If you’re planning to visit Disneyland, Disney California Adventure (DCA), or Disney World’s Magic Kingdom on Friday, May 24th, you probably already know that the parks will be open for 24 hours straight, from 6:00am on Friday morning all the way through until 6:00am on Saturday morning.
What you might not know, though, is that the Disneyland resort is also hosting Grad Night on Friday evening as well, with the Grad Night festivities centered at DCA. As a result, even though DCA is technically “open” for 24 hours, many attractions will be open to regular guests for much less than that. According to the Disneyland website, for example, Radiator Springs Racers won’t open until 9:00am, and will close to regular guests at 10:15pm Friday evening.
We’ve built this assumption into RideMax, of course, but thought you may want to know this if you’re visiting tomorrow. It could be very crowded, but fun too!
What about you? Are you planning to brave the crowds and visit one of these three parks tomorrow? How long do you plan to stay? Let me know your plans in the comments below!
Early morning at the Magic Kingdom. Arriving early during spring break is one key to beating the crowds!
Spring break is here!
Whether your trip includes Disneyland and the new Cars Land on the west coast, or Walt Disney World on the east, there are a couple of keys to beating the crowds:
1. Have a game plan (OK, you knew I’d say this, and yes, it’s a shameless plug — RideMax can help.)
2. Arrive early
If you’re an “old hand” at Disney and are already convinced of these two points , go ahead and quit reading now. If not, then this post is for you! I’ll even share some pictures to help illustrate this for you.
The thing is, you really need to consider BOTH of these tips for a successful day at your favorite Disney theme park. One without the other just doesn’t cut it.
For example, if you arrive early but don’t have a plan, you could waste your early-morning time visiting attractions that you could see later in the day without much wait (maybe with FastPass), but then you find that some attractions have huge waits by the time you get to them.
And, if you have a plan but don’t arrive early, well, there are some attractions that are just plain hard to see without a wait unless you’re in the park right when it opens. FastPasses for some attractions can also run out early in the day (Radiator Springs Racers, anyone?). No plan — not even RideMax — can save you here if you’re not in the park early when the lines are short and FastPasses plentiful.
Consider some pictures that I took yesterday at the Magic Kingdom to help illustrate the importance of arriving early.
The park opens at 8:00am today, and here I am at 7:51am in line to board the monorail. You can see that the crowds are already starting to build, but this is nothing compared to the masses you’ll see here in a few hours (more on this below).
I don’t actually recommend arriving this late, but I got lucky and was able to board the monorail quickly. I arrived at the front turnstiles just as Disney had opened the park for the day.
Here I am making my way through the entrance tunnel into the park, at 8:02am. As you can see, there are large crowds ahead of me. It would have been better had I arrived earlier!
Fortunately, I’m a fast walker, and was able to make it to the end of Main Street quickly. (I was also by myself today, so I’m sure I walked faster than most families with children would.)
A largely-deserted Fantasyland right after the park opened. Folks, this is why you arrive early! (Below I’ll show you a striking comparison photo taken later in the morning.)
I was mostly focused on Fantasyland today. And even though I was slightly delayed getting into the park, I still had time to get a FastPass for Peter Pan, and then make my way over to the current big bottleneck in the Magic Kingdom.
Enchanted Tales with Belle, posted at a 15-minute wait. My actual wait would be shorter.
This is where the importance of PLANNING comes in, and my RideMax plug. If I didn’t have a RideMax plan with me telling me to go here early, I might have visited one of the “big” rides instead, even though the lines for the big attractions don’t build nearly as quickly as the line for Belle does. This would have resulted in a crazy wait here later, or maybe even caused me to miss this altogether.
The line for Belle’s Cottage isn’t bad at all. Yet.
We go through the Magic Mirror…
And of course, Belle is charming as always.
By the time I exit the show, the lines here are already huge. I’d estimate about a 45-minute wait, and it’s not quite 8:45am!
Next stop for me was the new Little Mermaid attraction. It’s posted at a 20-minute wait, but it was still basically a walk-on.
This is where having RideMax helped. Had I visited Little Mermaid first, and then Belle next, my total wait for these two rides would have been close to 50 minutes, as opposed to the 10-minutes or so total I waited by following the plan.
The line for Ariel’s Undersea Adventure takes a while to build in the morning, thanks to it’s rather large capacity. No need to rush here first thing, and RideMax knows this.
It’s 9:07am, and the wait for Barnstormer is posted at just 10 minutes. The real wait is actually shorter. (Have I mentioned the importance of arriving early? It’s likely that some folks visiting today are still in bed!)
It’s around 9:15, and the Teacups are still very do-able!
Here is Fantasyland at around 9:20am, or one hour and twenty minutes after the park opened. The crowds are starting to build, but it’s still somewhat do-able here.
Still around 9:20, there is virtually no wait for “it’s a small world,” but as you can see here, you’d have to wait a while for Peter Pan now. (Thanks to RideMax, I’ve already got a FastPass for this one.)
OK, it’s later in the morning, but still not quite 10:00am, and it already starts getting crazy. The wait here for Belle is now posted at 60 minutes.
Aren’t you glad you got yourself out of bed early this morning, AND you followed that RideMax plan?
OK… Here’s that comparison photo I promised earlier, taken just before 10:00am. Please don’t do this to yourself, folks!
Even the line for the Haunted Mansion is getting a little ridiculous, and it’s still just 10:00am! (And if you were wondering, I’m not waiting in this one, just taking the picture. 😉 )
It’s about time for me to leave the park, but I couldn’t resist stopping for a picture of the Liberty Belle. What can I say? The light here is nice this early in the morning!
It’s just after 10:00am, and I’m on my way out of the park, while the crowds are pouring in!
Finally, here is the monorail entrance, at 10:30am. I know everyone has different tastes and opinions, but why would someone spend $1,000’s on a Disney vacation and then do this to themselves!
Spring break is survivable, but my advice remains:
OK, I’d be curious to see your thoughts on this. What are YOUR favorite strategies for surviving spring break at Disneyland or Walt Disney World? Â Tell us about it in the comments below.
FastPass: After February 18th, you'd better show up on time!
If any customers have created RideMax plans for a park visit on February 18th or later, we strongly recommend creating new plans instead, at least if you made your plans prior to February 14th at 9:00am PDT.
The rumors have been circulating for a long time, but now that Disney has placed signs on the FastPass machines asking guests to return within the one-hour window printed on the FP ticket, it seems like it’s time to take this seriously.
As a result, RideMax for Disneyland has been updated so that any plans created for dates on or after President’s day, February 18th, will no longer have the option to use FastPass late. (For those who are new to Disneyland and RideMax, up to this point Disney allowed you to use your FP ticket after the time shown on the ticket, even if you arrived several hours “late.”)
The other effect of this change is that we’ve updated our FP estimates themselves to better take this change into account. It’s always been easy for us to err on the late side with those estimates, since this was allowed by Disney and gave us more “wiggle room” in the plans. Now that the wiggle room is gone, we thought it best to pull the estimates back.
What does this mean for you? We hope the change isn’t earth-shattering, but you will, of course, have the annoyance of re-creating your plans if you’ve already made them for the affected dates. Once in the park, you will also need to double-check the return time shown on your ticket to make sure it fits within the time indicated on your RideMax plan, and adjust your day on the fly if necessary. (This is especially the case for FP return windows in the afternoon and evening, when predicting FP return windows can be more difficult. Fortunately, the afternoon and evening is also the time of day when the timing of the plan is less critical, so we’re hoping this will still work OK for most cases.)
With this update we’re also releasing a new version of the Windows application. This new version includes the ability to schedule more breaks (up to five), and also allows you to specify the location of those breaks. It also allows you to specify which specific attractions your FastPass runner is willing to miss, if any.
Note that we’ve implemented this change quickly enough that the RideMax “Tips & Hints” pages haven’t yet reflected these changes. We expect to get this done over the next few days.
Please let us know how these changes work for you, and happy planning!
Dumbo was flying high today, but does the FastPass loophole still exist?!!
As many of you know, RideMax has been taking advantage of a loophole in the FASTPASS (FP) system at Disney World’s Magic Kingdom which had allowed someone to obtain a FP ticket for both Barnstormer and Dumbo, even if he or she had recently obtained another FP elsewhere. This would normally be against the FP rules, but the machines seemed to be operating somewhat independently of the rest of the FP network. This allowed someone, for example, to get a FP ticket for Peter Pan (or some other MK attraction), and then to immediately get FP tickets for both Dumbo and Barnstormer, even though two hours hadn’t elapsed since the Peter Pan ticket was obtained, nor had the “ride window” for that first FP ticket arrived yet.
We had received reports within the last few days from a couple of customers who had read online that the Dumbo and Barnstormer FASTPASS machines were “connected” to the rest of the FASTPASS (FP) network again, so I decided to drop in on the Magic Kingdom today to check it out. I decided to “test” the loophole by obtaining a FP ticket for Peter Pan, then I’d try to also get FP tickets for both Dumbo and Barnstormer, to see if the system would allow it.
To make a long story short, the picture below shows the result of my “test” (click for a larger image):
It may be hard to read the time stamps in fine print at the bottom of these tickets, but I obtained the Peter Pan ticket at 11:29am, and successfully obtained both the Dumbo and Barnstormer tickets five minutes later, at 11:34am.
Given the recent reports of this loophole going away, I decided earlier this week to remove this feature from RideMax, at least for now. Even though this test indicates the loophole still existed today, it seems safer to NOT depend on this, especially since the parks aren’t crazy-busy right now, and this really isn’t absolutely necessary for efficient touring.
Having said this, I do expect to check this again as Mardi Gras week and President’s Day weekend approaches. If the loophole still exists then, I’ll likely put the feature back in RideMax so that folks using the planner can take advantage of this during those busier days in February.
Oh, by the way, while I was in the Magic Kingdom today I took a picture over the construction wall of the new Rapunzel’s tower and village, which I’ve posted below. It seems to be coming along nicely!
There seems to be a near-consensus in various Disney-related circles that if you’re visiting Kilimanjaro Safaris in Disney’s Animal Kingdom, you simply *must* do it early in the day. The logic goes that the animals are more active then, so you’re more likely to get a better experience if you do the Safaris early.
If this is *you* and you’re using RideMax, you can set aside time to visit the Safaris first thing by setting your “start time” to about 35 minutes after the park opens, and using this gap to visit the ride. (You could also use a “break” in RideMax for a similar purpose.)
On the other hand, what if you simply allow RideMax to do the plan optimization for you, even if the plan has you visiting Kilimanjaro Safaris later in the day? My opinion is that this isn’t as bad as people think, and this may especially be the case during cooler seasons of the year, such as January, when I’m writing this post.
To illustrate, I’ve posted below some pictures that I took on the Safaris yesterday, when I didn’t get on the attraction until close to noon. It had just finished raining about an hour or two earlier:
The crocodiles were out in large numbers!
There were a lot of giraffes out and about. Probably more than I’ve seen on any other visit…
In for a close-up. Smile!  🙂
Rafiki!!!
The rhinos were out in force!
Another shot of the rhinos…
The cheetah was out in the open…
…as were both of the lions. Above is the female.
And here’s the male.
Best “posing” I’ve seen from the lions in a while!
Taking a nap…
And finally, if you wanted to see zebras, this was your day!
I hope these pictures help illustrate my point. You certainly can do the Safaris early, if that’s what you really want to do. But doing them later in the day — especially during the cooler parts of the year — is simply fine with me!
What has been YOUR experience with Kilimanjaro Safaris? Have you noticed a big difference visiting it early in the morning versus later in the day?
Tell me about your experience in the comments below!
