I really can't get my head around the daft mess of a system they set up for initial bookings though. If you can go back and edit rides and times after you've booked them, why not just have a simple ADR-like screen for making the booking in the first place - just select the attraction and the desired time, and it would give you the closest available times to choose from. Simples.
The only thing I can think of is that they want people to be initially guided toward some of the less popular attractions and times in order to help balance the numbers out.
Andre
I think that it's because a vast quantity of guests will be happy enough with the 4 presets they will get to choose from. And most of them will stick with "best match"
It will indeed allow Disney to direct guests towards rides and times that will allow for a good balance of things
only a few hardcore planners like we are here will bother with tweaking the FP+ weeks in advance.
Based on personnal experience, over 90% of end users work with default settings (including critical settings). There is no reason to believe that a vast majority of guests will take the time to modify their FP+.
And there is another reason I can see.
Changing a time or an experience only displays what's available. And you never get an error message (such a message being quite negative, in terms of "experience")
with an ADR system, you choose a restaurant, and a time. Sometimes it's no availability, sometimes you get alternate times. It works quite well
now imagine you need to choose 3 experiences, and choose a time for each one.
You have 3 experiences which can all be unavailable. And for all of those 3 you have a possibility that the time chosen is unavailable.
That's 6 possibilities to display an error message, and require the guest to make changes, which might lead to other errors too (and so on)
And even with alternate times, if you display an alternate time, it must not conflict with another experience's time (chosen or alternate), and the other experiences must have an alternate time available to be able to swap that time with the other experience's time ... see the headache coming ?
It's a cascading chain of errors waiting to happen and fall on the guests head who would find the system too complicated to use.
Because it's only simple as long as there is availability for what you request. An ADR is simple, it's "yes" or "no", a FP+ is "yes if ... and if ... and if ... and ..." and "no but if ... and if ... and ..." it's never ending
the system, as it was designed, is the simplest way to do things, knowing that most of the users will keep the default (or A, B, C, D) presets, and knowing that allowing an ADR-like system would be too complex for the average user to use. (remember that we're Power Users here when it comes to MDE and Disney as a whole)
