Disney announces or teases a ton of attractions at D23

The OG FastPass was perfect. I didn't buy Genie+ or any Lightning Lanes during my last visit to Epcot and it wasn't a great experience for a number of reasons. None of my recent trips to Disney World have been great and it's to the point now where my wife and I are taking a break and not even going to Disneyland on our trip to LA this month. I think we'll be back once Splash Mountain opens in *checks notes* 2030.

Jeff:

Getting hung up on having to click a button on the app at 7am hardly feels like having to plan all the things and not be spontaneous.

I still say you feel this way, in part, because you're a local and go whenever you want, because I am in the same boat. If I want to ride Guardians but all of the reservations are gone, I can ride it next week. We also are local passholders and know how the system works.

If you were taking your once-a-year visit to Cedar Point and had to wake up at 7am for a chance to ride Steel Vengeance or Maverick, and you didn't click until 7:00:03 (I know it's not like that now, but it was in the beginning), and the reservations were already gone and you only had one day in the park, you would be annoyed. I know I would be.

But we've never not been able to get the reservation. I've been on Guardians at least a dozen times. It's not an "I'll get it next time" because I always get it this time.

I do miss the original FP+, for sure. Although that did require a little advanced planning for the popular attractions, even more so than Genie/LL. But in both cases, those two rides aside, standby is still possible on everything else.

GoBucks89:

If you were spending that much money on a non-Disney trip (or even something less than that amount), would you engage in some level of planning?

Want to hike the Kalalau Trail on Kaua'i?

If you want to drive in during peak season, you need to reserve and pay for entry at midnight, Hawai'i time, exactly 30 days before you go. If you are so much as a minute late, you are not driving in. You can get a shuttle reservation for a few days after reservations open, but they go fast and you have to choose a pick-up time.

In the offseason, parking reservations often last a day or two once the window opens, so you probably don't have to stay up late/get up early if you are willing to risk it.

Jeff:

But we've never not been able to get the reservation. I've been on Guardians at least a dozen times.

Just playing Devil's advocate now - do you think this is (at least in part) because you know the process *and* aren't even trying to go on busy days?

No and no. The timing isn't a secret, as they describe it right in the app. And as far as busy days, we (actually it was my kid) got reservations last Friday, which was one of the busiest days I've seen since before the pandemic. We were parked in the last row of the Rocket lot (formerly Explore), and they were starting to fill the Gamora (Wonder) lot. They had cast from Mexico and Canada directing traffic through the huge crowd at American Gardens for Boyz II Men. It was ridiculous.

If it’s so easy to get into the queue then why are they still using it?

That's why I suggested that I don't think it's gonna last.

thrill-data.com shows Tron BG’s last “seconds” ~half the time and 30 minutes ~half the time at the 7:00 distribution and at least an hour at the 1pm distibution every day (except today, oddly). So if you want a boarding group you can definitely get one at some point by some means.

I think there are some substantial variations in what one is hoping to get out of the vacation and one’s number of previous visits, and that information is crucial to answer the question about how necessary it is to plan and plan well.

I’ll say this right off the bat: if you are hoping to get on a substantial number of attractions, and especially all the heavy-hitters, you had better plan and plan well. I don’t have enough experience to know exactly how impactful Lightning Lane is to stand-by lines versus the Fastpass or Fastpass+ systems, but if it’s even remotely in that ballpark, I don’t know if you could hit all the big-name attractions short of going open-to-close and/or really putting together a good strategy. It might not be quite that extreme, and maybe it wouldn’t quite take you all day, but it’ll certainly come close, so you may as well put the effort in ahead of time to have some plan of attack.

Again, that’s if your objective is to hit a lot of rides. From my end, the stress of planning it out, at least to a point, is a lot less than showing it up and winging it, hoping for the best. That becomes especially true when you factor in parades or shows. You need to allot time to get a decent spot, and you need to be in that area of the park when it happens.

The simplest way I think I could explain it would be to block an hour per attraction or show. Maybe some lines won’t be that long, but that extra time is your walking or bathroom or whatever. Some rides are obviously going to require much more than that, but bare minimum, unless it’s maybe Dumbo, Spaceship Earth, The Three Caballeros, or something like that, block an hour minimum for any ride with a recognizable name unless you’re going to use Lightning Lane.

Obviously things change if getting in a lot of rides is not the primary objective, but this is where past visits apply, and this is also assuming that you don’t have a laundry list of rides that are can’t-miss no matter how many times you’ve done them already. Maybe I’m missing a few posts here or there, but it seems like a lot of the you-don’t-need-to-plan advice comes from those of us who have ridden everything dozens of times and/or who live here and have ready park access. I fall into that camp. I stopped caring about needing to ride things ages ago because there’s so little that I haven’t ridden, and most rides there are ones I’ve ridden countless times before. I’ll say that if you’re willing to sacrifice attractions, you’ll certainly enter a whole new side of Disney where you can experience all the other resort amenities like dining, shopping, out-of-park activities (the mini golf courses are excellent), or even just walking around and exploring the resort hotels.

However, even that can introduce a lot of planning because some restaurants run out of reservations quickly, and even if you’re willing to sacrifice some rides or shows to enjoy the other stuff, you’re right back in the same boat you would have been if it was rides only.

As that’s all long-winded, I’d sum it up best this way: unless you’re only concerned with a few key experiences and you’re willing to risk missing out on lots of others (you may not miss out, but you’re at the very least introducing the possibility), a Walt Disney World vacation, unless it’s a very lengthy one, does require a good chunk of planning.

I just don't concur with that. Obviously the date matters, but the other day we did walk-on Kilimanjaro Safaris, Everest standby was 20 minutes, and even Flight of Passage was 45 minutes. At DHS, we saw Rise under an hour, and Runway Railway at 30. Again, this is September, but that's no planning.

But even if I go back to my days as a tourist, if I did five nights and I did 75% of what I hoped for, that was a good trip. No one attraction would make or break the trip. I mean, if I'm at f'ing WDW, that sure beats being most anywhere else.

But I'd argue many folks (both enthusiasts and regular ol' tourists that go to a park) would not be content with spending WDW style money for 75%. Especially if they are there for nearly a week. Would you have been OK with that in your 20s when the goal was to ride as many rides as possible?

Also, Rise at 60, Flight of Passage at 40, Everest at 20 at Safari at a walkon is not the norm. A quick search right now, at 10:30am on a Thursday in October, shows

Everest 45, Flight of Passage 80, Kilimanjaro Safaris: 75, Rise of the Resistance 90, Slinky Dog Dash 100

In my 20s? That's a strawman, I couldn't afford Disney in my 20s. And of course the lines are longer in the morning. That's true at any park, anywhere. Furthermore, the numbers you're seeing are hardly grounds for vacation killing disappointment.

I don't know who "many folks" are. I think that's speculation. It's not possible to do everything even if you did plan all the things. This is doubly so if you have children.

But I'd argue many folks (both enthusiasts and regular ol' tourists that go to a park) would not be content with spending WDW style money for 75%. Especially if they are there for nearly a week.

I don't think most people who go to WDW are doing the tallying needed to make this determination. Most people going there are looking to have fun. And they do that by riding rides, seeing shows, meeting characters, eating meals, shopping, etc. They are not keeping tallies of everything they did. And they aren't looking to give the fun they had back by obsessing on what they didn't do. Only enthusiasts and fan boys do that.

Some people here seem to be suggesting that WDW was better without Star Wars, Toy Story, Guardians, Tron and Avatar because back then you could do "everything" (however you may want to define that) in one visit (however long you think that should be). Seems like a very odd view to me.

I made that strawman because I feel you (and all of us locals) are in such a different mindset about the parks than those that save and travel far distances for an occasional trip.

It is not nearly as difficult and frustrating to plan and execute a WDW itinerary as the internet wants people to believe. But outside of us locals just popping into a park with no plan or expectation, it is still a significant process with a non-zero chance of not having a chance to do "enough of the things" when compared to any other park or set of parks.

This is obviously anecdotal, but friends of ours took a trip to Disney World last year and they did not come away fulfilled.

They are a high income family of four, so not particularly sensitive to cost, and spent the better part of a week there. I don't know all the particulars (it's a sore subject :-P), but the basic gist is that they did little-to-no planning ahead (it is a vacation, after all), and for various reasons they were not able to get everything in that they wanted or expected or whatever. And given what the trip cost them they are in no hurry to go back, ever.

Now, again, I realize this is purely an anecdote, and that spending five figures on a vacation and doing virtually no planning ahead is foolish (especially to me), and that, to Jeff's point, merely being on vacation in a warm place with good food and entertainment should be enough on it's own, but it does sort of support the argument that the pendulum may have swung too far to the "plan ahead or else" side. I mean, even if that's the impression that people falsely have, Disney might be doing something wrong here.

I'm not sure "people" have that impression at all, because while attendance is down a little bit (at all of the Orlando parks) now that we are post-revenge-travel, there is still a healthy attendance. More importantly those people are collectively spending more in 23Q3 than they did in 22Q3.

That's not a problem.

Yes, profit is down, because while revenue has grown, costs grew more and the Starcruiser write-down is putting a dent in things. But I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt that they know what they are doing.

Every time coke goes up by a nickel, the refrain is the same: "This is the last straw." It never is. Likewise, every time the attraction access policy changes (Fastpass, FP+, G+, whatever) it's the Worst Thing Ever (tm). But, at the end of the day, the total attraction capacity hasn't changed, so it doesn't really matter how it is allocated. If anything, G+ is more small-d democratic than Fastpass/FP+, because fewer people use it and it is relatively limited. And small-d democratic is probably good for Disney, becuase it means they are spreading the wealth of attraction access to more people.

In terms of attraction access, G+ is almost certainly an improvement on FP+, which rewarded repeat guests at the expense of first-timers in a much more imbalanced way.

I didn't say it's a problem, just pointing out that there may be some truth to the argument that some people have the perception that a trip requires some nontrivial or prohibitive amount of planning, and that the perception may be deserved to some degree. Which is sort of supported by the FP/FP+/G+ acronym soup there. :-P

But if that's not a problem for the business, it doesn't matter that some people don't want to go. There are enough who do.

This conversation made me change my views on some things...

When Disney was getting really busy, like maybe ten or twenty years ago, I always asked why they didn't add more attractions to compensate. Now that they have added more attractions, I realize that there is so much to do there that one can be guaranteed that they are going to be able to do everything in so many days. If they want to do it all, guests need a longer stay. (Sometimes, in some or most cases.)

Now I'm adding this observation to Cedar Point and other parks. They grow because of demand, and guests with some expectations need a longer stay.