Disneyland tips and tricks?

At DisneyLAND, the plans are not such a big deal and may actually help you.

At Disney WORLD, you should be prepared to *avoid* any scripted plans...which means it is useful to be aware of them..because down there, a huge percentage of the park population is just like you, visiting the park for the first time in many years and absolutely hell-bent on doing absolutely everything, and many of them are carrying one of those guidebooks with the scripted day plan in it. Well, if everybody is carrying the same script, then it will be to your advantage to deviate from that script and do not just your own thing, but the opposite of what everybody else is doing.

At Disneyland, the crowd is much more likely to be very local. Oh, sure, there are plenty of vacationers there on any given day, but there are always tons of locals at Disneyland if the weather is decent (it wasn't the last time I was there, resulting in a light crowd). So there may be some wisdom to following a plan rooted in an outside observation of crowd patterns.

At California Adventure, any plan you find is probably already out of date. Huge portions of that park are walled off at the moment for some extremely disruptive construction projects.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I don't like plans for any park. I may plan my first and second rides of the day, but after that, I like to make choices as to what to do next as I get there. I feel as if I make pretty good decisions with this because I have a lot of experience in attending amusement parks on a regular basis.

I especially like to make new discoveries at a a park without them being planned.

But that's just me. I realize that having an itinerary may be helpful to someone else.

I would be against a new system in which everyone was forced to use a preplanned itinerary, like some people are predicting. It would be great for keeping each area of the park evenly covered by park guests, but it would be a lot less fun for me. I like how Islands of Adventure oversees this problem. They post wait times for all attractions near the front of the park. This is helpful for deciding what attraction to visit. I wish every park had displays like this throughout their park, which would even out crowds and still give guests a choice.

^ That's how I am too: Especially when visiting a park I haven't been to before, I try to find out from others which rides will probably fill up quickly in the morning, so I can hit those first (e.g. Volcano at Kings Dominion). But beyond that I just go geographically, and enjoy 'exploring' the park to find where everything is... assuming I'm not pressed for time.

I never plan when I visit Disney, aside from dinner reservations. I'm going to try something new the next time I'm down there, and use the wait time app on my phone, but I'm still not going to plan.

Travis: I'm with you on the whole planning vs. not planning thing. Personally, I think Universal IOA has a good idea by putting wait times at the entrance, but the implementation is impractical. The three US parks where posted wait times would be the most workable, in my opinion, are Disneyland, Magic Kingdom, and Kings Island...parks where you can get from any arbitrary point "A" in the park to some arbitrary point "B" without having to walk all the way around a Duell loop.

How about this: Instead of wait time signs at points around the park, how about directional arrows at the midway junction points: "For shortest attraction wait times, go THAT WAY".

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Because then the wait times aren't going to be short...

Wow. A continuously updated wait time display near the Eiffel Tower at Kings Island would be awesome!

I would think that the biggest problem with implementing something like that would be accuracy. In my experience with front-of-the-line access, once a line gets any longer than 10 or 15 minutes, park employees have no idea what the wait time (actual or approximate) for any attraction will be.

I would guess the complete opposite. The longer a line is, the more closely the estimate for a given wait should approach the real time. As queue length grows higher, the number of cycles required to process that line also increases. This has the twin effect of averaging out variations in cycle times over many cycles, as well as averaging out fluctuations in line spacing -- the longer line, the less bunchings and clusterings of customers in line affects the overall estimate of wait time. So the estimate of a two hour wait, in fact, ought to be more precise than the estimate of a half hour wait.

This is no different than the power of a sample approaching true representation of a population as the sample number increases.

I'm sure Dave has a much fancier explanation of the same phenomenon.

DHS also has the board at the front of the park with wait times. IIRC, IOA also has one in back somewhere near Jurassic Park. It's a great idea if you have the proper data to update it, as I assume those parks do. If you're relying on employee guess work, then it's not worth it to me.

This is also where Disney's line measurement system has certain faults. It's a cool idea to verify waiting time by actually using the people in the line to do the measurement (Universal does it as well now), but it falls apart if you have either large mobs descending on the ride, or long "dry spells"...both of which are common in the Disney parks because of parades and shows. The trouble is, the information that comes out of that system is delayed by the length of the line: if the system says it is a 20 minute wait it doesn't mean it is a 20 minute wait *now*, it means it was a 20 minute wait 20 minutes ago. "Crush" and "drought" conditions can really mess that up in a hurry. On a low capacity ride, the queue time will tend to be underestimated; with high capacity it will overestimate.

The most accurate way to measure the length of the line would be to count people as they enter the line, then count them again as they leave the line to board the ride. Then compare the number of people waiting in line with the measured average dispatch interval. This could all be automated...and in an environment like Disney where you have rides with dual entrances, the queue could even be measured before and after the merge point. You could tell with some accuracy *exactly* how long it will take to get onto the ride. Combine that with wait boards and directional signs, and you start to have a sophisticated queue management system with continuously updated information and no human intervention required...

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Wow, Dave. That is a brilliant idea. Why haven't we seen any of the park use that technique to measure the wait time? You may be onto something. You should patient that idea right away. :)

Well, since he hasn't patented it yet, obviously he *is* being patient with that idea. ;)

In fairness, the first time I saw a suggestion of not only using two turnstiles (one at the queue entrance, one at the boarding area) to count people in the queue but also tying it into the ride PLC to consider the line length in terms of current average throughput was, if I remember correctly, an article by Dan Birket that I read on the Birket Engineering web site. There is a lot of neat theoretical controls stuff there, but I can't find the original article.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

Stupid spell check can't always save me from my carelessness. :)

Dave, you don't know how interesting this sounds to me. I wish this technology would be used at parks, especially the ones who have ride reservations. It would help me to trust the posted wait times and the reserved ride times. I don't trust that info at all now.

There is a bit of psychology involved too. I've noticed that the posted wait times are usually overestimated up to 20%. And it really helps actually.

RideMan said:
The trouble is, the information that comes out of that system is delayed by the length of the line: if the system says it is a 20 minute wait it doesn't mean it is a 20 minute wait *now*, it means it was a 20 minute wait 20 minutes ago. "Crush" and "drought" conditions can really mess that up in a hurry... The most accurate way to measure the length of the line would be to count people as they enter the line, then count them again as they leave the line to board the ride. Then compare the number of people waiting in line with the measured average dispatch interval.

You mean like giving a guest a tag?

You're not giving Disney enough credit. You assume that the software isn't taking into account the number of bodies entering and exiting the queue, and many rides do that (look for the turnstiles without the turning part). You also assume it isn't counting the dispatch rate of the ride. In fact, I'd even argue that the tags they give guests are little more than something to calibrate the system, not the sole object on which they calculate wait time.

Even if, in your example, the length went from 20 to 60 minutes, in 20 minutes, you're talking about 40 minutes of people entering the line instantaneously. From 60 to 20, you're talking about 40 minutes of people riding instantaneously. We both know neither is possible.

Disney's system is not only good enough, I bet it's damn near dead-on, unless they intentionally put high numbers up as a further measure to distribute people to other rides (something I'd be all for).

I was at Disney two years ago and I found the system to be pretty accurate. Then again the fast pass def helps your day go a bit easier unless they run out of course (which they did on toy story mania...sad)

Just have to mention - last weekend we saw Space Mountain go from 30 mins posted to 60 mins to 95 minutes all in about 5 minutes' time. We were going to get in line after a quick bathroom stop happy since the wait was only a half-hour. Even after seeing the posted wait "virtually instantaneously" go from 30 to 60, we were going to ride - it IS Sapce Mountain after all. When we waited 2 minutes and saw it go to 95, the decision was made to go ride something else. Something VERY similar happened later when we made the error of getting in line for Big Thunder shortly after a parade ended. The posted wait of 30 mins turned out to be about 65-70 mins.

I love Disney (not quite at Josh level, but a LOT) - that wasn't their finest hour.

edited since kingdacor posted - TSMM typically seems to run out of FPs within 2 hours of opening...sometimes less. If you want to ride it (and trust me, you DO) - you need to get there at opening. We got in line *at opening* immediately upon grabbing some FPs - by the time we exited the ride at 9:40, the line for the ride was over an hour, and the FP line itself was probably about an hour...

Disney - PLEASE build a copy of that ride.. 2-hour waits pretty much all day long, that's not customer service...thanks! :)

Your other option for Toy Story Mania at the studio park, if the park isn't slammed but the fastpasses are gone, is to get there *somewhat* early, preferably while one of the bigger shows is going on. What I found was that the wait time estimate was set considerably higher than the actual wait time, because they had compensated for the FastPass users who were expected to ride during that hour. When I got there on my most recent visit, the FastPasses were gone, and the posted wait was about 40 minutes. I clearly picked a good time to ride, though, because the line moved almost continuously. There were, maybe, a dozen people who came through the FastPass entrance during the 18 minutes I waited in the main queue. Within 25 minutes, I was on board the ride. In other words, it was the inverse of the situation I had encountered a year earlier on the same ride, when I got there at the same time that all the FastPass people showed up. Again, I think the key is the showtimes for the big shows in the park. People who get to the park early go to Toy Story Mania, gobble up all the FastPasses, and then instead of coming back at their designated return times, they come back much later in the day, leaving an open window earlier in the day when you can sneak in with a shorter wait.

--Dave Althoff, Jr.

I didnt even know they could get away with making the wait times longer than they really are. Pretty sneaky if you ask me. I will have to keep an eye on that when I am out there this summer. I also am planning on doing Calif Great America (yeah I caved and going to rent a car and drive out there, get a room like someone mentioned while keeping the disney hotel active) Hopefully they won't do much time changes at that park.