We (3 adults & 2 almost adults) are staying offsite during a moderate season (5/10 ~ 7/10 crowds) and I am having a hard time coming up with touring plans for Epcot and Hollywood Studio. Most of website with suggested plans seem to assume you are staying onsite and have access to the early entry...
So here are my questions.
1. Do you have any suggestions for website with more information for offsite people?
2. Do you have any suggestions on how to tour?
3. Do you suggest late arrivals (like 2 or 3pm) while stacking the LLs in the morning? If we do this, do we need 2 days for each park?
We are interested in doing pretty much all of E-ticket rides in both parks.
Any help is so much appreciated!
My personal recommendation and experience is to not even bother with G+ for Epcot, however, if you decide to arrive later in the day and not take advantage of morning arrival times when lines are lower, it may be of good use to hit all you of your ride goals. However, at DHS, given that there are so many headliners and not enough other things to do at DHS, it's much more needed and more valuable imo.
If you want to arrive later in the day, you can definitely stack LLs for the afternoon/evening. I would recommend buying iLL$ for Guardians and ROTR if those are on your radar and/or trying for the virtual queue for Guardians (believe it's 7am and 1pm). If you do decide to do G+ for Epcot, your priority order for LL would be Remy, Frozen and Test Track. If you don't secure LLs for these rides, your next best plan of attack would be riding during fireworks or at park close. I would base my touring around the park on the LLs that I secured.
For DHS, the priority order would be Slinky, Tower of Terror and Rockin Roller Coaster (MMRR or smugglers if you're not a coaster person). Again, if you have issues securing these, which Slinky is usually gone within less than two min of 7am, you're best bet is to try getting in line at park close. You can keep checking for G+ times to pop up but for slinky, it's not common. TOT, RR and MMRR are much easier to ride standby as the lines are not always solid one hour+ waits. Disregard the posted wait times by disney at park close and what's in
MDE. I use the TP lines app which is more accurate. Disney will not lower the posted waits to avoid the "get in line at park close" strategy. You can usually tell by looking at the queue how long the line really is.
Of course, if you chose to arrive at park opening even after the resort guests arrive for ETPE, you'd have better luck with some of these headliners as lines will be a lot lower, thus much shorter waits. Probably not walk on but still many times the lowest waits are the first two hours the park is open and the last two hours. I will say we had really good luck and did late a later arrival at DHS, around 1pm, had lunch and then started our day. We did not do a late arrival at Epcot since we had a 9am iLL$. However, our late arrival at DHS was during spring break. I feel like if it's feasible in a high crowd environment, it
should be manageable most other non peak times. We did not do two days in Epcot or DHS over spring break and we did all we wanted to do however ymmv based on park touring style and preferences. Also, don't forget to set your alarm for your subsequent G+ selections, you want to do this as soon as your window opens to be ahead of the crowds.
