FOTL last week

[Letsbgoofy]

I read so many posts about how bad the FOTL perk was getting that I wanted to post our experience. In the mornings, you didn't even need to use FOTL until at least 10:00 on most of the rides. Weird how many people show up around 11:00 - I guess I'm used to Disney where there are a million people there when the gates open. I didn't see workers marking off the Express passes you buy in the mornings, but later in the day I saw passes being marked off on every ride we did. We never waited more than 10 minutes for anything except Shrek. Most of the rides had wait times of under 5 minutes no matter what time of the day we were there. It was well worth the price we paid to stay onsite.

I also noticed on many rides that there was an attendant stationed in the middle of the line checking express passes. I know people complained about non express people cutting into the express line, but that was not happening last week.

A few times we did see groups of people getting in to the ride (Cat in the Hat comes to mind) by a back way other than the Express line. They were all dressed a like - a kids club or something - maybe taking a tour?

I read the negative posts before we went and was expecting problems. It seems that Universal is on top of the issues and has straightened out any issues with express pass lines and wait times.

 

[goofy!]

Excellent - great to hear!

 

[ChisJo]

That is such a relief....thank you for posting your update on FOTL.

 

[Notatourist]

Yep, that was a kids foundation...and it was a tour....

 

[bubba's mom]

I agree w/ OP...we were there the same time (& did the "meet")

It seemed the EP lines at ioa (esp. hulk and spidey) would back up around the noon time. Other than that, they WERE checking them off and we didn't wait hardly at all. Totally 100% agree w/ OP.....no worries at all!

 

[JenLynn]

Ditto what they said

This was our first trip to Universal and we just got back yesterday. I was very impressed and pleased with the Universal Express system. Totally worth it! There was an attendant at the beginning and middle of just about every ride to check passes. Every time we saw someone with the "one per ride" type of pass the attendant was checking it off. The one "hang up" we had was with our kid's passes. We stayed at HRH and DH carried his room key along with the kid's in his lanyard. For the most part the attendants didn't want to see the kid's cards (just ours). But every once in a while (inevitably when we were running to try to catch a show ) the attendant wanted to see each card individually.

Oh, and the one thing we learned from experience - the Express Pass is quicker than even the single rider line (at least that was my experience on Mummy in particular).

 

[micksterlee]

I agree fotl worked out great for us all week.I was glad to have it when I was sitting at Starbucks watching several tour groups filing past from the garage to the parks.We hardly waited for anything and like others have said they were marking off the one ride tickets at every attraction.