We went yesterday, July 31st. We renewed our SoCal Select, and added MP to it. We got a Blockout Exception pass for the day. We arrived at the ticket booth at 7:28, and were still near the rope at rope drop... riding PP with only a 15-minute wait.
We did 20 attractions (counting F! and Fireworks... not counting Dole Whip floats (really... these are an attraction unto themselves, and you should be able to book a FP for them), meals, or the Pixar Play Parade that we briefly encountered. If you don't want to count F! and Fireworks as attractions, then we did 18 attractions. We used 9 FPs throughout the day (not counting F!), booking the first one at 7:36 (for an 8:30 return on Indy), and riding our last FP (Space Mountain) at about 7pm.
When you consider that our 20 attractions included Peter Pan, Tom Sawyer (45 minutes), Standby on Pirates (45 minutes), the RR (30 minutes), and the riverboat (15 minutes), F! & Fireworks (2 and half hours!)... I think that MP really allowed us to do a lot of main attractions without any major wait: Indy, Matterhorn, Space, BTMRR, Splash, GotG, Screamin, TSMM, Space (again). We left at the end of the 9:30 fireworks, pretty tired, having done over 20,000 steps and 10 miles.
Some helpful tips:
- You can book your first FP as soon as you pass through the turnstiles... you don't have to wait for ropedrop.
- Those who do the "morning runner" thing should really consider MP... in fact, Disney now has a monetary incentive to discourage runners joining their party in line. Now, Dad can stay with the whole family to ride TSMM or PP, knowing that the first FP is already booked.
- The app will tell you when you can book your next FP... too bad it doesn't provide an automatic notification!
- The 90 minute (instead of 2 hour) window is a bonus I wasn't prepared for.
- There's not very good signal in many of the ride buildings (Indy, Space, etc... hard to book FPs once the line enters the show building)
- From the booking screen, you can see the available rides, their current wait time, and the return time -- all in one place! This is better than tapping times on the map and trying to remember while you decide what to do next.
- It's nice to get on a longer attraction (like the RR, riverboats, or Tom Sawyer's Pirate Lair") or a sit-down meal, and being able to book a FP without running across the park to another kiosk.
- It also makes it easier to park hop... you can have FPs on hand when you cross to the other park, without having run across earlier in the day.
- There's still a learning curve on the scanners, both with guests and CMs. There are a couple of quirky things -- by automating the scanner process, guest/CM interaction is diminished. Also, they want you to use both scanners, but large groups make that difficult... and the space between the scanner poles isn't really wide enough to make it work well. A couple of times, we ended up in the middle of larger groups because of the way we passed the scanner point. Also, at the merge point, CMs aren't always clear about whether you should just go, or if you're supposed to wait until they've let a certain number of standby through. These are probably all just learning curve issues... and have more to do with the scanners than with MaxPass itself.
Those are my thoughts... I know it's not worth it to everybody... and I do feel badly for large families (I wish there was some way to mitigate this: a cost cap for larger groups, or a family plan...) But for people who already know how to maximize FP to their benefit, this really seems to work well. The $75 price point for AP-holders seems reasonable in comparison to the $10/day. Having said that, I'm doubtful that the introductory price will last, and I suspect that we won't continue MP beyond the first year.
