**Disney After Hours - Animal Kingdom** FAQ & Discussion Thread

[Haley R]

Thanks for all the great reviews here. I'm going to the after hours even on April 3rd and am looking really forward to it. I just read the last couple of pages but it appears that I can make a 7:00 FastPass even if I don't have a regular park ticket for that day. Is that correct? I may try to catch the safari if that is the case.

Yes you can make FPS with your dah ticket.

 

[detroitdad]

We attended on Feb 19th which someone reported was sold out but it certainly didn't feel that way to me. We attended the sold out DAH at HS on the 16th and that definitely affected the wait times for the TSL attractions (I posted separately on that thread).

We LOVED DAH-AK!! I really struggled with purchasing this event ticket given the lack of rides compared to other parks' DAH events but I have to say that we truly enjoyed the quietness of the park and the ability to soak in the atmosphere (especially Pandora at night) with minimal crowds. Even though the attraction count is less, for us personally we saw value in the low crowds over all. We entered the park around 7:30pm and head over to Dinoland to get a ride on Primeval Hurl before the park officially closed. No idea why they can't keep that ride open during the DAH event. It's so much fun at night! We then rode Dinosaur which was a walk on. We then headed over to Asia to ride EE multiple times. I managed 3 rides all together (breaks in between) but I think my 17 yr old son got in about 7 or 8 since he rode while my wife and I watched Rivers of Light. I know this show gets a lot of abuse on the boards but I thought it was beautifully executed and really enjoyed being able to see a special viewing during DAH and for the most part I liked it. I think it was about 5 min longer than it needed to be (started to lose interest) but I'm assuming that it needs to be a certain length to warrant having it be a night time show. We didn't understand the "uproar" on the boards over the cups of pop and popcorn in Asia. Really didn't bother us. I just asked for two cups of popcorn if I felt like it and they didn't have any issue with it. I personally like my pop with ice as opposed to just the bottle so it worked for me. To each his own .

We spent the rest of our evening in Pandora (got there around 10:15pm) taking our time and riding Navi River ride and FOP each twice. We would have had time to easily ride FOP another 2 times but in all honesty my stomach had had enough of the simulator as well as the pre-show (it was running both times). OK did they really want that actor to act like such a rambling idiot in their attempt to make him sound "real"? Fail. It is by far the worst God awful pre-show out there. I also found their attempt to hire a Sigourney Weaver resembling actress to be a little condescending. We all know it's not Sigourney so what was the point? She at least was easy to listen to. Ugh sorry for the rant! I guess it affected me deeply LOL?!?

The only thing we missed was seeing the awakenings on the Tree of Life. We must have just missed one on our way out because we waited around about 10-15 min and nothing ever happened. Wish they ran them more frequently during DAH.

 

[Iowamomof4]

Hmm, sounds like a rough night at AK DAH tonight:

https://twitter.com/WDW_Therapy/status/1100595012906246145

Frustrating night at Animal Kingdom after hours. 42 minutes to reach the Flight of Passage preshows. 66 minutes total from getting on line to back outside the gift shop. More than a third of the $125 per person event. The downpour certainly isn’t helping things.

 

[soniam]

Hmm, sounds like a rough night at AK DAH tonight:

https://twitter.com/WDW_Therapy/status/1100595012906246145

Frustrating night at Animal Kingdom after hours. 42 minutes to reach the Flight of Passage preshows. 66 minutes total from getting on line to back outside the gift shop. More than a third of the $125 per person event. The downpour certainly isn’t helping things.

The post says it was posted at 7:14pm. I wonder what time zone. If it's EST or CST, then AK DAH hadn't started yet. MST would make it 9:14pm, which might still be a bit early for FOP during DAH; however, that's still not great for that time. Only PST makes that wait time really bad.

 

[Iowamomof4]

The post says it was posted at 7:14pm. I wonder what time zone. If it's EST or CST, then AK DAH hadn't started yet. MST would make it 9:14pm, which might still be a bit early for FOP during DAH; however, that's still not great for that time. Only PST makes that wait time really bad.

I really don't know. Josh (easywdw) retweeted it and said he had been hearing about significant waits at FOP tonight. I don't know if this was his only reference point or if he had also been hearing from other people.

 

[skippytx]

I really don't know. Josh (easywdw) retweeted it and said he had been hearing about significant waits at FOP tonight. I don't know it this was his only reference point or if he had also been hearing from other people.

It was a cluster and we left before 10

I’ll post more about it when I get back to the room.

 

[JeninTexas]

Oh wow. I hate to hear that the evening is not going well. Hopefully it is just a one off, and will get better.

 

[Iowamomof4]

It was a cluster and we left before 10

I’ll post more about it when I get back to the room.

Oh no!

 

[Haley R]

It was a cluster and we left before 10

I’ll post more about it when I get back to the room.

Oh no that’s not good! You’ll have to let us know what was going on.

 

[skippytx]

Here's my experience with AK DAH tonight. (2/26/2019)

We got to the park tonight around 6:45PM for DAH. We did HS earlier today and then took a break to hot tub and do some laundry in the afternoon before DAH at AK. It wasn't that busy due to the weather. It had been raining since about 4:30. We grabbed an Everest FP earlier in the day so we went and rode that. It was basically a walk on so we rode it a second time. Grabbed a pretzel and went to ride Dinosaur. Got off Dinosaur around 7:45 or so, and went to ride it again but they shut it down 15 minutes early for some reason. There were some folks trying to get on the ride and they couldn't. I'm not sure if they regularly shut this ride down early, but it was surprising, normally in my experience things stay open until the park closes. I don't know if it reopened for DAH or not.

I haven't rode Primeval Whirl in about 3 years, and that's about how long it took me to forget that I hate that ride. I reset that timer tonight, man I don't like that ride. Rode that a little before 8, then sat at a table with an umbrella on it until 8:30.

Grabbed popcorn and a soda at 8:30 and started walking to Pandora. The night started off pretty well actually. Hit the entrance to FOP at 8:45 on the dot. Walked off the ride at 9:15. Almost no wait at the loading zone where you get assigned to the preshow room. I do not know for certain, but I only observed them loading 1 of the 4 theaters. I do not know how many were online tonight. There was a hiccup in the preshow room, where they repeat the decontamination procedure when they need more time up ahead, and we sat in the ride vehicles for 5 or 6 minutes between being secured, and then the ride starting. That was really odd, usually it starts pretty quickly. Something was clearly up tonight.

We got back in line for FOP right after the first ride, so say about 9:20, and the line was all the way down the ramp to right when you walk inside the ride building. We wait about 15 minutes and the line doesn't move at all. Zero movement. A gentleman we rode FOP with earlier bailed on the line, and we bailed as well. While we were walking back out of the queue we overheard people saying the CM's told them it was a 90 minute wait, and they were upset at paying 125 dollars to stand in line for an hour an a half. We went and walked onto Na'vi and rode that instead. At that point we left Pandora and grabbed a box of popcorn and another soda by Island Mercantile and we discussed if we wanted to go wait in line for an hour to ride FOP again, or if we wanted to bail and try to grab a late dinner at Disney Springs instead. We chose to bail, and hit the bus stop at 10PM, and managed to get to Chicken Guy around 10:50 or so. it took a while for a bus to show up, but we had it all to ourselves.

A few things to mention

We were just here in October for 8 nights with the kids, so this is a low key adults only trip my wife and I are on for our 10th anniversary with some friends. There's not a lot of pressure to see and do everything as we just did it all a few months ago. I will say this influenced our decision to leave early. We have 2 more FP+ for FOP this trip, so we'll get to ride at least 3 times total.

We were 110% prepared for the rain, and expected it. It didn't have anything to do with our decision to leave early.

We expected a mad FOP crush at the beginning of the night. That ride is the entire reason folks are coughing up the 125 (or 95) bucks for the ticket. Everyone is going to go get in line to ride FOP first thing. To have them reduce the ride capacity and create an artificial wait leaves a really bad taste in my mouth that no amount of "complimentary" Mickey Bars will remove. The FOP ride takes about 8 minutes or so counting load in/out time. 1 theater seats 48 people at once. Best case you're moving about 350 people an hour through that ride if they're only running 1 theater. Maybe 400 an hour if everything runs super smooth, which it wasn't tonight. DAH is promoted as a way to experience attractions with little to no wait, but then people were waiting anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes. Not what folks expected I bet.


Overall I haven't been happy with the extra hard ticket events at WDW lately. Didn't care for MNSSHP, or how it affected the MK operating hours 4 nights a week during our last trip, and didn't find the DAH at AK worth it either.

We also have the DAH event at MK this Thursday, hopefully that event is better for us.

 

[Haley R]

Here's my experience with AK DAH tonight. (2/26/2019)

We got to the park tonight around 6:45PM for DAH. We did HS earlier today and then took a break to hot tub and do some laundry in the afternoon before DAH at AK. It wasn't that busy due to the weather. It had been raining since about 4:30. We grabbed an Everest FP earlier in the day so we went and rode that. It was basically a walk on so we rode it a second time. Grabbed a pretzel and went to ride Dinosaur. Got off Dinosaur around 7:45 or so, and went to ride it again but they shut it down 15 minutes early for some reason. There were some folks trying to get on the ride and they couldn't. I'm not sure if they regularly shut this ride down early, but it was surprising, normally in my experience things stay open until the park closes. I don't know if it reopened for DAH or not.

I haven't rode Primeval Whirl in about 3 years, and that's about how long it took me to forget that I hate that ride. I reset that timer tonight, man I don't like that ride. Rode that a little before 8, then sat at a table with an umbrella on it until 8:30.

Grabbed popcorn and a soda at 8:30 and started walking to Pandora. The night started off pretty well actually. Hit the entrance to FOP at 8:45 on the dot. Walked off the ride at 9:15. Almost no wait at the loading zone where you get assigned to the preshow room. I do not know for certain, but I only observed them loading 1 of the 4 theaters. I do not know how many were online tonight. There was a hiccup in the preshow room, where they repeat the decontamination procedure when they need more time up ahead, and we sat in the ride vehicles for 5 or 6 minutes between being secured, and then the ride starting. That was really odd, usually it starts pretty quickly. Something was clearly up tonight.

We got back in line for FOP right after the first ride, so say about 9:20, and the line was all the way down the ramp to right when you walk inside the ride building. We wait about 15 minutes and the line doesn't move at all. Zero movement. A gentleman we rode FOP with earlier bailed on the line, and we bailed as well. While we were walking back out of the queue we overheard people saying the CM's told them it was a 90 minute wait, and they were upset at paying 125 dollars to stand in line for an hour an a half. We went and walked onto Na'vi and rode that instead. At that point we left Pandora and grabbed a box of popcorn and another soda by Island Mercantile and we discussed if we wanted to go wait in line for an hour to ride FOP again, or if we wanted to bail and try to grab a late dinner at Disney Springs instead. We chose to bail, and hit the bus stop at 10PM, and managed to get to Chicken Guy around 10:50 or so. it took a while for a bus to show up, but we had it all to ourselves.

A few things to mention

We were just here in October for 8 nights with the kids, so this is a low key adults only trip my wife and I are on for our 10th anniversary with some friends. There's not a lot of pressure to see and do everything as we just did it all a few months ago. I will say this influenced our decision to leave early. We have 2 more FP+ for FOP this trip, so we'll get to ride at least 3 times total.

We were 110% prepared for the rain, and expected it. It didn't have anything to do with our decision to leave early.

We expected a mad FOP crush at the beginning of the night. That ride is the entire reason folks are coughing up the 125 (or 95) bucks for the ticket. Everyone is going to go get in line to ride FOP first thing. To have them reduce the ride capacity and create an artificial wait leaves a really bad taste in my mouth that no amount of "complimentary" Mickey Bars will remove. The FOP ride takes about 8 minutes or so counting load in/out time. 1 theater seats 48 people at once. Best case you're moving about 350 people an hour through that ride if they're only running 1 theater. Maybe 400 an hour if everything runs super smooth, which it wasn't tonight. DAH is promoted as a way to experience attractions with little to no wait, but then people were waiting anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes. Not what folks expected I bet.


Overall I haven't been happy with the extra hard ticket events at WDW lately. Didn't care for MNSSHP, or how it affected the MK operating hours 4 nights a week during our last trip, and didn't find the DAH at AK worth it either.

We also have the DAH event at MK this Thursday, hopefully that event is better for us.

That sounds a lot like how fop was on our night. We sat on our bikes for a good 5+ minutes waiting for everything to load. There was no mention as to what was going on but Dh and I looked at each other multiple times wondering what was taking so long. When we went the line wasn’t as far back as you but it started pretty close to that, down the ramp in the “forest” area. Idk how to describe it but it’s the area right when you get inside before the lab area.

I’m really sorry you had similar issues. They really need to get this figured out because waiting that long for one ride is not acceptable. I emailed to let them know my experience and it didn’t sound like they were too interested. I got a pretty generic email back. Maybe you would have better luck but I definitely think you should let them know how the night went

 

[Nole95]

Here's my experience with AK DAH tonight. (2/26/2019)

We got to the park tonight around 6:45PM for DAH. We did HS earlier today and then took a break to hot tub and do some laundry in the afternoon before DAH at AK. It wasn't that busy due to the weather. It had been raining since about 4:30. We grabbed an Everest FP earlier in the day so we went and rode that. It was basically a walk on so we rode it a second time. Grabbed a pretzel and went to ride Dinosaur. Got off Dinosaur around 7:45 or so, and went to ride it again but they shut it down 15 minutes early for some reason. There were some folks trying to get on the ride and they couldn't. I'm not sure if they regularly shut this ride down early, but it was surprising, normally in my experience things stay open until the park closes. I don't know if it reopened for DAH or not.

I haven't rode Primeval Whirl in about 3 years, and that's about how long it took me to forget that I hate that ride. I reset that timer tonight, man I don't like that ride. Rode that a little before 8, then sat at a table with an umbrella on it until 8:30.

Grabbed popcorn and a soda at 8:30 and started walking to Pandora. The night started off pretty well actually. Hit the entrance to FOP at 8:45 on the dot. Walked off the ride at 9:15. Almost no wait at the loading zone where you get assigned to the preshow room. I do not know for certain, but I only observed them loading 1 of the 4 theaters. I do not know how many were online tonight. There was a hiccup in the preshow room, where they repeat the decontamination procedure when they need more time up ahead, and we sat in the ride vehicles for 5 or 6 minutes between being secured, and then the ride starting. That was really odd, usually it starts pretty quickly. Something was clearly up tonight.

We got back in line for FOP right after the first ride, so say about 9:20, and the line was all the way down the ramp to right when you walk inside the ride building. We wait about 15 minutes and the line doesn't move at all. Zero movement. A gentleman we rode FOP with earlier bailed on the line, and we bailed as well. While we were walking back out of the queue we overheard people saying the CM's told them it was a 90 minute wait, and they were upset at paying 125 dollars to stand in line for an hour an a half. We went and walked onto Na'vi and rode that instead. At that point we left Pandora and grabbed a box of popcorn and another soda by Island Mercantile and we discussed if we wanted to go wait in line for an hour to ride FOP again, or if we wanted to bail and try to grab a late dinner at Disney Springs instead. We chose to bail, and hit the bus stop at 10PM, and managed to get to Chicken Guy around 10:50 or so. it took a while for a bus to show up, but we had it all to ourselves.

A few things to mention

We were just here in October for 8 nights with the kids, so this is a low key adults only trip my wife and I are on for our 10th anniversary with some friends. There's not a lot of pressure to see and do everything as we just did it all a few months ago. I will say this influenced our decision to leave early. We have 2 more FP+ for FOP this trip, so we'll get to ride at least 3 times total.

We were 110% prepared for the rain, and expected it. It didn't have anything to do with our decision to leave early.

We expected a mad FOP crush at the beginning of the night. That ride is the entire reason folks are coughing up the 125 (or 95) bucks for the ticket. Everyone is going to go get in line to ride FOP first thing. To have them reduce the ride capacity and create an artificial wait leaves a really bad taste in my mouth that no amount of "complimentary" Mickey Bars will remove. The FOP ride takes about 8 minutes or so counting load in/out time. 1 theater seats 48 people at once. Best case you're moving about 350 people an hour through that ride if they're only running 1 theater. Maybe 400 an hour if everything runs super smooth, which it wasn't tonight. DAH is promoted as a way to experience attractions with little to no wait, but then people were waiting anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes. Not what folks expected I bet.


Overall I haven't been happy with the extra hard ticket events at WDW lately. Didn't care for MNSSHP, or how it affected the MK operating hours 4 nights a week during our last trip, and didn't find the DAH at AK worth it either.

We also have the DAH event at MK this Thursday, hopefully that event is better for us.

Definitely email guest services ASAP with all this information. Unacceptable that people are paying the amount of money they are only to have to wait in long lines. If Disney is going to market these things as events with minimal waits, then they need to staff accordingly and have an appropriate amount of theaters open.

We are going on April 3, and if this happened to us, someone would be hearing from me very quickly.

 

[Cinderumbrella]

Ugh, so sorry this happened again. I’ll be following closely to see if this becomes a true pattern or if this was an unavoidable technical issue.

 

[eliseisawkward]

Ugh, so sorry this happened again. I’ll be following closely to see if this becomes a true pattern or if this was an unavoidable technical issue.

There have been 13 events so far and only 2 seem to have had serious FOP issues. Not great, but not terrible. It seems like the biggest issue is that if FOP is having trouble keeping up with demand there really isn’t a lot of other stuff to do. If there was a night vision safari or something similar I think it would aleviate the pressure on FOP and make this event even better.

 

[soniam]

Here's my experience with AK DAH tonight. (2/26/2019)

We got to the park tonight around 6:45PM for DAH. We did HS earlier today and then took a break to hot tub and do some laundry in the afternoon before DAH at AK. It wasn't that busy due to the weather. It had been raining since about 4:30. We grabbed an Everest FP earlier in the day so we went and rode that. It was basically a walk on so we rode it a second time. Grabbed a pretzel and went to ride Dinosaur. Got off Dinosaur around 7:45 or so, and went to ride it again but they shut it down 15 minutes early for some reason. There were some folks trying to get on the ride and they couldn't. I'm not sure if they regularly shut this ride down early, but it was surprising, normally in my experience things stay open until the park closes. I don't know if it reopened for DAH or not.

I haven't rode Primeval Whirl in about 3 years, and that's about how long it took me to forget that I hate that ride. I reset that timer tonight, man I don't like that ride. Rode that a little before 8, then sat at a table with an umbrella on it until 8:30.

Grabbed popcorn and a soda at 8:30 and started walking to Pandora. The night started off pretty well actually. Hit the entrance to FOP at 8:45 on the dot. Walked off the ride at 9:15. Almost no wait at the loading zone where you get assigned to the preshow room. I do not know for certain, but I only observed them loading 1 of the 4 theaters. I do not know how many were online tonight. There was a hiccup in the preshow room, where they repeat the decontamination procedure when they need more time up ahead, and we sat in the ride vehicles for 5 or 6 minutes between being secured, and then the ride starting. That was really odd, usually it starts pretty quickly. Something was clearly up tonight.

We got back in line for FOP right after the first ride, so say about 9:20, and the line was all the way down the ramp to right when you walk inside the ride building. We wait about 15 minutes and the line doesn't move at all. Zero movement. A gentleman we rode FOP with earlier bailed on the line, and we bailed as well. While we were walking back out of the queue we overheard people saying the CM's told them it was a 90 minute wait, and they were upset at paying 125 dollars to stand in line for an hour an a half. We went and walked onto Na'vi and rode that instead. At that point we left Pandora and grabbed a box of popcorn and another soda by Island Mercantile and we discussed if we wanted to go wait in line for an hour to ride FOP again, or if we wanted to bail and try to grab a late dinner at Disney Springs instead. We chose to bail, and hit the bus stop at 10PM, and managed to get to Chicken Guy around 10:50 or so. it took a while for a bus to show up, but we had it all to ourselves.

A few things to mention

We were just here in October for 8 nights with the kids, so this is a low key adults only trip my wife and I are on for our 10th anniversary with some friends. There's not a lot of pressure to see and do everything as we just did it all a few months ago. I will say this influenced our decision to leave early. We have 2 more FP+ for FOP this trip, so we'll get to ride at least 3 times total.

We were 110% prepared for the rain, and expected it. It didn't have anything to do with our decision to leave early.

We expected a mad FOP crush at the beginning of the night. That ride is the entire reason folks are coughing up the 125 (or 95) bucks for the ticket. Everyone is going to go get in line to ride FOP first thing. To have them reduce the ride capacity and create an artificial wait leaves a really bad taste in my mouth that no amount of "complimentary" Mickey Bars will remove. The FOP ride takes about 8 minutes or so counting load in/out time. 1 theater seats 48 people at once. Best case you're moving about 350 people an hour through that ride if they're only running 1 theater. Maybe 400 an hour if everything runs super smooth, which it wasn't tonight. DAH is promoted as a way to experience attractions with little to no wait, but then people were waiting anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes. Not what folks expected I bet.


Overall I haven't been happy with the extra hard ticket events at WDW lately. Didn't care for MNSSHP, or how it affected the MK operating hours 4 nights a week during our last trip, and didn't find the DAH at AK worth it either.

We also have the DAH event at MK this Thursday, hopefully that event is better for us.

Sorry your experience was so bad. This sounds more like a malfunction or unexpected understaffing, like no shows maybe due to illness. The flu has just started hitting badly here in Austin. I don’t this was intentional.

 

[Dentam]

I’m not sure if that was why or not but it seemed like everyone in the park was all at fop. When we first got in line we were all the way back not even to the lab part of the que yet. When we’ve used FPS we’ve been way ahead of that point in line. I know I looked around on the ride specifically looking to see if it was completely filled and there were lots of empty sections so for some reason they weren’t running all of the sections

Wow, that's a bummer. On our night we just walked up to the line area and were basically the only ones there each time other than one time when a couple decided to re-ride and they directed them to the "line" next to us.

To have them reduce the ride capacity and create an artificial wait leaves a really bad taste in my mouth that no amount of "complimentary" Mickey Bars will remove.

Do you know that this was the case? Could it be that they were having issues with the ride in some way?

 

[Haley R]

Wow, that's a bummer. On our night we just walked up to the line area and were basically the only ones there each time other than one time when a couple decided to re-ride and they directed them to the "line" next to us.



Do you know that this was the case? Could it be that they were having issues with the ride in some way?

Yeah that definitely wasn’t how ours went. The people in line with us were not very happy. It makes it worse that fop is the type of ride you stand in one spot for awhile waiting for the next ride to start. Unlike rides like pp that should continuously move

 

[ShelliRenee]

Just got back from our whirlwind trip to attend the DAH event. A little bit about us, I am a seasoned Disney Veteran. However, I have not been to AK since the opening of Pandora. Also with me was my friend who had never been to AK, but is already a Disney addict. He loves to research everything Disney. We both are huge into the Disney Pin Trading, and had spent the day resort hopping for the pin trading.

We got there a little bit before 7, just before the rain started falling. There was a line of about 30 people that moved fast once cast members allowed us to enter the park right at 7pm. The process of checking in was easy and uneventful. The only thing that was a little bit out of the ordinary was going through security. Security checked everyone's bag but only men were made to go through the metal detectors. Women were told to bypass it.

After a quick stop at the gift shops, we made our way to Dinosaur and rode it twice before heading to Primeval Whirl (we had fast passes.) Then a quick ride on Triceratops Spin. It was just a few minutes after 8 and we saw them sitting up the refreshment booth in Dino Land, but were turned away and told the event didn't start until 8:30. We sat around and waited for our choice of ice cream, bottled soda or water, and pop-corn. Everything was walk on except the first time we rode Dinosaur. They had stopped the line briefly. So first time was maybe a total of 10 min wait.

We could see the first Rivers of Light was going on and it looked like a lot of the day guest were attending. However, the rain caused a cancellation of the second show, which they announced over the speaker.

Next, we went to Expedition Everest. My friend is not really into roller coasters, so we just rode it once. The cool thing is when the train stopped at the top, before sending us backwards, off in the distance you could see the firework show at MK.

Then, we met Mickey and Minnie at Adventurer's Outpost. The was no line to meet them and thus, they spent a lot of time with us. We got autographs and pictures. Before heading to It's Tough to be a Bug. It got us out of the rain for a few and only about 20 people were in the theater. A quick stop to get a cup of water at the snack cart. They had boxes of pop-corn and again the three choices of ice cream. However, sodas and water were served in cups instead of the bottle we got at Dinoland.

Off to Pandora! I was looking forward to this part the most and it seemed to be where most of the people were. First, we rode Navi River. We walked right on and had the entire boat to ourselves. There were other people in the que when we got back to the Landing. We asked if we could ride again. We had to get out of the boat but they allowed us to cut through the gate at the landing and re-enter the line. Our boat was full the second time around. Our last ride of the night was Flights of Passage. We walked right into the pre-show. Since I had never done FOP, I didn't mind the pre-show. And I understand its benefit of why they don't cut it out. I know lots of people have complained about not being able to skip it, but if you didn't have it, you would be just waiting for the flight.

We had to wait about 15 minutes for the bus to return us to Animal Kingdom Lodge. The seats were wet for some strange reason and so I had a wet bottom for the ride home.

Our thoughts about the event were:

• This park is meant to be seen in the daylight. Lighting made it hard to see the unevenness of the pavement (and the puddles). The grandeur of the theming was lost in the darkness, especially at Expedition Everest. Although Pandora was beautiful lite up, it didn't make up for the safety issues. I know others have said they wish they would add Kilimjari Safari to the event, but I think if they did, you wouldn't be able to see anything because of the darkness. Plus the animals need downtime from being on display all day. If anything I would like to see them add a showing of Finding Nemo to the event.
  
• I think for us it was worth the money to do the event since we are going back to do the park again in November. We now don't have to worry about doing the rides when we go back. We can go enjoy the animals. However, I don't think I would spend money to do it again.
• The rain did make an impact of the event. Everything was open but the rain and the ever so slight chill in the air did seem to drain your energy faster.
  
• I wish that Disney would have all the refreshment carts serving the same thing.
  
• It would have been nice to have at least one of the restaurants open for the first half of the event, especially with the rain. It would give us time to relax before the next ride.
  
• There were a lot more stores open than I expected. I don't think many people were purchasing products, but it was nice to have the option.
• The event mostly had adults. Those people who are not big fans of children will really like the event.
  
• Cast members were hit or miss in the event. Some of them went above and beyond to give us a great experience and took the opportunity to connect with us (which is one of the things I love most about Disney and the Pin Trading). But there were lots of cast members who made it apparent they didn't want to be there that late. My friend even made the comment that he noticed more disgruntled cast members where the first time he went to Disney, we didn't see a single one.
  
• I do wish we hadtn't done the park hopping before the event and would have saved our energy. But we only had the one day at Disney and wanted to make the most of our time.

Well that is my experience and thoughts. Hope it helps some of you in your decision to go or not go to the event and what it is like!

 

[giantgolfer]

Just tried to book 1 ticket for Tuesday night 3/5 and it’s sold out. I guess I’m out of luck? Any chance they’ll release any more?

 

[Haley R]

Just tried to book 1 ticket for Tuesday night 3/5 and it’s sold out. I guess I’m out of luck? Any chance they’ll release any more?

Oh wow you’re right it is showing as sold out. They have never released more tickets before