People have said I'm ruining Disney for years now because childless adult/paying for deluxes/staying on site at all/booking dessert parties/paying for G+ and ILLs/LLMP/SP/and now more recently not caring about $8 sodas. I remember when the CL FP+ pilot debuted and people were ready to pull out guillotines. It is what it is.
I am sort of the same- I did REALLY well over the summer booking rides with LL and LL+... I got 6 or more every day and for rides everyone wanted to go on, too.
BUT...the idea of waking up whenever and going on whatever just once??? Without waking up at 6:51 when everyone else is still fast asleep? And almost being forced to rope drop versus not even setting an alarm? That's pretty appealing too.
I won't lie, I balked at the announcement this morning thinking "this is nice for the normies who can't or don't want to stress out about figuring things out but I wouldn't ever buy it, because I'm an AP and The Planner and a power user etc etc" . I'm a weirdo that enjoys the gameification aspect of these systems (probably because I am a gamer) and there's a lot of satisfaction when a plan comes together, I've always been really successful with every iteration I've tried my hand at. But I'm thinking about our truncated pre-cruise trip last month where we were running ourselves ragged with LLs, specifically the day we hopped from MK to HS. While we absolutely were able to ride everything we wanted, and it went really well, we were way more exhausted than we usually are, and we didn't get to break when we normally would because of the return times I pulled. Refreshing is whatever but man it would be nice to basically take a day off from all of that once or twice on a trip, even on our normal longer ones. And my partner doesn't even give me grief about our touring plans!
We have a 3 day trip in December and will buy this for our HS day. If we were bigger MK people we'd buy it for that day as well...but we only usually spend half a day there at most on most trips. AK and EP we don't see the value for our situation as we can get most things we want done at those parks with the current LL offering.
I personally think this is a great addition. We've always bought whatever LL iteration is available....but could never justify the cost of the VIP tours....especially on our trips with just me and my hubby. It will allow us to have VIP-lite days at a fraction of the tour cost.
...and this is where I'm at on it now. Is it something we'd do every day or even every trip? Absolutely not. But in hindsight if this offering had been available I absolutely would have bought it on that MK/HS day we had, for HS, and just hopped in after our midday break after a morning spent in MK. The "why don't you just get a plaid" talk is insane to me, even if I had the money to do that with just me and my partner I wouldn't want to. VIP tours have never appealed to me because I hate traveling in the kind of large groups that would make the price feasible for us, as an introvert I don't want to be saddled with a stranger having to make small talk and pretending not to know all the trivia they're telling me all day long, and having to go for hours and hours at a time is just not for me.
I'm also thinking about next year's trip. We have 10 days and are bringing a friend who's a first timer. We've already had discussions about the type of touring we do to avoid lines, and budgeting for LLMP/SP, just to set expectations and avoid drama on the trip. She's fully on board but I'm wondering if it wouldn't be worth it just on an HS day alone, to cut out those insanely early rope drop mornings. I don't know, I see the value in it for us even if others don't. But again we're just 2 adults, 3 at most.
