So last night was the opening of my 60 day window for our August trip. I hadn't planned on staying up late to catch the opening of the window since I didn't need A&E, but I was up anyway doing some stuff for work so even though I was very tired I thought well, might as well get it done now ...
I was really frustrated by the amount of flexibility that was missing when I selected my rides and times. I had previously made FP+ at 30 days for a trip where we stayed off-site, and found the availability and choice of times to be much greater. Now, I know that our time in August is supposed to be much higher crowds, but I really was shocked out how little success I was having making the FP times line up with the rough guidelines I had mapped out for our days.
Well, four or five days into the process it occurred to me that what I was seeing couldn't possibly be right, and sure enough I looked and ... I had been making FP+ reservations for tomorrow and the four days following, not FP+ for the first five days of our actual trip!
OK, I hope you are all having a good chuckle or at least a smile.
The reason I bothered to post this is that although I was very frustrated at the limited offerings for what I thought should be a wide open span, as a set of offerings for tomorrow and the few days going onward they were pretty impressive. Only SDMT wasn't available of all the ones I had wanted. For times, it's true that there were more evening times than morning times, but I saw enough morning times for each that for most combos of three you could find times that would allow you to get through early enough to be able to pick up 4th and more FP if you were spending that long in the park. Were the times ideal? No -- but here is the thing, I felt that the times seemed very random and sometimes not ideal ... kind of like those FP- return times we used to get.
So my takeaway from this experience is that the ability to be spontaneous about picking parks has not necessarily been lost, and for those who really feel that they don't want to, it doesn't mean sacrificing any opportunity to "get on the good rides". It just means that, as before, you will have to take whatever FP times are available. That selection will not be as predictable as FP- return times were for the past -- with legacy, it was possible to know that on a crowd level 6 day at around 10 AM the return times for Jungle Cruise would be around 11:30 (I'm making those numbers up), whereas that predictability is totally gone now. And as has been noted many times, if you were a FP- superuser then this observation will not help you to replicate your experience. But if it's just the spontaneity you were missing, and you were already accustomed to being at the mercy of the time that was spit out of the machine ... it seems to me like what you get with FP+ by waiting until the last minute to book them might not be such a different experience after all.
I was really frustrated by the amount of flexibility that was missing when I selected my rides and times. I had previously made FP+ at 30 days for a trip where we stayed off-site, and found the availability and choice of times to be much greater. Now, I know that our time in August is supposed to be much higher crowds, but I really was shocked out how little success I was having making the FP times line up with the rough guidelines I had mapped out for our days.
Well, four or five days into the process it occurred to me that what I was seeing couldn't possibly be right, and sure enough I looked and ... I had been making FP+ reservations for tomorrow and the four days following, not FP+ for the first five days of our actual trip!
OK, I hope you are all having a good chuckle or at least a smile.
The reason I bothered to post this is that although I was very frustrated at the limited offerings for what I thought should be a wide open span, as a set of offerings for tomorrow and the few days going onward they were pretty impressive. Only SDMT wasn't available of all the ones I had wanted. For times, it's true that there were more evening times than morning times, but I saw enough morning times for each that for most combos of three you could find times that would allow you to get through early enough to be able to pick up 4th and more FP if you were spending that long in the park. Were the times ideal? No -- but here is the thing, I felt that the times seemed very random and sometimes not ideal ... kind of like those FP- return times we used to get.
So my takeaway from this experience is that the ability to be spontaneous about picking parks has not necessarily been lost, and for those who really feel that they don't want to, it doesn't mean sacrificing any opportunity to "get on the good rides". It just means that, as before, you will have to take whatever FP times are available. That selection will not be as predictable as FP- return times were for the past -- with legacy, it was possible to know that on a crowd level 6 day at around 10 AM the return times for Jungle Cruise would be around 11:30 (I'm making those numbers up), whereas that predictability is totally gone now. And as has been noted many times, if you were a FP- superuser then this observation will not help you to replicate your experience. But if it's just the spontaneity you were missing, and you were already accustomed to being at the mercy of the time that was spit out of the machine ... it seems to me like what you get with FP+ by waiting until the last minute to book them might not be such a different experience after all.
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