Rock 'n' Roller Coaster / Tower of Terror FastPass outage

[Tom Morrow]

When the Splash Mountain fastpass was down a couple weeks ago we waited in standby for over an hour, moving nice and slow and sweating to death. Not much fun with a 3 and 5 year old.

If they had been using fastpass on this day, and you didn't have one, your wait would have been even longer and slower.

Another problem with fastpass is not only the amount of people using it, but the fact that at the merge point, you have to take in a higher ratio of fastpass users than guests in the standby line. if the fastpass line gets too backed up, the standby line will not move at ALL for a while. That, plus the fact that we can't refuse any late fastpasses all makes the standby line much longer and slower than it needs to be.

Take it from someone who works on an attraction that uses fastpass - without it, things would go much smoother for everyone.

I completely agree. It's only logical that no fastpass means slightly less wait for people who don't use it, but for those of us smart enough to use it waiting 5-10 minutes/ride versus 45 minutes is a huge difference.

See, the point is, there wouldn't BE a 45 minute standby wait if there was no fastpass.

 

[nckid110]

Wow I really am glad I'm getting there on the 18 and I'm leaving Disney on the 23 for Universal. And the problem with the Fastpass is that its free with any ticket. I think they should use Universals fastpass you either pay for it and get one fastpass ride on each ride or stay onsite and get unlimited use of it. But thats just my thought....

 

[Monty]

Ah, the ever-popular debate as to the value [or lack thereof] of fastpasses.

Disney uses the Fast Pass to control traffic flow and reduce line sizes. There is no way to accurately determine how fast the lines would move if there weren't FPs on rides that have them, there are simply too many variables. Anecdotal stories of "I remember ride X before it had FPs and it loaded much faster" don't add anything of value.

Assuming the FP riders all joined the Stand By line and the load speed of the ride itself remained entirely unchanged, the lines would be longer, but the waits for original stand by users would remain roughly the same [all those folks with FPs who get let in in front of you would now be in front of you in the line]. The reality is that that wouldn't happen though, because people like myself who for physical reasons can't wait in lines longer than 30 minutes and others who simply wouldn't choose to wait that long would just decide not to ride. So in all likelihood, the lines would move somewhat faster, but Disney would lose a fair number of guests who wouldn't be willing to pay admission and not ride any rides because of long waits.

Disney is about profit. I don't shop while I'm in line but do while awaiting my FP time...

 

[Mansion Butler]

Here comes the long lines. But maybe they won't be as long as I think they're gonna be, because they won't have to actually load the fastpass line.

I still contend the Tower line is rarely that bad. Even on capacity days I'm usually in line less than 45 minutes.

 

[Figment82]

I'm glad FP for Tower isn't going down until the 23rd. I'm going to ride it 13 times on the 22nd (to celebrate it's 13th birthday, I designed a shirt and everything) and was banking on using FP to help me achieve my goal in a timely manner.