Come someone explain to me wait times...

[auteur55]

Wait times are a strange thing. Since I'm going for the first time next week I've watched the September wait times very closely these past two weeks so see trends and what rides really do have the biggest waits. What's odd is it's all over the map. Big Thunder Mountain usually was 5-20 minutes throughout the day but Alice In Wonderland was consistently 30-35 minutes. Everyone always discusses the mysterious wait times for Peter Pan that are long throughout the day but AIW is always longer.

Why do we have fastpasses for Big Thunder ranch and things like Star Tours and Roger Rabbit when PP and AIW would clearly benefit more from them?

Things like Splash Mountain would bounce from 5 minutes to 25 minutes in what seemed like seconds. Maybe I'm getting bad info.

Maybe I shouldn't compare the last two weeks of September to this next week as the Halloween overlays and such will bring in bigger crowds. I've been running into people all over Utah saying they are going next week.

 

[BirdsSingWords]

Alice's line is long right now because it just underwent an extensive refurb and had many new effects added. People are still wanting to check those out.

It will probably be quite a while until that line returns to a more normal wait time (although it's always had one of the lengthier FL lines)

 

[lalasmama]

The biggest thing to remember with wait time programs is that they are done with user input.... So, you're only getting what people are reporting, which may or may not be as accurate as you would hope. And that last report could be from 30 seconds ago, or from 30 minutes ago, or from 3 hours ago (unlikely).

Also, remember that comparing a Fast Pass ride (ie, Star Tours or Roger Rabbit), the standby wait times are only part of the picture, because the Fast Passes are factoring in as well. So, it may be a shorter standby wait with Star Tours, because it also has FP, and Alice is longer, because there isn't a fast pass.

And then there are "slow loading" rides (the majority of Fantasy Land), "Omni-mover rides" (Haunted Mansion, Buzz Lightyear, Ariel), and other high- or low-occupancy rides. Take Alice for example again. Each family/group gets their own ride vehicle, and it's only loading 1 family/group at a time. Star Tours has a loading capacity of 30-ish people per pod, and they have several pods--so they are moving many more people at a time, more people an hour, even though the ride is longer.

Too bad it's not all obvious why the wait times are like they are, huh? It never makes sense to me, no matter how much I try to reason it!

 

[ImDMous]

As for what rides have FP and not, PP and AIW have very compact lines, there's very little space in there. They wouldn't have any room to put in a separate line for FP holders. In general, the Fantasyland stuff has the slowest moving lines because they have the lowest ride vehicle capacity.

We just look at the time when we walk by something, if we don't think the current wait is worth it, we move on and come back to it later. We're pretty go-with-the-flow. There are also some standard crowd movement patterns. Generally, New Orleans square is less busy in the morning, people tend to start in FantasyLand or Tomorrowland and don't get over to the other side until lunch time. So we try to do the opposite. It's all very un-scientific.

 

[Congo Queen]

Regarding the quick jump in increased wait time for Splash, it has to do with the location of the ride itself within the park as well as weather. Splash is tucked way back in Critter Country. The bulk of visitors do not get back there first thing in the morning. Plus if the morning is at all chilly then visitors are not keen to get soaked on a water ride. So it can be a walk-on first thing in the morning and have a fairly short stand by line for an hour or so after opening - unless it is blazing hot from 8am onward then all bets are off.