How do you plan your FP+s?

[KSR0330]

Our trip last year was our first trip to WDW. I planned our FP+ pretty randomly, choosing what looked good and pretty randomly choosing times. That resulted in a lot of random running around the parks.

What's the best way to choose FP+ times? Do you plan your route and try to estimate what time you will be in certain areas and book them based on that? We're going in late August, so I'm planning mornings at one park, afternoon break and evenings at a different park. TIA!

 

[SnipsNSnails]

I choose my parks. I choose my ADRs. For MK I split my days up into target areas. For this trip we have 3 full days plus 2 evenings at MK. One day we focus on Fantasyland, one on Adventureland/Frontierland, one on Tomorrowland, one evening we have our FP for MSEP and Wishes. We rope drop and do morning EMH sometimes. I leave the first 1-2 hours, depending on the park, for riding with low lines then schedule the FP+after that. I try to keep them close together time wise and for popular rides. After I have my FP made, I put all the info into TP. The rides that we want to cover for that day and then Optimize. It will often not use your existing FP. I then reorder things so that my FP are in the right spots, minimize the walking by having my attractions in a logical order, and try to work out any long waits by moving things. Use Evaluate rather than Optimize after the first time. Sometimes things won't fall just right and I will from there tweak FP times if I can and even ADRs. My plan is once the FPs are used to check for a FP for the remaining attractions in our plan. After we are done with our plan, there is no plan. We will either go back to the room to rest until dinner, ride things using additional FP, ride things not on our list with short waits, hop parks to hit some things we didn't finish on another day, etc.

 

[ArielSRL]

Our last trip was summer 2012 before FP+ so our June trip is a semi new experience. I, like PP, am using touringplans.com; using for the first time ever. It only cost me about $10 so I thought that was well worth it. I read their advice (and several other sites' advice) on FP+ before doing anything. I used TP for help with crowd levels to pick what days for each park, then scheduled ADRs at 180 days out. Then I personalized plans on TP for each day. I entered all the attractions we wanted to do each day, "optimized", then dragged and reordered so the kids stuff was before they might fall asleep and so we were not criss-crossing the parks (we are doing 2.5 days at MK so, like PP, I was also able to focus on certain areas each day). Once I did that, I had TP "evaluate" and I picked the three longest wait times for my FP+ (though I actually haven't done it in reality yet bc we are 119 days out as of today). HTH.

 

[Accident]

Mine varies from trip to trip and it's getting harder to pick and more and more rides get new interactive queues that you can't see using fastpass. I think it's causing some of the old ride rediscovery and long lines the last couple years..

- If there happens to be something I've never seen and I want to make sure I can get on it. (also something with major refurb that I haven't seen yet)
- something important to the trip (generally not what you expect, just somethign we haven't done or maybe its time to fastpass a fireworks for a good comfortable spot and see it as intended).
- if anything left, something hard to get on in case I feel like riding it

With the construction I'm finding I need to look for a throw away to find 3 fast passes.. I've been aiming for rides I know never have a line so I don't keep anyone from a ride/character or make them stand in line a long time so I could find 3. Figment, Stitch, muppets and similar.

 

[JWigs]

If it's WDW I do the 180 days for ADR and then I map out which parks have EMH and that helps lay out the days we go to which park.

Like others said, I choose my FP usually for busier times so that I can knock out some rides in the morning that are popular and won't have as long of a wait. We spend a lot of time in Fantasyland with a little one so it's key for us to knock out as many of those rides since we can't FP them all

 

[KSR0330]

Thanks for all of the advice! I didn't know that TP had the ability optimize and evaluate plans. It's great!