wisblue
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Apr 28, 2003
- Messages
- 4,385
On the still active thread about why standby waits are so long, there was a brief side trip discussion about whether FP return lines are significantly longer than they used to be with paper FPs. I thought it would be useful to give that subject its own thread and invite people to share their experiences.
I just returned from a short trip while a couple of my daughters participated in the Wine and Dine Half Marathon (which unfortunately got delayed and then shortened to a 7 mile run because of lightning in the area). This trip gave me the latest opportunity to see if I would experience any significant changes in FP return lines as compared to other trips with FP+. I’ll give more details later in a separate post, but on this trip we used 18 FPs on 6 different days and I did not experience any unusually long lines. For all but one of them (at Soarin) we were on a ride vehicle 10 minutes or less after entering the line.
Because I was specifically paying attention to this after the discussion on the board last week, I found myself breaking up our time in the FP return lines into 3 distinct steps:
Step 1- Getting past the first scanner.
Step 2- Getting through the dedicated FP+ line to the second scanner, where the line is merged with the standby line.
Step 3- Getting from that merge point through the rest of the line and boarding area, including any preshow/instruction video.
Step 1 seems to be the most popular one for individuals who love to post pictures of long lines of guests waiting to scan their bands. On this trip, we did not see any of that, either in FP lines that we entered, or as we walked around the park. The longest line we got into was at Space Mountain, where there were about 20 people in front of us, and we got through the scanner in about a minute. We also had a slight delay at Spaceship Earth because the CM at the scanner was explaining to a group that appeared not to understand English that their FPs were for Mission Space.
There is no question that long lines at the scanners do occur on occasion. They could come up, for example, because of a sudden surge in arrivals after a parade ends or a show lets out, a person or party having trouble getting through the scanners, or a ride having a breakdown earlier in the day causing guests with earlier FPs to come back to use them later. But, my experience and observation continues to be that these lines are much more the exception than the norm. Even when they do occur, there is a question about whether and how much the backup affects the ultimate wait time, because that depends on whether it makes Step 2 longer. A picture may be worth a thousand words in some cases, but in this context a picture without some words explaining how long it took to get past the first scanner, and then how long it took to get to the merge point, isn’t very helpful.
As for Step 2, we never took more than 5 minutes to get from the first scanner to the second except at Soarin. In most cases, it only took as long as it took to walk nonstop between the scanners. At some attractions, like Space, Splash, and Safari, this walk can take a couple of minutes, especially if there are some slow people ahead of you in line.
Step 3 is tougher to generalize because what comes after that second scanner varies a lot from ride to ride. At some of the continuous boarding rides with no preshow of any kind you can be past the merge point and on to a ride in just a minute or two. On others, there is an unavoidable wait of 5-10 minutes or so just to get through the whole boarding process, which includes things like the car design at Test Track, getting placed in the loading cages and watching the Patrick video at Soarin, and the preshow videos at RNRC and Dinosaur. Those waits were there with paper FP too.
On this trip, as in our previous trips with paper FP and FP+, almost all of our waiting to get on a ride vehicle came in Step 3.
I just returned from a short trip while a couple of my daughters participated in the Wine and Dine Half Marathon (which unfortunately got delayed and then shortened to a 7 mile run because of lightning in the area). This trip gave me the latest opportunity to see if I would experience any significant changes in FP return lines as compared to other trips with FP+. I’ll give more details later in a separate post, but on this trip we used 18 FPs on 6 different days and I did not experience any unusually long lines. For all but one of them (at Soarin) we were on a ride vehicle 10 minutes or less after entering the line.
Because I was specifically paying attention to this after the discussion on the board last week, I found myself breaking up our time in the FP return lines into 3 distinct steps:
Step 1- Getting past the first scanner.
Step 2- Getting through the dedicated FP+ line to the second scanner, where the line is merged with the standby line.
Step 3- Getting from that merge point through the rest of the line and boarding area, including any preshow/instruction video.
Step 1 seems to be the most popular one for individuals who love to post pictures of long lines of guests waiting to scan their bands. On this trip, we did not see any of that, either in FP lines that we entered, or as we walked around the park. The longest line we got into was at Space Mountain, where there were about 20 people in front of us, and we got through the scanner in about a minute. We also had a slight delay at Spaceship Earth because the CM at the scanner was explaining to a group that appeared not to understand English that their FPs were for Mission Space.
There is no question that long lines at the scanners do occur on occasion. They could come up, for example, because of a sudden surge in arrivals after a parade ends or a show lets out, a person or party having trouble getting through the scanners, or a ride having a breakdown earlier in the day causing guests with earlier FPs to come back to use them later. But, my experience and observation continues to be that these lines are much more the exception than the norm. Even when they do occur, there is a question about whether and how much the backup affects the ultimate wait time, because that depends on whether it makes Step 2 longer. A picture may be worth a thousand words in some cases, but in this context a picture without some words explaining how long it took to get past the first scanner, and then how long it took to get to the merge point, isn’t very helpful.
As for Step 2, we never took more than 5 minutes to get from the first scanner to the second except at Soarin. In most cases, it only took as long as it took to walk nonstop between the scanners. At some attractions, like Space, Splash, and Safari, this walk can take a couple of minutes, especially if there are some slow people ahead of you in line.
Step 3 is tougher to generalize because what comes after that second scanner varies a lot from ride to ride. At some of the continuous boarding rides with no preshow of any kind you can be past the merge point and on to a ride in just a minute or two. On others, there is an unavoidable wait of 5-10 minutes or so just to get through the whole boarding process, which includes things like the car design at Test Track, getting placed in the loading cages and watching the Patrick video at Soarin, and the preshow videos at RNRC and Dinosaur. Those waits were there with paper FP too.
On this trip, as in our previous trips with paper FP and FP+, almost all of our waiting to get on a ride vehicle came in Step 3.
