FastPass at Disney World: How much is too much?

Which only begs the question, why would you ever get in the standby line?

RideMan said:
The virtual queue system does not increase the number of people who can experience an attraction. The capacity of the ride does not increase.

It DOES increase the number of people who can enter the queue for the attraction in any given hour.

Exactly.

And if those people are waiting longer in that line, then they're not in another line somewhere...which makes that other line shorter.

Like I said, I get the idea that ride capacity doesn't increase, but queue capacity does. But that still doesn't change the fact that ride capacity doesn't decrease either. They're still giving the same number of rides per day. They're just distributing those rides to people differently.

Under this insane situation (think Indy at Disneyland on Christmas. Been there, done that.) in an hour you're packing 2,400 people into the real queue and 2,160 into the virtual queue. After one hour, you have 4,560 people who have entered the ride queue. Of those people 1,600 of your virtual queue people and 800 of the real queue people get to ride in the first hour. So at the end of the hour, you have 1,600 people standing in the regular queue, and 560 people waiting in the virtual queue.

Of course, in reality, this kind of a crush load doesn't keep up all day long. But that is a good thing.

Not only is it a good thing, it's the key to the whole thing working.

I work on the assumption that people look at the posted time to decide whether to enter the queue based on their personal threshold for waiting. If that number happens to be 60 minutes (just an arbitrary number for the example - any number will do), it doesn't matter if that queue is 800 people or 2400 people long if the sign out front says there is a 75 minute wait. The guest isn't entering either way.

Because if it keeps up for just one hour, the real queue, which is running at 800 PPH, gets backed up into a two hour wait. The virtual queue in this case actually does initially move a little faster, as someone arriving at the end of the first hour will only be asked to wait about 20 minutes. But that number is going to deteriorate as well, and with a 2+ hour wait in the real queue, the virtual queue machines are going to stay busy until the allotment is gone. Incidentally, in a 12-hour operating day, that allotment of 19,200 tickets will be gone in just over eight hours. Meanwhile, because the real queue is so badly throttled, there is no way for that queue to recover from the 2-hour wait that got dumped on it in the first hour.

Sure, but that also assumes one ride in a vacuum. I'm not disagreeing with the idea that with FP the stand-by wait increases with the same number of people physically in line. But people have a tolerance. Like you said, that line doesn't keep growing at some point it levels off. People spread to other rides and attractions.

I still can't get past the idea that on any given day there is X number of people in the park and Y number of seats available at all the rides and attractions. None of that changes with or without FP. Some guests may be getting on less rides or riding different rides than they would without FP, but others are getting on more or riding the exact same thing. The net result is the same...those Y number of seats are filled by some combination of the X number of guests in the park.

Let me turn the question around a bit.

What's wrong with a system where EVERYBODY has to obtain a ride time in order to ride? Why not run the ride at 100% FastPass? Why is it that 80% FastPass is acceptable but 100% FastPass is not?

Well, I'd be cool with it. But the fact remains that there's too many variables with people showing up to guarantee that the seats get filled. You'd still need a stand-by or you'd potentially run some cycles with unfilled seats and others with extra people waiting based on the random ebb and flow of people's whims. I think that's why they've figured an 80/20 split to be efficient. You need a stand-by under any circumstance and you also need to guarantee that the stand-by moves...even a little.

On a ride that can move 1,200 PPH, an hour of crush load yields a one hour wait without a virtual queue. If you can't boost the ride capacity to 2,400 PPH, what else can you do to reduce the lines?

I'm not sure the idea is necessarily to reduce the wait - at least with FP - although people tend to play the system that way. I think the idea is that you can ride without standing in a long line. Go do something else, we'll hold your seat. Because, like has been said countless times in this thread already, if you're scoring a FP and then standing in another long FP-accessible line while holding it, you're missing the point entirely...and adding to the problem.

When I visit Disneyland I spend the first half of the day obtaining fastpass tickets and riding rides that do not offer the pass. Then in the last few hours of the day I use all my tickets, even though the ride time has expired.

So am I creating longer lines or shortening lines with this practice?

A few years ago when I visited Disneyland I ordered my tickets with AAA our tickets allowed us to get "enhanced Fastpasses" - where you could get a fastpass for any ride then immediately get another fastpass for any other ride without waiting for 2-hours (or whatever the time limit is).

So in the morning all we would have to do was have one person in our family go around to all the fast pass machines and get a fast pass for every ride first thing in morning. Then enjoy the whole day doing whatever we wanted and use the fastpasses as we pass the rides - even get another fastpass for the same ride as long as it was past 2-hours since getting a fastpass for the ride. By the end of the day we would always have fastpasses left over since I would get them everytime we went past a machine.

While it was great for us, I am sure this pratice messed up the lines - which is why I think they have discontinued this option.

Yeah, that AAA package deal lasted maybe a year or two tops.