Len-lentesta said:
First of all, many thanks for your work and research. My wife and I have been unofficial guide junkies for probably ten years running now, and purchase the book even in the rare year when we don't visit just to enjoy the updates and added ancedotes. We've joked that a royalty check sent our way would not be totally unexpected due to sheer number of people we've told to buy that book whenever we're asked for Disney advice by friends, workers and total strangers who find out just how much we enjoy the mouse and how often we go there.
Second, congrats! The two of us have lurked on the DIS boards for a long long time and have never felt a need to jump into the foray until your post. So for better or worse, if I continue to post after this thread, I'm blaming it entirely on you.....lol
We're heading back down there for the second half of September, and to be blunt, it was the Best Days guide that finalized our decision to not go during the last two weeks of August and instead pull DD-11 out of school even though the school year will only be eight days old when we yank her. (For those who live in the South, it might amaze you to learn that she doesn't start until the Thursday after Labor Day, and that's pretty standard around the Northeast). We saw that our intended days in August started at 6's, and yielded a couple of 4's at the tail end of our sixteen days down there. The last two weeks of September were all 1's marred by the occasional 2. One didn't have to be Einstein to realize that the quality of the visit would be significantly better by waiting a few weeks.
So, imagine our shock when the updated revisions were just released. The 1's and 2's have mutated into 4's and the occasional 5 & 6. I consoled myself at first by scanning the entire year and realizing that 4 was still the lowest number all year, and that the time we had picked was still, based on your schedule, optimum.
Your earlier post explaining the rationale behind the change helped to shed some light, but I still think your updated grading system is flawed, and possibly misleading. If I understand you correctly, ratings are now based on a number corresponding to the average wait time for the headliner rides. In order to achieve a 1, there would have to be an average wait of 5-15 minutes within your measuring period on the headliners. Your new rating system says that in the course of the year, that will never happen at all, and that the lowest average wait time will be between 35-45 minutes. If I'm wrong about this point, I'll humbly apologize and return to my lurking post and remain quiet.
I think there's an inherent problem with this sort of grading scale. Your new system assumes that there will eventually come a day when absolutely no line will ever form at a headliner, and that day will be the new 1. I think the crowd conditions need to be looked at from the perspective of the (real world now) quietest days of the year vs. the busiest. Under this system, 1 is the quietest, and 10 the busiest, or in other words, just like you had it before. I applaud your attempts to give the rating system some sort of real time meaning instead of the old "quietest time vs. busiest time" method (which I have no doubt many first timers probably thought was too vague to have meaning). In the process, I think you've done a bigger injustice because there's going to be a far bigger difference between, say, an 8 and a 10 in terms of mobs at the park than the new scale would imply. People are conditioned to think of terms of 1-10, and your new grading system, based on real time numbers, doesn't allow for that. Is it realistic to expect that Christmas week could now be graded a 12 or a 13 if that's how long the line is? Capping at ten becomes meaningless. So please....either go completely to a real time system and remove the upper end limit of ten, or revert back to the old method of 1-10 based on the quietest days vs. the busiest days of the year. Either one of those would be more fair and more instinctive to readers than the scale you've presently decided on.
Whew.......
Okay, having lowered my blood pressure by typing this novella, I'll fly back to my loft, but before I do, two quick notes about the absolutely wonderful and indispensible Unofficial guide that come to mind. I'd greatly appreciate you passing these on to the appropiate editor.....
1) The guide does note that gum is not sold in the parks (and rightly so, IMHO). The guide does need to note that the long arm of the mouse extends to the airport as well since gum is seemingly unavailable there as well. This is a major inconvenience for those of us wishing to lower ear pressure in the cabin by chewing gum on the return flights back home.
2) Please allow for more reader mail in future editions! It's always one of the best parts of the book. To this day, I cannot walk by It's A Small World without visualizing a dispensing rack filled with softballs..........
Thanks for the time taken to read this, and my deepest repects for the incredible job your team does of cramming WDW into a measly 800 pages or so and still making it a great read.
FWIW, the correlation (in Excel) of our crowd predictions to actual wait times is just over 0.80. Not perfect, but not guessing, either.
