Magic Kingdom Fifteen Attractions Before 2:00pm — Follow Along LIVE Tuesday on Periscope

Magic Kingdom Rope Drop

I had enough fun earlier this week using Periscope briefly to live-stream a ride on Expedition Everest, that I thought I’d next try something a little more ambitious.

So, in that spirit, I’ve created a Magic Kingdom RideMax plan for Tuesday, January 19th, that should allow me to visit fifteen attractions by 2:00pm. More significantly, I plan to live stream the entire visit on Periscope. I’ll have my extra phone batteries (and leg muscles) ready to go bright and early Tuesday morning for park opening.

What is it that appeals to me about Periscope for this? Three things, really.

First, Periscope will allow me to show off this RideMax plan in a real-time setting. And since it’s a *live* video, you know that what you see is what you get.

Second, I expect to keep broadcasting even as I’m walking from one attraction to the next, and while I’m standing in line. And although if everything works out the lines should be fairly short, if anyone viewing the broadcast has questions you’d like to ask over Periscope during this lull between rides, I’ll try and answer what I can as I’m moving about the park.

Finally, I’d like to be able to share some of my favorite tips for visiting some of the attractions, and live video seems ideal for doing this.

If you want to join in but don’t want to spend all day watching for your favorite attraction, here is the plan I intend to follow, and yes, I already have those FP+ reservations lined up:

MagicKingdom15Rides

As you can see, the day begins with what might be the ultimate rope-drop challenge in all of Disney’s theme parks, visiting the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. I’ll try to show you how I navigate the crowds for this to (hopefully) end up near the front of the line. That 10-minute estimate may look optimistic, but it all depends on how you make your way into the park, and hopefully the live-feed video can allow me to show that.

Looking at this plan you may be wondering if I plan to take a lunch break, and the answer is yes, sort of. I guess I’m cheating a bit by virtue of the fact that, based on the current weather forecast, I expect Tuesday to very cold, and that 31-minute estimated wait for Splash Mountain will instead be closer to 5 minutes. This should give me time for a lunch break somewhere in that timeline, probably right after Pirates.

I also decided I wouldn’t attempt to broadcast a ride on Space Mountain, as there wouldn’t be too much to see in the dark, so it’s omitted from the plan. In addition, Buzz Lightyear is scheduled to be closed for refurbishment, so that doesn’t leave us with much to see in Tomorrowland. Then again, I do have to admit that simultaneously driving and filming the Tomorrowland Speedway should be… interesting.

At any rate, if you want to join in the fun, be sure to follow me on Periscope. I’m new to “scoping” and don’t have a huge following there; this should make it easier to answer your questions as we hit those 15 rides.

I expect that the Magic Kingdom will open at roughly 8:45am, and I’ll start the scope just prior to that time.

I hope to see you on Tuesday!

 

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Quick Postmortem for Animal Kingdom RideMax Roulette

DisneysAnimalKingdomDeVine

This is just a quick follow-up to my previous post from Tuesday’s round of RideMax Roulette at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. (And yes, I did meet DiVine, shown above, shortly after entering the park!)

For those who were wondering, Tuesday went really well in terms of low wait times and a decent touring plan. About the only downside was that I lost my prescription eyeglasses on Expedition Everest while trying to ride and simultaneously video stream the experience on Periscope. (I have to admit I thought it was fun to “scope” the ride, though, and I’ll have a longer follow-up post on Periscope later today or tomorrow.) All’s well that ends well, as Disney has found my specs and promised to put them in the mail today.

Anyway, as a recap, here’s the RideMax plan I followed Tuesday during this round of RideMax Roulette:

RideMaxRouletteDisneysAnimalKingdom

After seeing this plan, some of you may have been wondering about that second green line, the FP+ at Primeval Whirl. This was my second ride on that particular attraction, where I also began my day.

I’m guessing some of you were wondering if it wouldn’t have been faster and involve less walking to just do that second ride on Primeval Whirl right after the first one, rather than coming back to it later in the day?

And if you were thinking this, you’d be right.

This is a case where using FP+ actually *hurts* the overall efficiency of the plan. In fact, RideMax estimates that I’d save about eight minutes of walking (with a similar amount of waiting) if I just hit Primeval Whirl again the second time right at the top of the day, rather than using FP+ and coming back later.

One big reason that using FP+ for the second ride on Primeval Whirl is less efficient is that when you make your FP+ reservations, you’re forced to “space out” the reservations so that they don’t overlap, and RideMax knows about this restriction when it creates your plan. So, because I already had a FP+ for Dinosaur that ran from 9:05 to 10:05, the earliest time slot available for that second ride on Primeval Whirl was sometime *after* that.

There are a couple of lessons I draw from this.

First, it pays to play with your options in RideMax before settling on a final plan for the day (and this especially applies to your FP+ options).

Second, maybe you really *do* want to use the plan the way it’s outlined and use FP+ for that second ride on Primeval Whirl. Why would you do that? If you really do plan to leave the park as soon as the plan is finished, then you probably shouldn’t. If, however, you’re trying to get a fourth FastPass for the day and want to visit attractions after the formal plan is finished, it might make sense to follow the plan and “burn” that FP+ anyway. Remember, you can’t get those fourth (or fifth…) FP+ reservations until you’ve actually used your first three.

I hope this helps reinforce the idea that experimenting with options in RideMax is a good thing. And thanks again for following along on this latest round of RideMax Roulette!

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RideMax Roulette Tuesday at Disney’s Animal Kingdom

RideMax Roulette at Disney's Animal Kingdom

I’m heading out tomorrow (Tuesday, January 12th) for another round of RideMax Roulette, this time at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Feel free to follow along as I send out live tweets and Facebook updates throughout the day. Who knows, I may even try out that Periscope thing for a ride on Expedition Everest or something. You can find me at the Periscope username @RideMax4Disney.

For those who’ve followed the blog for a while, you know that RideMax Roulette is a sort of game where I choose a set of attractions at random, and plug them into the RideMax optimizing software. I then take the resulting plan to the park to see how well it works out. Playing this game gives me a good chance to test the plans RideMax comes up with, as well as — quite frankly — forces me to visit attractions I might not otherwise be all that inclined to see.

One additional goal with tomorrow’s plan is to check out the new Pizzafari restaurant, something I haven’t done since it came out of refurbishment a little over a month or so ago. Josh over at easyWDW did a write-up on this recently, which has me intrigued.

My random number generator came up with the following list of attractions for tomorrow’s visit. I’ve listed these in alphabetical order:

  • Dinosaur
  • Dinosaur again (yes, we’re doing this one twice)
  • Discovery Island Trails
  • Expedition Everest
  • Finding Nemo, the Musical
  • Flights of Wonder
  • It’s Tough to Be a Bug
  • Maharajah Jungle Trek
  • Primeval Whirl
  • Primeval Whirl (yes, also twice — hopefully no barf-bag required)
  • TriceraTop Spin

This may seem like sort of a “softball” list of attractions, as I’m expecting tomorrow at Animal Kingdom to be fairly uncrowded. Tomorrow is a RideMax “recommended day” for Animal Kingdom, coming off an Extra Magic Hours morning day today. To make things even easier, Kilimanjaro Safaris didn’t even come up in the list of attractions I’ll be visiting. I decided to push ahead anyway.  🙂

For FastPass+ selections, I decided to tell RideMax I wanted to use FP+ at Dinosaur, Expedition Everest, and Primeval Whirl. I also plugged in a lunch break at Pizzafari, and RideMax came up with the following game plan for the day.

RideMaxRouletteDisneysAnimalKingdom

We’ll see how this actually works out in practice, but on paper, it looks pretty decent, with just an estimated 64-minute wait to visit 11 attractions, or just six minutes per attraction. Even if you take out the two zero-wait “walking” attractions — Discovery Island Trails and Maharajah Jungle Trek — the average wait is still just a hair above seven minutes each, and that assumes we arrive 20 minutes early to wait for Finding Nemo. Overall, this looks like a great day with very little wait.

Continuing on with the planning, as a further confirmation of my expectation of low crowds tomorrow, I didn’t have any trouble securing FP+ reservations at the times recommended by RideMax on this plan, even though I made the reservations this afternoon, just one day before my visit. Here’s a really big picture taken from my phone, just to emphasize the point (and because I’m too lazy to size it down lol):

AnimalKingdomFastPassPlus

Note that if I hadn’t been able to secure the FP+ reservation times shown in this RideMax plan, I would have used the new feature added recently to RideMax which allows me to specify the times at which I want to use my FP+ reservations, and had RideMax recalculate accordingly.

So, wish me luck on my quest tomorrow. Again, feel free to follow along on Twitter, Facebook, or (possibly) Periscope @RideMax4Disney. I also welcome any guests for lunch at Pizzafari if you’re free at the lunchtime shown on the RideMax plan.

Here’s looking forward to tomorrow!

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New FastPass+ Feature in RideMax

For customers who’ve used RideMax recently to plan a visit to Walt Disney World, you know that you can tell RideMax which attractions you wish to use FastPass+ (FP+) for, and the software will work those FP+ reservations into your RideMax itinerary.

Up until early last month, the only mode RideMax supported was that it would tell you the time of day at which it expected you to use those FP+ reservations, and it expected you to make the necessary adjustments in Disney’s online reservation system to match the times shown on the RideMax plan.

This worked OK for someone making FP+ reservations well in advance (which I still advise), but what about those situations where there were only a couple of FP+ “time slots” available in Disney’s system, and you simply couldn’t get the reservation times to match up with your RideMax plan?

The new feature in RideMax looks like the following. This is captured from the FP+ options page in RideMax where you check off your FP+ attractions:

FastPass+ Options

As you can see in the screenshot above, once you check a given FP+ attraction in the list, RideMax now gives you two options: you can either allow RideMax to tell you what time to make your reservation for (same as was supported previously), or you can tell RideMax when your existing FP+ reservation begins.

Note that it’s still better if you can allow RideMax to tell you when to use your FP+ reservation, as this can result in more efficient plans. I also believe that RideMax is the only Disney planning tool that offers this option. I’ll probably post a more detailed example on this at some point in the future, but just to explain briefly why you may want RideMax to choose your times for you, if the most optimum plan for your list of attractions is to have you visiting the rides in Tomorrowland at 11am (for example), but you tell the system you have a FP+ reservation at Splash Mountain at that time, the reservation will place you on the opposite side of the park from where you “should be” if you allowed RideMax to choose the time for you.

Having said all of that, I know there are simply occasions where you just can’t get the FP+ time slot RideMax recommends, and the closer you get to your visit date, the less flexibility you have to change reservation times in Disney’s system. If you find yourself in this situation, I hope you find the new feature helpful.

Happy planning!

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Fun Friday: RideMax Roulette at the Magic Kingdom

Seven Dwarfs Mine Train at Walt Disney World's Magic Kingdom

If anyone wants to join me, either virtually or in-person, I’ll be in the Magic Kingdom again this coming Friday, May 8th, doing live tweets and Facebook updates as I play another round of RideMax Roulette.

For those not familiar, RideMax Roulette is a game using the RideMax planning tool, where I select a list of attractions at random and plug them into RideMax. RideMax then creates an optimized game plan using those attractions designed to minimize my waiting and walking. I then take the plan to the park to see how it works out. (Just FYI, because I’m biased, I call this a “RideMax plan,” but I know that some would call this a “touring plan” instead, lol).

Playing this “game” helps me keep things real by actually using plans the software produces, as well as having me ride attractions that I might not normally visit, but which customers very well could. (“Business philosophy” note here: There’s nothing quite like putting yourself in the shoes of your customers and actually, you know, *using* your own product, to help you know where the strengths of that product are, as well as learning what could be improved.)

For this week’s test, my only requirement going into the process was that I wanted to at least hit the new Seven Dwarfs Mine Train ride. So I made sure I included that attraction, then added attractions to the list using my handy-dandy random number generator, until I had enough attractions to fill a half-day at the park.

In alphabetical order, here is the complete list of twelve attractions I plan to visit from 9:00am, when the park opens, until noon-ish:

  • Aladdin’s Magic Carpets
  • Astro Orbiter
  • Astro Orbiter (Yes, I’ll be visiting this one twice.)  🙂
  • Barnstormer
  • Barnstormer (Yes, also twice!)
  • Cinderella’s Golden Carrousel
  • Country Bear Jamboree
  • Haunted Mansion
  • Little Mermaid: Ariel’s Undersea Adventure
  • Peter Pan’s Flight
  • Seven Dwarfs Mine Train
  • Splash Mountain

Before creating the plan, I had to decide what I wanted to use my three FastPass+ reservations for. While this can sometimes be a hard choice, this time it seemed obvious: Peter Pan, Splash Mountain, and the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train probably offer the most opportunity for time-saving with FP+. (And If I couldn’t get a FP+ reservation for 7DMT, I’d probably use it for the Haunted Mansion instead.)

Well, as luck would have it, there was still a FP+ slot available for 7DMT in Disney’s reservation system, so I went with it.

Here is the plan RideMax came up with for Friday, and which I plan to use:

RideMax Touring Plan for Disney World's Magic Kingdom

So, you might be asking yourself, “But what if you weren’t able to get that 7DMT FastPass+ reservation? What would the plan look like in that case?”

Well, since you asked, here is the RideMax plan the software produced when I told RideMax to use FP+ for the Haunted Mansion instead of 7DMT:

RideMax Plan riding Seven Dwarfs Mine Train standby

As you can see, this plan estimates we’d wait 43 minutes longer overall using FP+ for Haunted Mansion and visiting 7DMT using the standby line right at opening time. As I look at this second scenario, the estimates for Astro Orbiter look a bit high to me, but even if the actual combined wait for Astro Orbiter ends up being 15 minutes less than shown on the plan, this second scenario would still involve an extra 30 minutes or so of waiting over the first plan.

The other thing to note about this second scenario is that the 10-minute estimate for 7DMT right at opening time depends on your ability to follow some pretty specific instructions, and to get to the ride right after rope drop. (That note in the plan next to the 7DMT entry to “see tip #1 below” is crucial to the plan’s success.) RideMax subscribers will see various tips like this sprinkled throughout their RideMax plans, and this particular tip is probably the longest and most detailed of any, as you’re trying to stay ahead of a rope-drop crowd that looks like the scene below, with many or even most of the crowd headed to 7DMT:

Magic Kingdom Rope Drop

I guess the moral of this story is that if you can use FP+ for the Mine Train ride, do it, since it can help you avoid this whole rope-drop mess. (And of course the second moral of the story is that RideMax makes plan comparisons like this very simple.)

So, please join me Friday morning for live tweets and Facebook updates as I go along, including pictures of the day as it progresses. And if you want to join me in person, watch for me near the Newsstand outside the Magic Kingdom tunnel just before the rope drop. I’ll be the really tall guy with a large-ish camera hanging around my neck, getting ready to make a beeline to Astro Orbiter as soon as the opening countdown finishes. 🙂

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