MK Hours Week of December 1st

[DVC92]

I just returned from a 9 night stay. The hours at MK from December 1st through the 8th for resort guests not wanting to attend a Xmas party were absolutely ridiculous. For these 8 nights, MK was only open on Wednesday AND Saturday evenings for guests. There were 5 Xmas parties where the park closed at 6 PM and 1 cast member night where the park closed at 4:30 PM. Wednesday was an EMH night and Saturday the park was open to midnight, but since these were the only 2 evenings, MK was so crowded you could barely move. The fast pass line for Jungle Cruise stretched past the spitting camel and took 45 minutes. The FP line for Haunted Mansion stretched past the loading area for the River Cruise. and the Peter Pan FP line stretched past the Carousel.

I have no problem as to the Cast Member event, but if they do it at this time of the year, they should eliminate one of the Xmas party nights for the week so MK is at least open 3 nights during the week.

 

[Traveling on cc points]

I was there last week too but we left on the 7th so there was only 1 night where it was open late. We did go Wednesday evening to see HEA and it wasn’t bad.
I knew if was going to be a crazy night so we did another park during the day got there right before the HEA started. A lot of people left right after the show so it wound up being a decent night. We left around 11:30.

I agree with you 100%. Disney needs to either do the cast party when other parties aren’t going on or at the very least have 1 less Christmas party when they have the cast party.

 

[Unvoiced_Apollo]

I was there last week as well. And yeah, the Saturday lines were kind of insane. On Saturday, both Peter Pan & Splash had lines going well outside of the FP queue to the point we had to ask where the FP line was. But part of that, at least for Splash, was because it was downed in the morning so that inflated the crowding there later in the day. Still got on both in under 20 minutes. Guess it wasn't the big a deal for me since it's was just me & my dad and it was the end of our vacation where we had done everything else we wanted anyway.

If you have kids, the crowding can be really overwhelming. For the most part though I planned around those and if I didn't have the party tickets, I would have just done MK same day and called it an early night. But I guess if the time at WDW is really limited (less than a week) or the aforementioned group includes kids, I can see why this would be frustrating.

What probably didn't help for Saturday were the hour changes because for quite some time it was 9-10 and without me knowing it changed at some point to 8-Midnight (don't know if this changed before or after I had already arrived there). So anyone in the know had a good jump on everyone else. Not to mention the natural Saturday crowds, and the inflation from the party days. There was just a culmination of all these elements leading to a huge cluster that went above the normal weekend.