Hey All,
I'm finally going to disneyworld after waiting 28 years (I'm australian and havn't travelled til now). going with my fiancee.
I understand how fast passes work, but what do you all think of buying an extra ticket each to get an extra fast pass for a second ride?
Thank you
We did this last year. I got some negativity when I asked about it so I haven't talked about it much but in the spirit of helping I will give you my experience.
We went the week after Easter, one of busiest times at the parks. I had not been in years and didn't know when or if I would be able to return and I wanted to maximize our experience. We had about a 6 1/2 day visit. If I were only going for a day or two I would have considered the (not sure what the actual name is) "premium" VIP tour from Disney (as opposed to the regular VIP tour) where you book one of their tour guides for $300+ an hour and they flash their magic pass and get you through all the lines (at least for all the FASTPASS rides and I think the shows, not sure about non-FASTPASS rides). I couldn't afford VIP tours for all the days of our trip so I decided getting us each an extra ticket was the way to go.
Our first day I made the mistake of telling a turnstile CM what I wanted to do. I was hoping that I could just have her scan both my tickets at once and be on my way -- BIG MISTAKE. She misunderstood what I was trying to do and wouldn't listen to my explanation. When I said I wanted to scan two tickets per person I'm sure she thought that I was wanting to scan a ticket that would become a ticket for a member of our party that was sleeping in and then give this person the ticket later. Obviously this wouldn't work but I think they have people try to do this all the time. Once you tie your finger scan to a ticket no one else can use it. This was before rope drop at AK and I gave up trying to explain it to her. I asked her to just point me to the exit. We exited immediately then went to a different gate and scanned in using our second set of tickets. We all used our same finger to scan the second ticket and had no problems. Now we had two sets of active tickets and we were good to go. So, the advice here is to not tell the CM's what you are doing because they will likely misunderstand you and you will end up wasting a bunch of time. Just do it. Enter with the first set of tickets, exit, enter again with the second set of tickets. Some days we wanted to be belly to the rope we entered on the first ticket and did Rope Drop, then after riding a ride and getting a FP we exited and re-entered with the second set of tickets.
In theory this was a great idea. In practice sometimes it worked out fantastic and we ended up "slaying" the park, and other times it helped but not as much as I would have hoped. There were a couple of reasons for this.
One reason was that turnstile CM's don't understand this strategy and think that you are trying to do something not allowed (activating another person's ticket, which is not what we were doing) so you have to exit the park and re-enter to activate the second ticket (you don't tell the CM's what you are doing or they will slow you down because they don't understand). This usually puts you behind the crowd at rope drop which means if the park is crowded you will not have as early a FASTPASS return time for your first FP.
Another reason was that parks are large and some parks are larger than others. If you plan on always getting two FASTPASSes per person per ride then this probably works out well. We sometimes wanted one FP for one ride on one side of the park and one FP for another ride on the other side of the park so we would have to send a runner (me) back and forth across the park which took time and was an extra effort. If you split your FP's, using one for one ride and one for another, the return times will usually not be in sync which means that later you are struggling to rush back and forth across the park to get FP's for set 1 or FP's for set 2 (there is some overhead travel time across the park if you split the FP's).
My conclusions? I wish I were rich. Then I would get a premium VIP tour every day and not worry about extra tickets. I was happy with having the extra FASTPASSes that our extra tickets provided and we definitely enhanced our experience by using this strategy. I would consider doing it again if I were going at a peak crowd time. But..., unless you are going when it is pretty crowded you won't get your money's worth out of buying an extra set of tickets. My conclusion was that I should put more effort into trying to plan our trips for times when the parks are not so crowded. This may mean taking kids out of school which is what I was trying to avoid and part of the reason we ended up going for Easter break.
If you are going to use two tickets per person you MUST make sure that the tickets are tagged for each person they belong too. I wrote an ID (first letter of name and which ticket it is, 1 or 2. Actually I didn't need a 1 or 2 because one set of our tickets was visually different from the other -- room key tickets plus standalone tickets) on them with a permanent marker so we wouldn't get them confused. If you confuse the tickets you may get stuck at the turnstile for a long time while they call a supervisor to make sure you aren't attempting to use someone else's ticket. I made sure each person had their own set 1 ticket when we entered the first time, and each person had their own set 2 ticket when we entered the second time. I used a little leather business card holder with two pockets (like a mini wallet) to hold the tickets and the FASTPASSes so they were easy to access all the time. It worked beautifully.
Exactly, although having to come all the way from Australia might help make it a slightly less frequent occurrence that it is for many of us. Just today, one of my employees who just returned from his "first, and guaranteed only" trip to WDW popped his head into my office and uttered those immortal words: "So, tell me about DVC and how many points I should buy." This is a hard-charging, aggressive, high-level financial sales executive who then proceeded to tell me about the joy of his seven days with his wife and daughter down there and how they are already counting the days until their next visit.
