Touring Plans
Hi Tybroid59-
The way the customized touring plans will work is this: You'll request an order form either from email or a website (don't have the exact email/website addresses yet, but should later this week). On the order form, you'll select the attractions you want to see, the time you'll arrive at the park, and and lunch or breaks you want to take during the day. You'll return this form via email to the Unofficial Guide.
Within two business days, the Guide will send you back a customized touring plan that details how to do everything you want while minimizing your wait in line. Your touring plans will be very similar in detail to the touring plans in the Guide, except they'll have your custom itinerary on it. Cost is going to be around $11.
The standard touring plans in the Guide are designed based on three main assumptions: (1) that you arrive early to the park - typically around 40 minutes before the park opens; (2) you want to see the vast majority of the attractions in the touring plan; (3) it's not the week between Christmas and New Year - the parks are so crowded then that the lines and people's behavior differ significantly from the rest of the year.
If these three things sound like you, then the standard touring plans are almost perfect - it is highly unlikely that you could save more time by re-arranging the order of the attractions. We tested the standard touring plans during Spring Break this year, and the results were very good. The 2003 touring plan for the Magic Kingdom saves about 90 minutes of standing in line versus the 2002 edition. Guests on their first visit to the Magic Kingdom who used the touring plans saved more time than Disney veterans, some of whom had 50+ visits to WDW under their belts.
The **customized** touring plans are good for people who do not want to wake up at 6:30 a.m. to tour the parks every day, but still want to save time standing in line. Or, if you want to see a different set of attractions than those the Guide suggests, then customized touring plans are for you. Finally, if you're going to go during the holidays, and want to see more than a few attractions, customized touring plans are a good bet.
Creating a good touring plan is really, really complicated for more than a handful of attractions. The two main problems are that the number of possible ways to see the attractions gets big very fast (there are over 3.6 million ways to see the ten most popular attractions in the MK, for example), and almost no one has the historical wait and Fastpass times for the attractions on which to base their decisions.
Collecting the wait- and Fastpass times is a story in it's own right. Had we had more pages in the Guide, I would have loved to share them.
Hope this helps. Let me know if you have any questions.
Sincerely,
Len
--I posted my last question to the wrong board! I'll try again here, if that's ok. Here's my question---my family is visiting WDW in June, and I'd like to know, what are the best days of the week for visiting Magic Kingdom and MGM? I'm grateful for any help anyone can give me----I've only been to WDW once, a year ago, but now I'm hooked!
