Crowd Impact on AK (Skipping Avatar Attractions)

[MouseEarsJenny]

We are headed to Disney next week with a group of 10. We usually tour at rope drop, with a plan (modified from touringplans). We have no interest in the Avatar attractions, and plan to keep to our usual AK plan. How badly have the increased crowds impacted the waits at other park rides (Everest, Kali, Safaris, Primeval Whirl)? Should we plan on arriving earlier for rope drop if we don't intend to join the Avatar lines, so that we can enter the park in a timely fashion? We only plan to spend about half a day, per our usual for this park. Thanks in advance!

 

[kmb584]

We are headed to Disney next week with a group of 10. We usually tour at rope drop, with a plan (modified from touringplans). We have no interest in the Avatar attractions, and plan to keep to our usual AK plan. How badly have the increased crowds impacted the waits at other park rides (Everest, Kali, Safaris, Primeval Whirl)? Should we plan on arriving earlier for rope drop if we don't intend to join the Avatar lines, so that we can enter the park in a timely fashion? We only plan to spend about half a day, per our usual for this park. Thanks in advance!

We returned home last night and spent 3 days at AK this time due to Pandora (FYI, it's incredible) and I found the wait times to really be hit or miss. For example, on the 9th, KS was an 110 minute wait at 12:45 pm whereas yesterday we waited about 15 minutes for EE around 2:00. I never noticed an increase in PW and Kali was down quite a bit because of the storms. I don't think you'll have too much of an issue with arriving at RD as all wait times outside of Pandora were less than 25-30 minutes in our experiences.

 

[Auntie_Maim]

That's good to know. We're going in October and have no interest in Pandora; we'll just stick with our usual FPs and schedule.

 

[MouseEarsJenny]

Thanks for the first hand report. We will plan as usual, then.

 

[Kerriowl]

We were in AK on June 2. We found that the lines outside of Pandora were rather low. We did Flight of Passage at rope drop (saw it twice in a row). Then did Dinosaur, Everest, and the Safari before going back to Pandora for our 10:45 fastpass for River Journey. We did everything including shows except for Tough to be a Bug (my 6 year old HATES it), Kali River Rapids (don't want to be wet) and Flights of Wonder, and had plenty of time for my husband and older son to wait 2 hours for Flights of Passage again in the evening.

 

[DrummerBoy523]

We were there on June 4th. Rope Dropped the Navi, then walked on Everest, walked on the Safari, walked back to Everest for FP (Standby was 25 min), ate lunch, FastPass for Flight of Passage, then hit Primeval for about a 15min wait, then used last FP for Dino. Long story short - crowds weren't bad at all.

 

[barbliny]

Just got back.

If you get up early and ropedrop AK - outside of Pandora is a virtual ghost town - it's eerily empty!! We did EMH at 7 am this past Saturday morning. We did Pandora first. Hit the rest of the park stating at 7:30 - walked onto Safari, Everest 3 times and could have continued doing this over and over if we wanted, walked on Dinosaur, Primeval Whirl (even with it's notriously slow-loading). Everything was empty - there were literally 3 people walking in front of us when we walked from Safari to Everest for as far as could see.

Similar at night - we went on Monday night and Saturday night - with fp+, but we could have just walked on everything we wanted. As a matter of fact, Everest had a 10-minute wait so we walked on first, then used our fp+ - could have done it more, but we had dining package seating for ROL. Had a fp+ for Safari around dusk - it was a 15 minute standby at that time.

But, I have seen some crazy afternoon waits on MDE at AK in the afternoon (we are morning and night touring people, never afternoon). I would assume when people go to AK to ride FoP and Na'vi and see the crazy waits, they will give up and cause spikes in wait-times in the non-Pandora rides.

 

[johnnydakota]

I would recommend scoping out the MDE app every so often to check on the wait times on there. Might give you an idea.