Disney likely to keep reservations in place for foreseeable future

I feel like I live in a different reality when talking about FP+ here. How does research and awareness make it any better? What pro level hack am I missing?

I visited land a few years back, rode almost every single attraction in three days. Waited decently long for a handful but not for most.

I feel like nearly every attraction in three days at world would be difficult if not impossible.

can’t say now with Star Wars and such but at the time total attraction counts between land and world differed by like 3 or 4 if I recall correctly.

For me it's the artificial demand that it creates on the second and third tier rides that I just don't like. I know that if I show up to Magic Kingdom at 6pm I'm not going to score a Fastpass for Space Mountain whether or not it's the new or old system, and I'm likely going to encounter a 40-60 minute standby wait. But until Fastpass+ came along I never had to worry about securing a FP+ time for Spaceship Earth or Star Tours because they were almost always guaranteed to be a 10 minute wait, and that's just not the case anymore unless it's right at park open or park close.

And until FP+ was a thing, I *never* saw those little table tennis paddles with the "Attraction Fastpass Line Starts Here" sign on it because the FP line was so long.

Spaceship Earth and Star Tours still have a 10 minute line at night. Or available FP's you don't need. I swear we go to different parks. 🙂

And it very well could be in part that I am jaded from working there under an awful, micromanaging operations manager in my last 10 months with the company, which is when all this stuff was rolling out.

Or I just knew how to play the paper Fastpass game. Or both.

What Brett is describing reminds me of the old A-E ticket system (which I am old enough to remember). Technically E tickets weren't rationed - you could buy more - but the effect of the way tickets were included in the books drove people to the Swiss Family Treehouse or the carousel or whatever because (a) you were rationing your E tickets a bit, not trying to go on everything, and (b) you had the A's and B's, so you might as well use them.

And I suppose we strategized what we were going to use our limited E tickets for, but I do not quite remember that.

Somewhat OT, but I found a purported list of the E-ticket rides:

Pirates of the Caribbean
Jungle Cruise
Country Bear Jamboree
Haunted Mansion
Hall of Presidents
It's a Small World
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
Space Mountain

It's a little surprising to me in that:
1) I recall that we did all of these except Hall of Presidents and Country Bears - so we really didn't have to do much rationing. (We may have been appropriating some of my grandparents' tickets.)
2) I can't believe we would have burned an E ticket on It's a Small World. Maybe we didn't and I only rode that later.
3) Some of these seem like they're really high-capacity, and I'd think they would have taken that into account.

eightdotthree said:

I feel like I live in a different reality when talking about FP+ here. How does research and awareness make it any better? What pro level hack am I missing?

I don’t feel like it’s a pro-level hack: ”book what you want 60 days out, look for more on the app once you burn 3” would get you pretty far. Combine that with a half decent rope drop strategy and I think you could do any park’s major headlinerss without any significant waiting.

I can sympathize with the “pop in after work and everything has a 60 minute wait” crowd but I’m pretty sure Disney did that intentionally. The boarding group system is the logical extreme wherein, if you care/know enough you can get on with basically zero wait, but if you roll into the park after 1pm it’s literally impossible to get a ride. It may suck for a handful of people, but I think on the whole, it works well for a lot of people.

ApolloAndy said:

”book what you want 60 days out, look for more on the app once you burn 3”

I hate it. I've never had any Fast Passes for anything with a wait after the first 3 are used up and in the meantime I' had to walk back and fourth across the park 3 times to take advantage of the ones I had.

ApolloAndy said:
The boarding group system is the logical extreme wherein, if you care/know enough you can get on with basically zero wait.

Again. Different reality. How do you get on to Rise of the Resistance with basically zero wait? I've ridden it twice and both times the wait was an hour or more once I checked in.

You had to cross the park twice with the paper system, once to get the pass, again to come back when it was time. Get off my lawn!

I was skeptical about FP+, and initially, it was a disaster in part because they couldn't check them fast enough. Now (well, pre-pandemic), I think the system is fine, save for the difficulty in getting a group of 3+ passes for exactly two rides (Flight of Passage and Seven Dwarfs). It's been easy to use as a local, and superior for a resort stay. To Andy's point, get the top three, front loaded as much as possible, and from there, fairly reasonable waits or additional FP's that shave a few minutes from your wait. That's my experience.

Jeff said:

You had to cross the park twice with the paper system, once to get the pass, again to come back when it was time. Get off my lawn!

Not with research and awareness... /end sarcasm

CA has MaxPass which lets you book Fast Passes AND download all of your photos from the app for $20. It's awesome.

I'm terrible to have any opinion on the subject, honestly. I realized Saturday night at Epcot that the festival scene on weekends is what I live for, and I hope that friends will be around and ticketed or passworthy enough to join me for it. I just dig walking around and sampling food and beverages and live music, with fireworks at the end. That's a solid night out for me. The daytime trips with my kid are fun too, but we've never really had an issue of not getting to do a few things that he wanted to in a four-hour visit.

In full disclosure, I haven’t ridden RotR yet, but my impression is that the wait after the boarding group check is usually 20 min. Regardless, compare that to the 4 hr standby lines that FoP was regularly drawing and even an hr is pretty great. Now of course that was with FP, but I bet you’d still be seeing 150 min waits on RotR without FP or Boarding groups.

But I’m curious: do you (8.3) not like the boarding group system either? I personally think it’s great, largely because I feel confident in my ability to get a BG, but also if I don’t I can just carry on withy day and not keep checking to see if the wait is less than 2 hours and then rush over there.

Resistance is, "complicated," if you want to talk about how long the "wait" is. When (spoilers!) you see Rey's hologram, then board the transport, then walk into the shuttle bay on the cruiser, then to the interrogation room, then you get on the ride, I consider all of that part of the experience. On my two trips, I don't think that has taken longer than 10 minutes to start all of that.

Confidence leads to suffering... practice you must.

I've ridden Rise of the Resistance twice. Both times it took around an hour to get to the start of the experience.

I'm late to the party on this one but there is a lot of value, in my opinion, for the 3 and 4 day Florida resident tickets. Not cost prohibitive like Annual Passes. Drives us to non-peak times of the year (to the extent that is still a reality).

All that said, if Epcot continues lengthening their festival times I can see at least two adult Annual Passes in my future as, like Jeff, I can't get enough of those.

I saw a Facebook post from Blog Mickey showing the Tomorrowland FP+ kiosks uncovered today.

Also, there were same-day reservations available for Epcot today.