is rope drop still worth it?

[DisneyFive]

I don't think that's the right way to look at it.

Standing in line for an hour at 8am is not the same as standing in line for an hour at 10am, because at 8am there's nothing better you could be doing. At 10am, every minute you stand in line is a minute you're not doing some other fun thing.

You have a point there. Part of the waiting around time, before they allow you to enter an actual ride queue, isn't taking away from other ride time. That portion of the morning wait isn't that much though. Maybe 30 minutes, depending on how early you got to the park.

Overall though, the crowds build WAY faster now than they did pre pandemic. I do agree that it's better to be there before park opening if you want to minimize standby time for a some rides. It's just nothing like the benefit it used to be. A large part of that, I think, was that guests previously could pre-book 3 FP's for the day, so they didn't feel the need to be there so early just to have a "successful day".

Dan

 

[snikki]

You have a point there. Part of the waiting around time, before they allow you to enter an actual ride queue, isn't taking away from other ride time. That portion of the morning wait isn't that much though. Maybe 30 minutes, depending on how early you got to the park.

Overall though, the crowds build WAY faster now than they did pre pandemic. I do agree that it's better to be there before park opening if you want to minimize standby time for a couple of rides. It's just nothing like the benefit it used to be. A large part of that, I think, was that guests previously could pre-book 3 FP's for the day, so they didn't feel the need to be there so early just to have a "successful day".

Dan

Yup. ILL is a big part too. If you don’t want to pay for a headliner you get there at RD now and hope to ride it for free with a low wait. Before you could get a boarding group or FP+ and estimate around what time you needed to be in the park.

 

[DisneyFive]

Yup. ILL is a big part too. If you don’t want to pay for a headliner you get there at RD now and hope to ride it for free with a low wait. Before you could get a boarding group or FP+ and estimate around what time you needed to be in the park.

Very true. Good point. The inability to book the two “best” rides, without paying extra, in each park does causes the need to be there at before opening to have a decent wait. (Hopefully)

The other option is to hop in line at the end of the night. The line might be a little longer than it would have been first thing in the morning but it’s another option.

Dan

 

[Orsino]

In my opinion, no. I’m at Disney now and had two bad early entry experiences. Lots of down attractions makes for a beyond useless rope drop. And with so many people going into the parks early, rope drop at best gets you one ride with low wait. I’m better off sleeping in.
Since then we have skipped rope drop and emphasized riding popular attractions near closing. 7 dwarfs was a 25 minute wait (actual) ten minutes before close. Flight of passage was a 30-ish minute wait at closing. We think Remy would be short at closing too, but didn’t do it since we were in france around 7:30pm and by 9pm we weren’t close to france anymore. (We saw harmonious once on our first epcot night and that is plenty for us.)

 

[glocon]

Does Disneyland have as many rides that break down as Disneyworld I wonder? Is it just WDW or more of the parks suffering from ride breakdowns? This sounds disheartening.

 

[Donna M]

Rope Drop is so worth it; we think it is the best strategy to get the harder rides. We used it on Peter Pan and had a 10-15 min wait.

We used it for ROTR this past Wed. Got to the park at 8 am and were walking through the ROTR line at 8:15. Posted wait was 20. We were moving almost the whole time. An advantage to doing rope drop is that when the ride breaks down you may be almost ready to board, so they give you a lightning lane for anytime later. That happened and we used it later for an easy walk on.

Being a resort guest required showing our eligibility but there wasn´t a hold area like there was in the MK.