Is Ride Max or Touring Plan worth it

[wisegal]

Hello

We are heading to WDW from Aug 25 - Sept 5. IS buying a subscription to either touring plans or ride max useful. What are your experiences with them? We are a group of 9 5 adults 4 kids (ages 11,11,10,10).

Thanks
Nicole

 

[Klayfish]

We don't use those things for crowd calendars or planners, my personal opinion is that they have little value. However, we do use the Lines App, which gives real wait times from other guests. We've found that to be pretty accurate, so we know what the real wait time is....the ones on MDE are usually fairly close, but often very conservative (they post a 40 minute wait when it's actually 25).

 

[rwdavis2]

Easywdw used to go them but stopped for a while. Check over there, it's free. Most of the planning sites admit that getting to a park for opening, hitting the popular rides first is the more important than any specific plan for a day.

 

[HydroGuy]

Hello

We are heading to WDW from Aug 25 - Sept 5. IS buying a subscription to either touring plans or ride max useful. What are your experiences with them? We are a group of 9 5 adults 4 kids (ages 11,11,10,10).

Thanks
Nicole

It depends on what you want. Are you looking for something to create an itinerary? I think having that is really helpful especially when you do not visit often. Before visiting WDW the first time I used RideMax to "test drive" different itineraries so I could get a realistic idea of what we might accomplish in a day or morning and not waste time on the wrong attractions. I have always liked RideMax for this. I used it heavily for my first few trips to WDW.

Now that I have a better feel for WDW I feel like I can strategize on my own on what to ride and see.

Touring Plans also creates itineraries. So both can help if that is what you want.

If you are looking for crowd calendars and apps, I like TP for that. I use their Lines app at WDW and DLR.

 

[soniam]

Love the personalized plans from Touring Plans. We have used it for every WDW, DLR, and Universal Orlando trip since 2012. Really helps with time budgeting. I don't use the crowd calendars much, because things dont vary much between days of our trips. You can always choose to use the plan how it fits your group.

 

[Surgie2]

Touring Plans is very helpful in creating itineraries. When we went with all adults we did some criss crossing which was part of the plan and had no waits of over 10 minutes. With kids our plan will minimize any criss crossing and that's what I like about TP...you can input your style of touring and optimize your plan. And really the $15 subscription fee is a miniscule part of our Disney budget.

 

[kay1864]

Two thumbs up for RideMax. For me it means an extra two hours a day riding rides instead of standing in line for them. Considering it's less than $2/day, I think it's money well spent.

 

[Tomh]

I've used Touring Plans, and RideMax, and both work well. Of the two, I prefer RideMax. However, after having been to Disney World for 2 weeks every summer since 2008, I am well past the point of needing help making my ride plans / itinerary. If you are new to Disney, then I would say it may well be helpful for you. If you've been at it a while, then you should know all you need to know to put together a solid touring plan of your own.

 

[Budzooka]

I have used RM for DL and am using TP for my first trip to WDW. RM was fantastic for the old paper FP at DL. We stayed ahead of schedule both days and fit in everything we wanted to do and then some.

I subscribed to RM for WDW, but I kept getting an error that I had too many attractions in my day. There isn't the flexibility to move around the order manually if you desire.

So, I tried TP and liked the setup so much better. The results are yet to be seen, as we go next month (23 days to be exact, but who's counting?), but I loved the flexibility to manually adjust the itinerary and see the results.

Both have good reviews and I like having a sense of purpose instead of struggling to figure out what to do next.

 

[blemon]

I use touring plans and its lines app and it's worth every penny. Here's how I use it so you can decide for yourself.
We are new to Disney. We've only been twice. I am a planner and we HATE waiting in lines.

So I use the personalized plan feature on the site. You choose all the attractions you want to see and it gives you the order you should do them in based on your preferences and tells you which rides you should get FP for. For our first trip it was accurate on wait times within 2 minutes.

I also use the thing where they send you a text if a res opens up. Very useful. Got CRT reservations using it. Excellent.

This time I used the room pictures and views to help make a room request. I don't know if it worked but it did give me a better idea of the resort.

We use the lines app in the park after lunch when our plans sort of break down and we don't care what we do -- just want to go where the lines are shortest. I feel like it also told you what rides had FP. So it was getting hot, popped on the app, decided to head to Haunted Mansion. Got FP on the Disney app and passed up all the people waiting in line. It was great. Hate lines.

It doesn't help with character meets. For example. We know that Merida meets all day at a certain spot and my daughter wanted to meet her. We had to put that in as a break.

 

[wisegal]

Thank you for your replies. Since there are 9 of us I don't want to be standing around trying to figure out what to do next. I think I will try one of these. In the grand cost of it the cost is not a lot.