to Fastpass+ and then Genie+/Lightning Lane. It has nothing to do with the fact that they have queue skipping. It's because they have it on rides and attractions with extremely high hourly capacity that did not have Legacy (paper) Fastpass. Rides like Spaceship Earth, Pirates, Haunted Mansion, etc., now have a level of artificial demand they did not have back in the day. And Hollywood Studios just doesn't have enough to do in relation to the popularity Star Wars and Toy Story have brought to the park. Back in the day you could always count on Tower of Terror having a relatively short line in the evening or outside of peak season. But when you double the number of guests coming in the park per day, even the new attractions can't absorb those extra guests.

When I was still a Cast Member and they were rolling out MDX/Fastpass+ in 2013 the official word from our leadership was that park guests were satisfied if they experienced between 4-6 rides/attractions per day. If I'm a local stopping in after work or for a few hours that's all well and good. But if I am spending money on a full day in any park I am not content with 4-6 rides for the entire day.

I can go to Universal on a slow day and, if I wanted to, marathon rides like Mummy or Hulk. And I can virtually be guaranteed to have a Mako marathon if I go to Seaworld any time that's not near peak season. But the days of being able to do that at WDW are gone, and even though it has been a while, those days did exist.

TL:DR - Disney hates power riders and Rip Ride Rockit > Hollywood Studios on a busy day

As the unofficial spokesperson for team "plan to the minute," I will say that the challenge and gaming is part of the fun, too. And certainly a large part of it is "bragging rights" and FOMO. And just testing and learning new loopholes and hacks is also fun.

But all the "Disney hacking street cred" aside, given that I go on the order of every 5 years (with a Disneyland trip in between) and that I drop $6-7k+ to be there, to me it's a no brainer to spend some money and time planning to get the most out of my trip, especially given that the knowledge/return curve keeps going up (the amount of hacking possible on Genie+ is really astounding to the point that, with the right tricks, you can get infinite Lightning Lanes). It's definitely not a vacation in the sense that it's not relaxing, but it's a hell of a lot of fun and I leave thinking, "Wow, we did everything multiple times and then some" rather than "Shoot, I wish we had gotten around to X." I hate waiting in line and I really, really hate waiting in line when I paid $200 to be there.

On a different note, I think Disney is intentionally setting up their systems in favor of the once-every-few-years visitors (hence, 7am VQ, paid Genie+, and Individual Lightning Lanes). They're much more lucrative than a local dropping in for an afternoon to grab a beer at Epcot and maybe take a spin or two on a few mid-tier rides. It's worth so much more to Disney for someone to go back to <home state> raving about their first ride on Rise of the Resistance rather than for a local to get their tenth ride because the line was short. Heck, in Disneyland, you have to enter the park to do any virtual line stuff which I'm sure is explicitly to prevent locals from booking everything up on the way to work in the morning.

Rick_UK:

If I don't get on anything at my local parks because it's crowded, it makes no odds to me. I just have a beer and go home.

100%

Vater:

I haven't been to Disney since 1987 and reading this doesn't make me want to return. Nothing about it seems synonymous with "vacation." No amount of "It's not as bad as it sounds" or "it really isn't that stressful, it just takes a little planning ahead" will convince me that I wouldn't sooner give my left testicle to be at a beach resort or a lake house or even my own house instead of Orlando

Honestly, I wouldn’t call a Disney vacation relaxing. Not at all. It is fun though, and I do enjoy the planning and strategy of it all. At least to a point. I typically get there about once every 5-6 years. We get the 4 or 5 day park hoppers but I can’t do more than two days in a row. I get worn down these days. The heat, the people, the strollers bumping into everyone, etc…..

We did Pigeon Forge/Dollywood last summer and yeah, it was mostly back to back fun stuff with very little relaxation, and that’s fine. I enjoyed planning the trip because we had no rigid schedule for the week, and the only stress (if you could call it that) was picking which days we wanted to hit the outdoor stuff based on the weather forecast.

That said, we came home from that trip absolutely exhausted and all in agreement that the next vacation would be chill. I’d like for my kids to experience Disney someday but they’re past what I feel is the prime age range to appreciate it the most, so it’s likely going to be up to them when they’re able to go on their own.

This is why I love cruising in the tropics, though not for the ports. You get on the ship, you are fed (constantly), you don't have to figure out what to feed the kids, and you're not obligated to do anything. You can completely turn your brain off. Non-tropical ports, sure, that's more "adventure travel" and running around, but even then you're coming back to the same "hotel" every night and don't need to worry about how you get to the next place.

I do enjoy cruising, I just haven't for years. My honeymoon in 2004 was our first, then we scored a crazy deal with a friend's scuba dive team a year later, but we haven't been since, which also means we haven't cruised with kids. We've actually discussed doing a Disney cruise recently, so it's on the table. That seems more appealing than the Orlando parks.

Yeah, I'm not sure any park-centric vacation is truly relaxing. We've been half-a**ing it this week, and I'm still feeling it.

Contrast that with the week we spent in Nuevo Vallarta last month. Wake up. Have breakfast. Sit on the beach under a palapa with a kindle stocked with books and chair-side service. Grab a shower. Go to dinner. Catch one of the live-e things. Go to bed. Rinse, repeat. The only thing we did was a whale watching trip, and even that was chill. It was also fantastic. At one point the boat was in the midst of a group of six whales plus some dolphin hangers-on.