Express pass on very crowded days

keke5656

Earning My Ears
Joined
Jan 2, 2017
Messages
27
We are going the week before Christmas. It looks like it will be a busy one! We have EE and EP. From all of the reading I have done it looks like the worst wait time with EP is half the standby time.
Can anyone confirm?
Also is the EP for train really terribly long when busy?
Our son has a hard time with lines sometimes. I want to be able to set some reasonable expectations for him and our day. I know it will be very busy. We plan on leaving the park from 12-3 each day to get a breather.
Thank you!
 
We usually go the week leading up to Thanksgiving (F-Tu) and I think half the standby is a good worse case benchmark. It’s usually much less than that. A nice thing about EP is that you can often see the line and just decide to come back later. Popular rides have longer EP lines so hitting them early or later in the day is a good strategy for lower EP waits too. But most of the time it wasn’t an issue. I think we’ve only waited for EP longer than 30 minutes a couple of times.
 
We were there Thanksgiving week and had EE and Express Unlimited Passes since staying at RP. Express lines were 20% or less than the posted wait times. I made the mistake to assume that it was half of the time so I didn't try many rides until I tried Spider-Man. Spider-Man was posted at 110 minutes but it took us 7 minutes. After that, we hit every ride we could. Gringott's was posted at 140 minutes - took about 10 minutes. Hippogriff or whatever it is called was about 50% of posted time - that was the longest wait. We didn't wait more than 20 minutes for any ride other than Hipp.
 
Also there on Thanksgiving week and it was super crowded, and EPs helped a ton. The best advice is to go in early and do the rides before the crowds hit. EP lines are not open during EE, but will be very short until around 10:30. At that point, you'll have to decide what your tolerance is for lines. Your plan to take a break from 12-3 is good, as you will avoid the worst of the crowds. If you go back in the evening, lines should get short again as the crowds hit CityWalk for dinner...
 

The train is the worst, FYI. We’ve waited 45 minutes+ with EP because the merge point is so early. Other than that I don’t think we ever waited more than 20-30 and usually 15 or less.


yes, We tried the train last Monday and it was about a 30 minute wait to get to our turn to get on the train. My son had to use the bathroom so we didn't make it on the train after that long wait. Tried again on Tuesday morning last week and zero wait for EP folks. Got right on from UO to IOA. We took the return train that night and it was about a 10 minute wait right after the Hogswarts Lightshow. We did leave the light show a few minutes early to get the jump.
 
I'll agree with the above posters, most of the time the EP waits won't be bad but it really depends on how well the workers are moving the line and how busy the EP line itself is.

I was there the second week of November and the EP lines were terrible at first. After talking to some other people I found out that we just happened to be there right after the morning EE issues where the park had a power outage and so the parks had apparently handed out a whole bunch of express passes to the people who were affected those mornings. For the first two days of my trip it seemed like the EP lines were longer than the regular lines and in some cases they really actually were.

I watched a family walk in about 10 minutes after us in the King Cross station and end up line in front of us after the merge point. King's Cross station is always bad for EP cause the merge point is so early but this particular worker at the merge point didn't seem to want to move the EP line, she was not doing a very good job of ratios between the two lines. I've seen that happen before at King's cross and I think it is because the merge point worker can see the switchbacks for the regular line but can't see how far back the EP line goes. That's just a theory of mine though. This particular case above the EP line was backed up all the way to the place where they scan your tickets, whereas the regular line was only through the first switchback. Then the worker held the EP line over and over again to let the regular line through. It was very aggravating and had we realized what was going on we would have switched and gotten it the regular line.

Of course, that was a rare experience, there won't usually be that many people with EP. But either way my advice would be to not park hop too much. Try to do the train early in the day when the line will be less because not as many people park hopping and then stick to that park for the rest of the day, you'll save a ton of time and be able to do more.
 
I will add that the Hogsmeade station is almost never a problem, so going from IOA to US is fine, that line is short and the merge point is right at the point where you get loaded to a train car.

It's just King's Cross that is super bad and has the really early merge point. So try to avoid hopping from US to IOA unless it is early in the day.
 
Exactly. Kings to Hogsmeade in the morning - no line really. I could not believe how empty it was. Great experience taking the train both directions.
 












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