Just Back My thoughts..

[harbin]

Hello,

We just returned from a 10 day trip. Travel dates were 3/26-4/5. Wanted to give everyone a mini trip report...

Hotel Stay: We did a spilt stay, 5 days at BWI and 5 days at CR. I loved this! BWI made travel to epcot and DHS so easy! The hotel was very nice and we enjoyed all the activities on the Boardwalk. Check in was seamless. We did not make any room requests prior to check in. Food options here are a bit of a challenge, but we had breakfast ADR's most days so it really didn't matter much. CR was great also, we stayed in Garden Wing, Garden View room 6210. It was about a 5 min walk to the tower, and we had a beautiful view of the canal. The pool was great, and resort was well kept. We loved the ease of travel to MK. All in all we would stay in both places again.

Parks: Crowds were large, it was Spring Break season. It was no more crowded than when we go in summer, but still packed. We had the best time in the park in the AM hours (not rope drop) before 11am, and late at night during fire works or parades until closing. We rode everything we wanted to ride, sometimes multiple times.


FP+/Magic Bands:

The jury is still out as to wether I really liked this or not. Magic bands worked flawlessly was able to charge, get in room, and never had a problem using them for FP+. I agree that the three FP+ per day can be a challenge and that the tiering and not being able to make reservations in more than one park are a problem. We were able to benefit from Rider Swap as we have a three year old, so that was helpful in allowing us to ride favorites more than once. Overall I think I liked the system, but the new improvements that are supposedly coming "should" help. However, if I have to stand in those god awful kiosk lines to make more FP+ I will just stick with my "three per day". I do not understand waiting 2 hours to "reserve" rides later in the day... you could have ridden them by the time you are out of the kiosk line KWIM? Sometimes the FP+ line seems very long, with everyone scanning bands, but it really does move quite quickly.

MDE:
I did experience the "blip in the system" message a few times. Overall it worked fine, but there were times when I got the dreaded message twice when trying to cancel ADR's, and twice when trying to switch FP. I was able to switch FP but the app can be cumbersome to maneuver. Most of the time trying to change times for TSMM, Soarin, or Test track were out of the question, they just weren't available later in the day when I was trying to change them. However, this isn't much different than what we saw with legacy FP. If you didn't get a FP early in the day for these attractions (often by running to get there), you wouldn't get one at all. We found riding these in the afternoon with FP+, and then riding again right before park closing was pretty easy to do with little to no wait.

Overall we had a great trip as always! I do believe "the magic" is still there just slightly modified LOL. We had such a great time, I am already planning our trip for next year! Let me know if you have any questions.

 

[RWF]

We just got back from a trip last week. It had been five years since we've been to WDW. Our feelings are similar to yours. We had a great trip, but have some reservations about FP+ and MDE.

Anyway, I wanted to ask about your morning vs. evening experiences. Now that our kids are older, we may start staying in the parks later. However, I don't see us being able to do rope drop and late evening. So if you had to choose one, which would you choose? I always thought evening would be less productive than morning because people don't mind staying up late. However, you seem to have had low crowds at night.

 

[TJA]

Thanks for the info and report. We will be in WDW soon and are anxious to try to new FP system!

 

[harbin]

Yes... we are not rope drop people at all. Just can't seem to get up that early, and get two tired kids out the door. We had great success at night.. Here is what our average night looked like... Just to add. We used Park Hopper a lot more than we usually do. Would start at one park during the day, mid morning and then move to another at night. An example was:

AK during the day.. rode everything we wanted, saw everything we wanted, and then moved to MK after dinner. Park hours at MK this day were until 12am. We got there around 8pm. Rode everything with short waits first (tea cups, small world, dumbo, astro orbiters, tomorrow land speedway, and Barnstormer (about a thousand times in a row) It's my three year old's favorite. Then around
10:00 when everyone was gathered to watch wishes we rode all the mountains and more popular rides. No wait was longer than 20 minutes at this time. We stayed until crowds cleared after fireworks around 11:30 and then left.

The same at epcot... went there after a day at another park and rode Soarin and Test track literally right before closing. Test track at 8:55 with a 9:00 park closing was a walk on...
We enjoyed the late nights more than the early morning rope drop... coming from the west coast, those early mornings just kill us with the time difference. As long as my three year old napped during the day (which he mostly did in the stroller) we were good to stay up! Hope that helps!

 

[RWF]

Yes that helps a lot! Thanks!

We might try late nights on our next trip. Your experience at TT and Soarin is really encouraging. Even in the morning those rides were swamped on our trip and we could only do one without a FP.

I love the parks at night, and for the first time, our kids were enjoying the evenings as well. They appreciated the ambiance and were having fun just walking around. But we never stayed really late because we didn't want to miss rope drop the next morning. Definitely have to try this next trip!

 

[ampc3]

Thanks for your positive update. Quick question on the rider swap, did you happen to get one for space mt? If so did it allow you to come back on a different day or did it have to be used the same day?

I saw a picture of the new rs passes and it showed end of month date but someone said space was still same day? Tia

 

[harbin]

We did get rider swap for space mtn... Truthfully I can't remember if we had to ride that one the same day. I know the ones we got for Everest and primeval whirl expired at the end of the month. My 7 year old always wanted to ride again right away, so we used them all soon after we got them. Sorry I'm not more help!