Hey folks,
Yes, I'm here. DrTomorrow, thanks for posting the link to the Guide's "Best Days to Visit Each Park" page.
Swilphil, I'm interested. Give me an example of the morning/afternoon/evening thing and I'll see what I can do.
I'm not sure how TourGuideMike does his touring plans or collects his data. I'd guess he's making his touring plans by hand. As we note in the 2003 edition of the Guide, the number of possible touring plan permutations is so large that it's virtually impossible for hand-made touring plans to be efficient. For example, the 21 attractions in the Guide's MK One Day plan for adults has 51,090,942,171,709,440,000 possible permutations. There's no way any person can sort through those.
Nothing against TGM - I subscribed; it's got potential - but unless they're parroting the Unofficial Guide (something not unheard of in the world of online Disney touring plans), I doubt serously their plans are as efficient as the Guide's.
To suggest the best days to visit each park, and to do touring plans, Unofficial Guide researchers spent about a week in each park, at least three or four times per year, for the past three years. This includes holidays, peak and off-peak times. In total, I'd estimate we spent more than two months in the parks over the past couple of years. You can imagine how much money this cost.
Every day in the park, researchers recorded the wait times at every ride, show, FASTPASS booth and restaurant every thirty minutes, from park open to park close. We collected literally thousands of pieces of data every day. Each researcher walked up to 30 miles per day. It was hard work.
We sent this data to our professional statistician for analysis. He helped us create "wait time" templates for each park and time of the year. This took the better part of three months. We've verified their accuracy in separate testing.
Lastly, we created some specialized touring plan software. As I noted before, this came out of my grad school research into scheduling problems. It took five years to create. Many university professors, almost all Ph.Ds, and experts in their fields, contributed research and ideas to the software. It's been described in two (soon to be three) peer-reviewed academic journals. We've got two patents pending on the technology. It's also been mentioned in some mass-market publications, the most recent being the May 26 edition of U.S. News and World Report.
On a not-too-powerful desktop PC (a 700 Mhz P-3), the software can analyze in the neighborhood of about a million touring plans per second, assuming around 21 attractions in the plan. For reasons I won't get into here, it's the *right* million touring plans, too. The software can suggest the best places to eat lunch, and include multiple breaks in the day.
On a reasonably busy day, the "Adult One-Day" touring plan in the Guide can save up to five hours of standing in line in the Magic Kingdom. This is an improvement of 90 minutes from the 2002 edition, which used an alternate technology that Bob helped create (mixed integer linear programming, for those of you with Ops Research backgrounds).
So, in summary, the Guide bases its recommendations on extensive research, performed by recognized experts and using state-of-the-art technology. I don't think any other Disney guide does this. And given the difficulty in putting all those pieces in place, you can understand why.
Hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions!
Sincerely,
Len
I just usually plan out what park and than we decide when we get there where to go. I'll make a better plan for our Dec trip I believe!
