ridemax

[nutty4wdw]

i know there is a ridemax thread but i can't find it and my search is not working right. sorry for any redundancy here.


purchased ridemax so i could play around with customized plans. i am a UG and TGM planner. i have a hard time trusting the plans ridemax is spitting out. it's giving me plans that go against UG, TGM and i believe just common sense. but people swear by ridemax. little nervous about trying it out.

for example:

would anyone here start their MK day at IASW when you have the two mts(splash will be closed), buzz, HM etc on your plan. i never heard of a plan that starts out at IASW at RD

another MK plan has me at IASW at RD, pooh, than FP peter at 9:35. common sense says why be at IASW and not FP PP before getting on IASW. why wait and backtrack

no matter how i arrange my breaks, etc it always has me going to test track, mission space then soarin. it says soarin will only have a 13 min wait at 9:45 am. this would be 2nd week in sept(tgm-3blue-green). is that possible. i assumed soarin would have a longer wait but i could be wrong.

worried about trying it now. anyone have experience with this at WDW

[jana616]

We are using it for our trip in September, so I haven't used my plans in the parks yet. I agree that sometimes the plans don't seem to make sense, esp. in regards to waiting to get a FP instead of getting one on the way to something else. On the Ridemax Users thread, lots of people recommend kind of forcing the plan to start off the way you want. For example, we have an 8 am TH ressie, and want to do the safari first. So I did a 30 minute break at 9:05 in Africa, we will do the safari then, and I left it off the rest of the day's plan. You could do the same for Soarin.

As far as the wait times being accurate, people swear, again and again, that they are accurate. I have run enough plans with long waits on some rides (example, trying to do Dumbo our first day when we get there at 1 pm, and it tells me it will be 44 minute wait) to believe that they will be accurate.

Good luck! I'll try to bump the Ridemax Users thread up so you can find it...

[mwerner2]

I had the same worries, but we found that ridemax usually worked. We did change some things around a little, like we would probably have gotten the FP for Pan before IASW, but we have always ridden Soarin the first thing at Epcot and this time we followed ridemax and got two Soarin fastpasses during the morning and so ended up riding it twice that day even though we went to TT first.

It was really very interesting to do things in a completely different order than usual. I think it's RideMax's use of FP's and going back later than the window that makes this work. Their plan seems to always be aware of when you can get the next FP and use this to your advantage.

[Tomh]

I too am a bit concerned with some of the first choices that Ridemax makes. On our AK day, I set it up for a later start time so that we'll have time to go do the Safari first, as I have heard many times that the animals are most active first thing in the morning. For the rest of the trip, we're just going to trust that Ridemax is right, and do things in the order it tells us to.

[mwerner2]

Another difference that we have always thought must be done. We *didn't* ride Sarfari in AK as early as possible in the morning. We rode it later in the morning and even in the afternoon, and there really were as many animals to see as usual. (We were there in late June and it was HOT!, but that didn't seem to matter to the animals) We had Safari FP's, so we had a very short wait.

RideMax put the Safari ride at different times than we usually rode, so we thought, what the heck, let's try it. And it worked.

It really is an amazing little application. It uses FP to the max.

[penguingirlie]

I am glad to hear that it worked for some people. I think we are just going to go with it and try something different. I figure if it doesn't work after a couple of days we can always go with what we usually do.

[Madzac]

I second what was said! We used it for our trip in May and I loved it! It was dead on accurate and at times even conservative... we almost always got ahead of schedule and could later in the day move things around or hit other things over again. I couldnt believe it would be that way! And it didnt always make sense. But it truly, truly worked.

We had the same plan with Epcot and it did work well. As a PP has suggested you can schedule a break first thing and do say Soarin if you want, but after 7 days of Ridemax I belive what they are saying.

Finally, we had the same safari expereince. We always did it first, but this time in the afternoon we had minimal wait with FP and saw all the animals up and around except the lions... and I think they sleep most of the time anyway!!!