Friday, February 9, 2018

Planning Fastpasses at Walt Disney World - Part 3

Hi Disney friends,

I come to the last post in the series of planning fastpasses, and I wanted to spend time talking about how my family goes about our plan for a day in the parks in regards to booking our fastpasses. For starters, we stay on site, which means we are able to book at the 60 day window which allows for more opportunity to book rides. There is one thing to remember though, when the window opens at 7am eastern, some rides have already had people booking them, because when you stay on site, your 60 day window includes up to 7 days of the trip. That means that if your window opens for a trip on a Monday, you are able to book through the following Sunday (again if you are staying on site.) Therefore, some of the times may not be the best, but if you start early you should be able to get what you want.

What we do is try to plan on going to parks with extra magic hours in the morning. Since we are staying on site, we are able to ride rides one hour prior to the official opening of the park. At EPCOT and Hollywood Studios, we book one Tier 1 ride for as close to opening as we can get and then 2 tier 2 rides as soon after that as we can (they will not let you overlap times.) We get to the park for extra magic hours and hit the other tier 1 rides if we can. Then as close to opening, we head over to our first fastpass ride (tier 1.) Once we have checked in, there is still some waiting, we will try to go to our other 2 rides and move them up and finish them as fast as possible so that we have the option of booking other fastpasses for later in the day. If most of the fastpass options are gone, we will book one of the fireworks shows that have fastpasses (Illuminations at EPCOT, Fantasmic at Hollywood Studios, or Rivers of Light at Animal Kingdom.)

So a typical fastpass day for EPCOT may look like:

800 am Test Track (at rope drop—not fastpassed)
900 am Soarin (as soon as booked through start trying to move times up for other rides)
1000 am – 1200 am Journey Into Imagination with Figment and Mission: Space

Then we are free to do other things.

A quick not about Flight of Passage at Animal Kingdom. The ride is so popular that early morning times are booked out when you get to your 60 day window. Therefore, you can plan a late day at the park or book from the end of your trip (book the ride for the last day you are in the parks) and then back up to other rides. When my last trip occurred, I was able to FOP at 630 pm on the third day of our trip and I booked fastpasses at 702 am when my window opened.

Walt Disney World does not have tiered rides, but 7 Dwarfs Mine Train and Peter Pan’s Flight are 2 of the more popular attractions and book relatively quickly.

I hope this helps you in any planning you have coming up for a trip to Walt Disney World and again if you need any help booking a Disney vacation of any type, please let me know at brian.herndon@mousemadesimple.com.


PS: There is one disadvantage that I can think of when using fastpasses—you do miss out on some of the more interesting queues for some of the lines. An example is that in Space Mountain in Magic Kingdom, there are games to play if you are in the nonfastpass line—but you are moving faster—so in the end, it is about tradeoffs.
Part of the queue at Flight of Passage

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