has anyone bought a touring plan from:

[pstepka]

http://www.touringplans.com/intro.html

Just curious if they do save time.

Thanks,
Pam

 

[QuickGold]

I haven't bought any, but these are the same people who put out the Unofficial Guide to WDW by Bob Sehlinger and I love the tour guides in the book. And if those save me time(which they always do), I imagine the ones from Touringplans.com works as well.

 

[maearley98]

I used http://tourguidemike.com/ and found that more useful than "The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World" . Mousesavers.com has a discount code to use for it..

Use this link from Mousesavers and then work your way to Tour Guide Mike.
http://mousesavers.com/timeismoney.html#tgm


Good Luck.

Mary

 

[lentesta]

Hi Pam,

I wrote the software used by both the Unofficial Guide and TouringPlans.com. I'll be happy to provide references on request. Plenty of Disboards readers have used the touring plans, too. I believe you can use the search facility here to see their comments.

As far as TourGuideMike goes, his touring plans are not as efficient as those found in the Unofficial Guide. That is, for the same set of attractions, you'll spend more time waiting in line if you follow his plans. There's a thread on Disboards that explains why - let me know if you'd like a link.

Also, TGM's plans are not customized - they're more like a generic set of instructions based on some assumptions that may not apply to you. The plans from TouringPlans.com, on the other hand, are completely customized. You specify when you want to start touring, what attractions you want to see, when you want to take breaks, and so on. That's completely different from what TGM (or anyone else) offers.

Thanks for the opportunity to explain how TouringPlans.com works. If there's anything else I can help with, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Len Testa

 

[rolshan]

I tried to compare myself the unofficial guide tours with Mike's and could not account for the differences, would be interested to see the discussions as to why one is more efficient...Thanks.

 

[lentesta]

Hi rolshan,

I'd posted a fairly lengthy explanation here previously, but the search function is currently disabled. When that becomes available again, I'll see if I can find the link.

In short, creating efficient touring plans is very difficult because of the sheer number of possible ride combinations. If you wanted to see the ten most popular attractions in the Magic Kingdom, for example, there are 10 x 9 x 8 x 7 x 6 x 5 x 4 x 3 x 2 x 1 = 3,628,800 different touring plans to do so.

A fairly comprehensive touring plan of the Magic Kingdom, such as the One Day Touring Plan for Adults found in the 2003 Unofficial Guide, has something like 21 attractions. There are 51,090,942,171,709,440,000 possible touring plans for these 21 attractions. For comparison, this is something like five times the estimated number of grains of sand that exist in the entire world.

Clearly, no human being could possibly evaluate this many touring plans. Even if you had a computer that could evaluate one hundred million touring plans every second, it would still take more than 16,200 years (if my math is correct) to analyze all of those touring plans.

Fortunately, scientists have been working on problems such as this for a long time, and have developed some sophisticated ways of dealing with this kind of complexity. I joined the Unofficial Guide, for example, while doing research in grad school on this kind of scheduling problem. My research led to the creation of the computer software the Guide uses to create its touring plans. The software is truly state of the art - descriptions of its inner workings have been published in peer-reviewed academic journals, and we've got a series of patents in the works to cover the techniques. I continue to work on the software as part of my Ph.D. research.

In field trials, touring plans generated by the software have been shown to save up to five hours of standing in line per day. In general, we estimate that the software can get within about 2% of the "optimal" touring plan. As we note in the Guide, if the "perfect" Magic Kingdom touring plan takes ten hours to complete, our touring plan will generally take no more than ten hours and twelve minutes. Given that it would take sixteen thousand years to find this "perfect" touring plan, the extra twelve minutes is a fair tradeoff.

To the best of my knowledge, no other guidebook or web site, including TourGuideMike, uses any sort of systematic method to create its touring plans. I would venture a guess that most other authors or webmasters sit down with a pencil and a piece of paper and use their own experiences as a guide. Given the sheer complexity of the problem, it's extremely unlikely any of them would be able to match the performance of our software-generated touring plans.

The software is only half the story, though. We also need lots and lots of data to feed to the software. Several times each year, a team of Unofficial Guide researchers visits each park. We measure the wait time at every ride, show, FASTPASS booth and restaurant in every park, every 30 minutes, from park open to park close. A typical researcher will walk about 18 miles per day and collect around 500 pieces of information. No other guidebook does anything at all like this.

We feed this data to our professional statistician (again, I don't think any other guidebook has a statistician on staff). He creates templates for each park based on the season, crowd volumes, and Early Entry patterns. The software uses these templates when creating the touring plans.

How good is the data? At any given point in the day, our wait time estimates are within 5 minutes of the actual wait time a little more than 80% of the time. We're within 10 minutes more than 90% of the time. We don't know why, but it happens to work out that we're over and under the actual time with about the same frequency, so things tend to balance out over the course of the day. In testing our new Epcot touring plans this summer, virtually all of the test subjects finished the touring plan within 10 minutes of its predicted completion time. Even I thought it was a little spooky.

I hope this helps answer your question. It takes a lot of historical data, backed by extensive analysis and some really sophisticated computer software, to come up with good touring plans. And the Unofficial Guide is the only group that does this. That's what makes ours the best.

Thanks for the opportunity to explain this, rolshan. Feel free to ask questions.

Sincerely,

Len Testa