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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6 thoughts on “RideMax Roulette Tuesday at Disney’s Animal Kingdom”

  1. Hi! On the Disney World website and other places, it says that after the arrival window of your 3rd FP+, you can then get another FP+. When that arrival window passes you can get another FP+ and so on. But on my ridemax plans, it isn’t telling me to get more FP+’s. Why is that?

  2. Hi Matt! The only “guaranteed” FP+ reservations are the three you’re able to make in advance, and it’s pretty normal for most of the headliner attractions’ FP+ to be sold out by early afternoon, with perhaps the exception of some of the “non-mountain” high-capacity rides at the Magic Kingdom, such as Buzz Lightyear & it’s a small world. The catch for RideMax’s purposes is that availability can change not only due to crowd levels, but can also depend on the size of your party as well. (You might get a 4th FP+ for Space Mountain with a party of one, but would have less luck with a party of four, etc.)

    I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not a given that any particular attraction will have availability for the 4th FP+ on any given date, for any given party size, and that’s what RideMax is assuming currently. (We *may* do more in this area in the future, though…)

  3. Thunder Mountain as a fourth FP+ would be iffy I think. You might get one later in the evening on less busy days, but if it’s too late, you really wouldn’t need FP+ at that time of day anyway. The attractions where this might come in handy would be the super-high capacity rides, like Pirates, Buzz Lightyear, and it’s a small world. The other advantage of using it on these (rather than Big Thunder) is that the return window could be very soon after obtaining the FP+ reservation, allowing you to obtain yet another one as soon as you finish riding.

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