Front of the Line - Universal Studios Hollywood

I keep going back and forth about FOL as well. We are going on a Friday in June so may be a lot more crowded. Hate to wait until the day of and they are sold out.

I was there last Friday and did not have FOL and did not need it. I went first thing and got in an hour early for Harry Potter - I was able to go on both Harry Potter rides and wander around a bit there before heading over to Springfield to check that out and then got in line for the first studio tour about 5 mins before it opened to the general public. Did not have any issues with wait times for rides the rest of the day

Kontos said:

I was there last Friday and did not have FOL and did not need it. I went first thing and got in an hour early for Harry Potter - I was able to go on both Harry Potter rides and wander around a bit there before heading over to Springfield to check that out and then got in line for the first studio tour about 5 mins before it opened to the general public. Did not have any issues with wait times for rides the rest of the day

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Thanks for the update. School is likely still is session which helps.

I have a question about using the FOL pass for Forbidden Journey. I have no idea how it works, but I'm wondering if you miss the queue entirely if you use this pass? From what I understand, the queue is worth seeing. I guess you could always ride a 2nd time after using your FOL.

My husband and I just got back from a Saturday visit this Memorial Day weekend. I wasn't sure what to expect and thought about FOL, but I was glad I didn't pay extra because we really did not need it at all. We had 1 hour early entry since we bought our one day passes online at Universal's site. We headed straight to Forbidden Journey and had a 10 minute wait. When we came out it had already jumped to 30 minutes and I saw it up to 75 minutes at one point during the day. However, later in the day, probably around 5:30, the wait time was going back down to about 45-35 minutes. There is also a single rider line for FJ, which we thought we would use later in the day, but both of started feeling not so great (probably too many butterbeers, haha!), so we decided once was enough. The single rider line does skip a lot of the cool stuff to look at in line though. We also used single rider lines for Mummy, Transformers, Jurassic Park, which really cut down on our wait time and even though we were not sitting next to each other, we actually ended up in the same vehicle on Mummy and Jurassic Park. Our wait times for the Studio Tour, Simpsons and Despicable ME were minimal, maybe 15- 20 minutes at the most. In fact, I think the longest line that we had to wait in was the line to get into Three Broomsticks to order lunch! But even that line moved fairly quickly considering how many people they were serving.

Just gotta mention that what UO includes with deluxe stays isn't "front of the line". Not at all.

UO includes unlimited express pass. Which is great. But it's not FOTL unless you get lucky and there's no one else in front of you in the line.

And USH doesn't have EP. So you can't really compare.

USH was hot and busy today and I talked to several people with FOTL and they all said they hadn't waited *at all* that day.

FOL at Hollywood and EP at Orlando function pretty much the same. It's a separate queue. But, similar to fastpass, there can be people in the queue ahead of you and they do alternate in the other lines. I've done both EP at Orlando and FOL (via VIP tour passes) at Hollywood and it was exactly the same experience. It is truly only FOL at either place if there is no one else using their pass in front of you. Neither place did I ever wait more than 5 minutes for a ride using the pass.

ETA - the only real difference is that not every ride at Orlando had EP while every ride at USH does.

We are going for 2 days and weren't planning on FOL because of that. I'm wondering if we should do FOL for the the first day. Going last weekend in September. Hmm.

No you don't need FOL for your first day. Last weekend is Sept is quite slow.

DahliaRW said:

Neither place did I ever wait more than 5 minutes for a ride using the pass.

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I have waited longer than 5 min in the EP line at UO, and we go at slower times of the year to UO. And not having it at every line is a big difference.

I personally can't compare the two in the way others were. I personally think they are very different from each other.