How reliable are touring plans?

[halssister]

I was playing around on touringplans.com last night, and made some personalized touring plans for each of our park days. Pretty cool, I've never messed with anything like that before. The thing I noticed, though, is that most of the days, the plan didn't even use the fastpasses we have. With the exception of our MK day (where we have A&E), the plan used only one or none of them. Now, most of the fastpasses we have are for shows......are these really not needed? Even for the DHS Frozen SingALong? I guess I'm trying to figure out if I should trust the touring plan and use it, or just plan my own stuff around the fastpass times. We really don't do many of the popular headliners anyway, but I did like how it mapped out the best route so we weren't backtracking too terribly much!

 

[dwight16]

They are very reliable all first timers I send to that site and they have good success you need them more in busy times then off peak but it's a resource you have to use

 

[Alesia]

I find their wait times to be pretty accurate, but I find that shows kind of screw them up. They never have you arriving early enough and never take into account how long it's going to take you to get out of the theater.

Personally, I don't love the touring plans from Touring Plans. I much prefer using the cheat sheets at easywdw.com

 

[halssister]

I find their wait times to be pretty accurate, but I find that shows kind of screw them up. They never have you arriving early enough and never take into account how long it's going to take you to get out of the theater.

Personally, I don't love the touring plans from Touring Plans. I much prefer using the cheat sheets at easywdw.com

Thank you for that info! I'm thinking maybe I will use the plan as a general guideline and as an idea of how long it may take to get from place to place, but still come up with my own schedule. I'd rather we allow time for just ducking into shops, dawdling along etc, than be all scheduled for every single minute. And I am nervous about not using my show FPs and trying to go standby instead. They also didn't take into account certain things, like I purposely scheduled my shows at AK to have time in between, so we could use them as cool down periods, but they had me not using either show FP and instead seeing them back to back at times other than the ones I'd picked.

 

[Alesia]

I think fastpasses for shows are generally a waste. I have never, ever had a hard time getting into a show without one. Have you looked at mesaboy2's fastpass thread? His fastpass recommendations are spot on.

 

[mom2AidanAndEli]

I use Touring Plans as a general guide. Don't plan on following them minute by minute, but as sort of a guide to see if what I have planned is reasonable. I've never tried to really follow one in the park, but I like playing around with them actually!! And you can move things around. It will give you a plan, but then you can manually move things to where you want them and see what happens.

And I agree about not using a FP for a show. There are so many other things to use them on! And if you don't like how they've fit your shows in, just move them!

 

[TheDisneyNurse]

I think they are pretty reliable, but I disagree with a lot of them. I'm sorry, but I'm not riding Splash Mountain, then walking all the way across the park to do Space Mountain just so it can take 4 1/2 minutes off my touring day.

I like to do the park in chunks and coordinate it with my FP's, and I never wait more than 20 min for anything. Then again, I've taken 27 disney trips. I think the touring plans on his site are a wonderful begining for the first timer

 

[TheDisneyNurse]

Adding in, I have used the FP for the Frozen sing-a-long twice now, and I'm glad I did. You get to sit all the way up front and center, and get to go inside first (aka: more time in the AC!!) No idea how long the actual stand-by wait is, however. Does anyone know?

 

[halssister]

I think fastpasses for shows are generally a waste. I have never, ever had a hard time getting into a show without one. Have you looked at mesaboy2's fastpass thread? His fastpass recommendations are spot on.

We really don't ride on many rides, besides Soarin (and DH won't even ride that one with us), and maybe a couple of really tame MK rides. I did read the entire fastpass thread, but we had no interest in most of the popular rides, which is why we got the FPs that we did. Oh, and also A&E at MK, as DS is a big Frozen fan

 

[TheDisneyNurse]

OP, I've heard that it's gotten easier to get A&E fastpasses. And that's a great use of one!

 

[cigar95]

The pre-packaged touring plans are better than the personalized ones. The former have been checked and tested and tweaked, and are quite good.
The latter just come out of the computer algorithms. That's not always a bad thing, but there are so many little things that the algorithms just can't anticipate in advance, so sometimes the personalized plans come out weird. This is especially true when dealing with attractions that take place at specifically scheduled times.
There are ways to work around these flaws, but it takes a lot of work and a good deal of experience with plan tools.