Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge

Disneyland Early Entry 2022

Hi there, everyone! Our family just happened to be staying at Disney’s Grand Californian Hotel this week when they introduced a new perk, Early Entry (EE) for Disneyland Resort Hotel guests. Early Entry is just what it sounds like: each day resort hotel guests get access to their choice of Disneyland or Disney’s California Adventure Park for 30 minutes before regular park opening. We spent a few days this last week taking advantage of EE from Monday through Wednesday. Here’s what we experienced.

OUR DISNEYLAND DAY

Arrive EARLY if you want to be among the first guests into the park

ARRIVAL TIME

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Visiting Walt Disney World in Fall 2020? Here are FIVE TIPS for Getting the Most from Your Trip

Thinking of visiting Walt Disney World this year over fall break? The parks are in such a unique state right now that I thought I’d rundown my top five tips for a 2020 visit.

Let’s dig in!

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Major Update to RideMax Wait Estimates for Disney’s Hollywood Studios

The scene above basically sums up what a normal weekday looks like these days first thing in the morning at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. This represents just a portion of the line for Slinky Dog Dash just before the park is set to open for the day.

With the new Rise of the Resistance attraction only accessible via virtual boarding groups, and due to the fact that these boarding groups can fill up within just a few minutes of park opening time, Disney is left with a HUGE crush of crowds at opening time, with the major attractions swamped very early in the day.

While we’re hoping Disney will do something to ameliorate this madness, in the meantime we’ve been forced to update our wait estimates for Hollywood Studios — and not in a good direction. 🙁

If any of you have created RideMax plans for Hollywood Studios prior to the publishing of this post, I’d strongly encourage you to re-run those plans before your visit!

Disneyland RideMax Customers: Time to Re-Run Your RideMax Plans!

This is just a quick post to let our Disneyland customers know that we recommend re-running your Disneyland RideMax plans, due to much lower crowds in the park than we had originally estimated. This applies to ALL dates on the Disneyland RideMax calendar except the 4th of July, for plans created prior to today, June 28th.

Just for some background here, prior to the opening of Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland, we had expected that the draw of the new land would bring in greater crowds than normal, and so we put together our initial RideMax wait time estimates under that assumption. Somewhat surprisingly, those crowds have either not materialized, or the attractiveness of the new land is serving to dilute the crowds in the rest of the park (or both). Either way, this summer is shaping up to be a GREAT time to visit Disneyland, and we’ve just made some pretty substantial cuts to our wait estimates for the resort as a result, for all dates on the current RideMax Disneyland calendar.

Also worth noting is that if you’re a RideMax subscriber and plan to visit Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge during your trip, be sure to check out the Disneyland Tips & Hints page, available from the link on the main page after you login to RideMax. We give some important “strategy advice” here for using RideMax to map out a plan which includes Galaxy’s Edge.

Enjoy!

Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run Wait Times from Galaxy’s Edge Opening Day

Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opened with much fanfare yesterday at Disneyland, and by all accounts the reservation system Disneyland is using to allow access to this new Star Wars land from now through June 23rd is a huge success.

If you’re lucky enough to have a reservation for a four-hour visit to Galaxy’s Edge before it opens to the general public on June 24th, you might be wondering when is the best time to visit the only open ride in this new land, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run.

Since we have a pretty keen interest in wait times here at RideMax, and thanks to the fact that Disney makes posted wait times available in their app, we tracked waits throughout the day yesterday, and the chart below reflects the result (click the image for a larger view).

As you can see, the results here were pretty impressive, with wait times peaking at 2 hours right around 3:00pm — not bad for such a groundbreaking new addition to the park. It’s also pretty amazing that there were VERY LOW posted waits of only five minutes just before 11:00am, and ten minutes just before 8:00pm.

If you’re wondering what the orange lines on the chart represent, these are the times at which each of the reservation slots began. (The four-hour time slots overlapped by an hour on each end with the previous and next group to be admitted.) So guests holding reservations were assigned time slots beginning at 8am, 11am, 2pm, 5pm, and 8pm.

Looking at the chart, if you plan to visit the ride during the reservation phase, it’s pretty clear that the best time to get in line for this ride is just before the next group is to be admitted, or just before the three hour mark into your reserved time slot. (And if you’re a RideMax subscriber, we’ll have more specific advice for getting around the land in the RideMax “Tips & Hints” pages, which you’ll see on the main page after logging into RideMax.)

All in all, this is a pretty impressive set of wait times for the opening day of the largest Disneyland expansion in park history. Congratulations to the entire Disneyland operations team for making this such a huge success!