RideMax

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!

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!

First in Line for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train: Hyperlapse Video

Here’s a raw Hyperlapse from this morning’s park opening at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom, where I made my way from the park entrance to the first in line for 7DMT.

The video has no sound at this point — I’ll likely be adding some verbal “tips” and moving this to the RideMax subscribers area in the next few days, but in the meantime, I thought this would be fun to share.

Warning: This is running at about 8x normal speed, and with all of the camera movement it might make you dizzy watching it. Also, just to clarify, this shows the *walk* from the entrance to the 7DMT boarding area, not the ride itself.

Enjoy!

First in Line for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train: Hyperlapse Video from Park Entrance to Ride from RideMax LLC on Vimeo.

RideMax Fan Mail

Just a quick update today. It’s always fun hearing from RideMax customers who found the software helpful. Knowing that we’ve helped folks more fully enjoy their experience in Disney’s theme parks is one of the things that keeps me going.

In that spirit, I appreciated this recent note from Jason, from Salem, Ohio, who used RideMax to plan a trip to Walt Disney World trip with his young daughter.

The software was worth double the cost, easy. I planned a spur-of-the-moment trip to Disney World for my daughter’s sixth birthday. We are a spontaneous family like that, but I’d been there twice before and in order to make sure my daughter got to ride everything I thought she’d like, I knew I needed a plan. RideMax to the rescue.

We went to Hollywood Studios, Magic Kingdom, and Epcot, each for a day. I crammed as much as I could into those days, including being at Magic Kingdom early (we got up at 6, at park by 8:30) and stayed until 11pm. Out of 3 days we missed only 2 rides on our list, but it was mainly due to my poor planning – I didn’t expect the line for Anna and Elsa to be 2 hours.

Even though Epcot was on a Sunday, I picked the Friday before because the hours and extended hours closely matched. It was pretty darn accurate.

We had a blast all three days and I know we got double the rides in with RideMax.

Thanks for those kind words, Jason. I’m glad you had such a nice trip, and that RideMax could help!

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!