The Miscellaneous Thought Thread

mickEblu

mickEblu

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
chadwpalm said:
I went in 2015 and wasn't staying onsite. Those staying onsite got to book their first 3 fastpasses 60 days in advance and those who weren't staying onsite can only book 30 in advance. By the time your 30 day window is up all of the good rides are gone, so you book subpar attractions.

Then when you get there, you had to use all 3 fastpasses before you can book more, so if your 3rd fastpass was at like 1pm....well....good luck, cause by then all the good rides were sold out for the day. We ended up having to wait 3 hours for SDMT and was the biggest waste of 3 hours of my life.
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I see. Sorry, I should have been more specific. Meant to say vacationers staying onsite. Basically I’m trying to understand if I, someone who plans on going to WDW and stay onsite in the next couple years would prefer the current genie system or something closer to the older FP+ system. Being able to book the top 3 (non- ILL) rides at each park in advance sounds much less stressful than the current system. That probably leaves one more ILL to purchase per park which is a nominal fee when on vacation. Am I missing something? Would anyone staying onsite prefer Genie + to FP+?
 
PiratesMansion

PiratesMansion

Well-Known Member
mickEblu said:
Was the old FP + system worse for vacationers? From what I remember it sounded better than having to wake up at 7am on vacation to buy Genie + and maybe get to use it on 2-3 rides.
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It sounds good on paper, BUT:
-As said above, if you're not staying with Disney at night, you had basically no shot of getting the newest rides. In 2017, we would NOT have gotten either of the Avatar rides, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, or Frozen without staying on site.
-WDW has drastically worse ride capacity than DLR, so if every person automatically gets 3 reservations per day, and can be booked in advance, the overall number of things you can book in one day goes down pretty fast.
-Especially because literally everything more complicated than, say, Tiki Room, the Railroad, or the Riverboat had FP+. So what happened with Monsters Inc at DCA, happened to almost all the attractions at every park. At WDW of all places, where even the park with the best capacity (MK) has a fair amount less capacity than Disneyland, and where some parks have around nine rides total.
-Additionally, the FP+ apologists tend to minimalize this, but the non-MK parks were tiered. So you couldn't get BOTH TT or Soarin', you had to pick one-assuming you reserved in advance and they were available. You couldn't get BOTH TSMM and RNRC, you had to pick one. Once Pandora opened, you couldn't get both Pandora attractions. Invariably this meant it was difficult to get three attractions where FP+ would actually have been helpful in some parks, regardless of how early you were able to book. Epcot was particularly bad for this. This was great for Disney because they could shunt people into places that were less busy to more evenly distribute demand; not so great for a consumer who could tell the difference between FEA and the current Figment attraction.
-If you were a poor schmuck who walked into the park not knowing any of this and learned about FP+ when you walked in the gates, you were pretty much SOL.

Getting three FPs guranteed sounds nice, but getting much beyond those three (particularly anything good) was FAR more difficult than using FP/MP/LL at DLR. And that's assuming you actually got three good rides and you didn't end up stuck with, say, Journey into Imagination with Figment, Turtle Talk, and Living with the Land (which I like, but let's be honest, almost nobody is going to Epcot primarily to ride LWTL).

Imagine walking into DLR pre-LL and finding out, at park open, that Space Mountain and Indy were out of FPs for the day because they'd been gobbled up a month or two before by Disney hotel guests. That's what FP+ did to WDW. Can't say I liked it much.

But people who didn't do the comparison math or didn't know what they were missing loved it, so now some spin FP+ as this tragically missed gem of a service that WDW so rudely snatched away from them.
 
mickEblu

mickEblu

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
PiratesMansion said:
It sounds good on paper, BUT:
-As said above, if you're not staying with Disney at night, you had basically no shot of getting the newest rides. In 2017, we would NOT have gotten either of the Avatar rides, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, or Frozen without staying on site.
-WDW has drastically worse ride capacity than DLR, so if every person automatically gets 3 reservations per day, and can be booked in advance, the overall number of things you can book in one day goes down pretty fast.
-Especially because literally everything more complicated than, say, Tiki Room, the Railroad, or the Riverboat had FP+. So what happened with Monsters Inc at DCA, happened to almost all the attractions at every park. At WDW of all places, where even the park with the best capacity (MK) has a fair amount less capacity than Disneyland, and where some parks have around nine rides total.
-Additionally, the FP+ apologists tend to minimalize this, but the non-MK parks were tiered. So you couldn't get BOTH TT or Soarin', you had to pick one-assuming you reserved in advance and they were available. You couldn't get BOTH TSMM and RNRC, you had to pick one. Once Pandora opened, you couldn't get both Pandora attractions. Invariably this meant it was difficult to get three attractions where FP+ would actually have been helpful in some parks, regardless of how early you were able to book. Epcot was particularly bad for this. This was great for Disney because they could shunt people into places that were less busy to more evenly distribute demand; not so great for a consumer who could tell the difference between FEA and the current Figment attraction.
-If you were a poor schmuck who walked into the park not knowing any of this and learned about FP+ when you walked in the gates, you were pretty much SOL.

Getting three FPs guranteed sounds nice, but getting much beyond those three (particularly anything good) was FAR more difficult than using FP/MP/LL at DLR. And that's assuming you actually got three good rides and you didn't end up stuck with, say, Journey into Imagination with Figment, Turtle Talk, and Living with the Land (which I like, but let's be honest, almost nobody is going to Epcot primarily to ride LWTL).

Imagine walking into DLR pre-LL and finding out, at park open, that Space Mountain and Indy were out of FPs for the day because they'd been gobbled up a month or two before by Disney hotel guests. That's what FP+ did to WDW. Can't say I liked it much.

But people who didn't do the comparison math or didn't know what they were missing loved it, so now some spin FP+ as this tragically missed gem of a service that WDW so rudely snatched away from them.
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Thanks for the thorough bread down. Ok it doesn’t sound as great as I remembered. Sounds more like a toss up for which system is better for those staying onsite and definitely inferior for those who aren’t. FP+ kind of lost me with the tiered options but still probably preferable for someone like me, a Disneyland AP who doesn’t need to do rides like Soarin, TSMM or Smugglers Run.
 
Too Many Hats

Too Many Hats

Well-Known Member
Dear Prudence said:
I had no idea that WDW's Railroad was such a colossal waste of... basically everything. LOL.
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Ha! Did you (like me) just watch the Poseidon Entertainment video on YouTube?

I grew up with WDW and loved the railroad so much. The BTMR flooded town segment is delightful, as is the tunnel through Splash. But then I went to Disneyland and realized how deprived my childhood really was...
 
SuddenStorm

SuddenStorm

Well-Known Member
mickEblu said:
Getting my last ride(s) on Splash this Saturday. Haven’t been to Disneyland in 2 months so I’m looking forward to it. Of course just when the weather started getting decent my schedule wouldn’t allow me to go.
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Try and get on it first thing if you can, it was the busiest I've seen it in a while yesterday. 30 minute wait at close, when it's normally walk on after 10:30p or so.

I thought it looked better than it has in a while. So it should be satisfying to ride.
 
mickEblu

mickEblu

Well-Known Member
Original Poster
SuddenStorm said:
Try and get on it first thing if you can, it was the busiest I've seen it in a while yesterday. 30 minute wait at close, when it's normally walk on after 10:30p or so.

I thought it looked better than it has in a while. So it should be satisfying to ride.
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Will do! What would you say the wait time topped out at in the afternoon?
 

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