Hours Needed For Each Park

[Gran Fiesta]

I am going on a trip soon to Disney World in August and I was starting to plan out each day with park hopper and trying to maximize the time I have in the parks to try to do as many attractions as possible. We are a group of only 2 and we are going to spend 5 days in the park. I just wanted some advice on how should we distribute our hours in order to do everything in the parks? I didn't want to go to one park for too few hours or another too many hours. I know this is kind of a vague question since everyone does Disney differently, but we really want to try to go all out from rope drop until park closure all 5 days. Also our hours might change just based on how fast we get things done, thats the nice thing about park hopper.

So far our (planned) hours distribution so far is:

MK: 17
HS: 14
AK: 13
EP: 11

(Also I know I'm just splitting hairs here lol, but I am overall just interested to see which parks everyone spends the most time at compared to ones they don't)

 

[aliceismad]

We have been before but it has been a while, and we just plan on doing all quick service. When we went Hollywood studios was only a 1/2 day for us as well but A LOT has changed since then. Toy story land, Star Wars land, and MMRR have all opened since then and I was wondering if I need more time there because of those things?

I would look at wait times at the various rides you are interested in and ballpark based on that. For example, right now at 11:15 on a Tuesday, the WDW app lists Slinky at 110 minutes, SR at 95, A$$ at 70, TSM is 65, and MMRR at 60. RNRC and TOT are at 80 and 85. Even Star Tours is at 50, which is crazy. ST was a waste of a FP in 2019. Lots of high-demand rides in DHS with not a lot of other capacity to take the pressure off those rides. Maybe that will lighten a bit when shows open. So I would open the app from time to time and check (or pay for touringplans because I enjoy that).

ROTR is the virtual queue, of course, so there's no guarantee you'll be able to ride that. If SW:GE is a priority for you, you're probably going to have to be flexible with your hours because there's no way to know when you will get a ROTR boarding group.

 

[Weather_Lady]

My family breaks our touring into roughly 4-hour "blocks" of rope-drop-to-lunch, and 4/5pm-until-park-closing, with a 3-4 hour break in the middle of the day. Obviously that will change with the newly-truncated EPCOT hours, and we'll probably just do 11am-whenever on our EPCOT day, in one go. Still, our usual distribution in the past has been:

3 "blocks" (~12 hours) for MK: one for Tomorrowland/Fantasyland, one for Adventureland/Frontierland/Lib.Sq., and one to revisit favorites and do things like Tom Sawyer Island. MK is the only park where we routinely do pretty much everything, and many attractions more than once.

2 "blocks" (~8 hours) for EPCOT: (about 6 hours for all of the Future World attractions and 2 hours for World Showcase, where we only visit about half of the pavilions and do both rides and perhaps take in a little live entertainment, but don't stop to watch any of the films)

1.5 "blocks" (~6 hours) for AK (doing every "ride" and trail in the park and 1 of the live shows, skipping Rafiki's Planet Watch/Conservation Station)

1.5 "blocks" (~6 hours) for HS (doing almost every "ride" and 1 of the live shows)

OP, if you're not a touringplans subscriber, I suggest looking into it. It will allow you to develop personalized touring plans that take into account projected crowd levels and wait times. Even if you'd rather come up with plans on the fly, tinkering around with touring plans is a great way to get a sense of what attractions to do, in what order, to maximize your time. If you enjoy that sort of thing, that is (which I do)!

 

[aliceismad]

My family breaks our touring into roughly 4-hour "blocks" of rope-drop-to-lunch, and 4/5pm-until-park-closing, with a 3-4 hour break in the middle of the day.

Oh hey, that's how I planned our last trip too. It worked really well for the most part. It was flexible enough to account for kiddo and random wants and whatnot but enough planning so we got a lot accomplished.

 

[jimbojones]

For our family we find 5 days to be perfect! *
Day 1: MK all day
Day 2: EP all day
Day 3: AK all day
Day 4: HW morning to whichever parks has lower waits in the evening (pre starwars stuff when HW was a half day park)
Day 5: open, hop between two parks we want to revist before we go, usually AK to MK

MK and AK are our favorite parks and we go every 3 years or so , and so don't feel the need to try and see every attraction every visit. When we have done 6 or more days by the middle of day 6 we are "done with disney" and want to get back to experience realworld things. Some of this timeline is nostalgia because when I went as a little kid there was only MK and EP so I like to visit those parks in my first two days.

*pre pandemic at least