Park Hopping Rumor?

[Jrb1979]

I have to say if they are actually calling some people “low value guests” that’s just wrong in so many ways.

That's how they view off-site guests and AP holders.

 

[snikki]

I read the wdwmagic thread. Interesting.

 

[CaptainAmerica]

The park pass is also their way of controlling how many off-site guests and AP holders they let in each day.

I agree. I was responding to someone arguing that Park Pass ISN'T about limiting capacity.

 

[DeluxePrincess]

For me, there will be no value in buying park hopper passes anymore if this turns out to be true.

 

[Obi-J Kenobi]

For me, there will be no value in buying park hopper passes anymore if this turns out to be true.

For WDW, park hopping has challenges just due to the transportation and geographical separation of the 4 parks, which makes purchasing a park hopper suspect. Truly the only 2 parks (and I'm intentionally excluding water parks) that are close enough within walking distance are DHS and EP. Everything else really depends on driving/parking or Disney Transportation. That can be time consuming and really an inefficient use of time. After all, time is money and that old adage is very true for Disney parks.

Now, DLR and parking hopping is an entirely different story due to the proximity of the two parks.

 

[Moliphino]

For WDW, park hopping has challenges just due to the transportation and geographical separation of the 4 parks, which makes purchasing a park hopper suspect. Truly the only 2 parks (and I'm intentionally excluding water parks) that are close enough within walking distance are DHS and EP. Everything else really depends on driving/parking or Disney Transportation. That can be time consuming and really an inefficient use of time. After all, time is money and that old adage is very true for Disney parks.

Now, DLR and parking hopping is an entirely different story due to the proximity of the two parks.

I get bored in one park for a full day. The transportation between parks counts as our rest time, as we don't go back to the room during the day.

 

[snikki]

I get bored in one park for a full day. The transportation between parks counts as our rest time, as we don't go back to the room during the day.

If we aren't doing a midday break that's how we use transportation between parks too. It's our rest time and decompression time. For our 9 day tickets I have us hopping 5 days. Some of those days we have midday breaks and the others we start late and will use our transport time as our rest time.

 

[Mrs.AMC]

For WDW, park hopping has challenges just due to the transportation and geographical separation of the 4 parks, which makes purchasing a park hopper suspect. Truly the only 2 parks (and I'm intentionally excluding water parks) that are close enough within walking distance are DHS and EP. Everything else really depends on driving/parking or Disney Transportation. That can be time consuming and really an inefficient use of time. After all, time is money and that old adage is very true for Disney parks.

Now, DLR and parking hopping is an entirely different story due to the proximity of the two parks.

Nah, not at all. There are buses from park to park. In addition to the monorail from MK to Epcot. It's quite easy.
Park hopper ticket add on is 100% profit for Disney. It costs them nothing and makes them 100% of the money a guest spends on it.
Any level of complication added to hopping will reduce sales. This may even eliminate almost all of them. AP will likely be the only guests left to want to hop. Who would buy it if they are only able to hop to 1 park, if that? On top of leaving it up to a risk to hop at all? It would be stupid to purchase something that you may not be able to use.

 

[MickeyMice]

idk...i could see APs being required to reserve at multiple parks per day, but i really think requiring this for multi-day hoppers would completely disincentivize their sales. i upgraded to a hopper for our upcoming november trip and if this is real, i would regret it.

 

[Mrs.AMC]

idk...i could see APs being required to reserve at multiple parks per day, but i really think requiring this for multi-day hoppers would completely disincentivize their sales. i upgraded to a hopper for our upcoming november trip and if this is real, i would regret it.

It wouldn't surprise me but it would be a nightmare for someone like DH and I who travel with ticketed guests at times. A lot of families are "mixed" especially now that AP sales are stopped. I've got a friend who bought her AP and was planning to buy her kids and spouse the next pay check when they stopped. So now they are also a "mixed" family.

It's already a nightmare hassle to book initial park reservations even when we are all on the same hotel stay. There have been several days when we can't all get the same park reservations because the Ticket Guest with hotel stay and the AP guest with hotel stay aren't booking from the same pool of park reservations.

 

[loves to dive]

For WDW, park hopping has challenges just due to the transportation and geographical separation of the 4 parks, which makes purchasing a park hopper suspect. Truly the only 2 parks (and I'm intentionally excluding water parks) that are close enough within walking distance are DHS and EP. Everything else really depends on driving/parking or Disney Transportation. That can be time consuming and really an inefficient use of time. After all, time is money and that old adage is very true for Disney parks.

Now, DLR and parking hopping is an entirely different story due to the proximity of the two parks.

That might depend on your style of doing WDW. We have always had park hoppers even when there were only 2 parks to hop to. We have never been focused on seeing how many rides we can do. As others have said, it's a good time to rest since buses are rarely crowded mid-day. I almost always take a break in the afternoon so it's just part of the break time.

 

[CeeCee101]

Requiring reservations wouldn't necessarily mean you have to make reservations in advance. I picture it something like... you're in Magic Kingdom and want to hop to Epcot, so you pull up the app while you're in line for Big Thunder and see if Epcot has hopping reservations available, which it always will outside of maybe Christmas day.

But that’s just one more layer.
We are going back for the first time in 12, almost 13 years. You can imagine how stunned I was to all these changes. Last time we were there, no app, etc. and just paper FP you went out to grab. So we have had to learn all this stuff. The 2 pm park hopping rule was quite depressing but we figured we could work around it, though pairing that and park reservations with trying to get ILLs and G+ for certain things really complicates stuff if you can’t get something until like 7 pm. And adding ADRs? Makes all this even more complicated. What if your morning reservation was at MK but you have a p.m. ADR at HS but you can’t get in? We have always been hoppers and we used to go twice per year, even from the West Coast. We were just starting to think we might be going again more regularly. But if we can’t start at say MK, then hit Epcot, then bounce to HS or one of many combinations thereof FREELY, feel like our heads and phones are going to be spinning.
So right now just hoping nothing changes between now and November.

 

[CaptainAmerica]

But that’s just one more layer.

1. I think the rumor is nonsense to begin with.

2. I'm not saying I like it. I don't. But if it's true, it's not the end of the world.

We are going back for the first time in 12, almost 13 years. You can imagine how stunned I was to all these changes. Last time we were there, no app, etc. and just paper FP you went out to grab. So we have had to learn all this stuff. The 2 pm park hopping rule was quite depressing but we figured we could work around it, though pairing that and park reservations with trying to get ILLs and G+ for certain things really complicates stuff if you can’t get something until like 7 pm. And adding ADRs? Makes all this even more complicated. What if your morning reservation was at MK but you have a p.m. ADR at HS but you can’t get in? We have always been hoppers and we used to go twice per year, even from the West Coast. We were just starting to think we might be going again more regularly. But if we can’t start at say MK, then hit Epcot, then bounce to HS or one of many combinations thereof FREELY, feel like our heads and phones are going to be spinning.
So right now just hoping nothing changes between now and November.

So you missed the FP+ era entirely? I thought it was the perfect middle ground. I don't think people realized how much time they spent criss-crossing the parks to get and redeem the old paper fastpasses. People also view the past with rose colored glasses. I remember VIVIDLY when you had to rope drop Hollywood Studios to get a paper FastPass for Toy Story Mania if you wanted to have any hope of riding it. Managing Genie+ isn't any more complicated than that was, you just do it with your phone instead of your feet. I totally get being annoyed by Genie+ as a semi-disguised price increase, which is what it is, but I don't think it's particularly complicated.

I totally agree that the 2pm hopping window sucks. I have changes I love (30 minute early opening at every park instead of 60 minutes at one park), I have changes I'm lukewarm on (Genie+), and I have two changes that I absolutely loathe. The 2pm hopping is one of them, and the elimination of DME is the other.

 

[SL6827]

Where there is smoke, there is fire. There is something to this rumor. Right now we are planning to return in January 2024, then we will be done for a while. A good while.

 

[CeeCee101]

Yes we missed FP+ completely but from what people say it sounds like we would’ve really liked it, paired with hoppers. We really don’t view those days with overly rose colored glasses. We remember BEFORE FP! We thought paper FP was the best thing in the world in those days, lol. But despite everything it was easier in some ways, largely because you could bop around. RD was your friend but the hoppers were your savior. If you missed something you could still make an ADR and then just adjust on the fly, come back, try something new, etc. I will say the longest we ever waited in those really old days (think 1998) was one time —2 hours for Splash. yes that’s brutal. But we’re now oldsters and having to glue onto our phones, make reservations, get up at 7, wait until 2 to hop, IMO does In many ways make things more complicated. Guess there are trade offs to any system and the parks sound so crowded now that the G+ stuff makes some sense but feel like we are losing some spontaneity we had in those old hopper days...appreciate your comments though.

 

[acgardne]

Honestly, the ability to hop before 2pm is enough for me to make this preferable to the current system. Especially if, say, we get two parks, and you can start at either one! Twice in our May trip, we tapped in at a park only to turn around go where we actually wanted to go. If we could have made reservations for two parks with an option for either at any time of the day, it would have saved us lots of travel time.

 

[Mrs.AMC]

But that’s just one more layer.
We are going back for the first time in 12, almost 13 years. You can imagine how stunned I was to all these changes. Last time we were there, no app, etc. and just paper FP you went out to grab. So we have had to learn all this stuff. The 2 pm park hopping rule was quite depressing but we figured we could work around it, though pairing that and park reservations with trying to get ILLs and G+ for certain things really complicates stuff if you can’t get something until like 7 pm. And adding ADRs? Makes all this even more complicated. What if your morning reservation was at MK but you have a p.m. ADR at HS but you can’t get in? We have always been hoppers and we used to go twice per year, even from the West Coast. We were just starting to think we might be going again more regularly. But if we can’t start at say MK, then hit Epcot, then bounce to HS or one of many combinations thereof FREELY, feel like our heads and phones are going to be spinning.
So right now just hoping nothing changes between now and November.

After that long your basically a first timer
You have to learn everything all over again
It would be the same no matter what they’d switched to
Paper FP was actually the worse of all because of the actual running and zero idea of what time you’d get

 

[Liquidice]

On wdwmagic the rumor seems to suggest only APs will be required to do this or continue to have Park Passes and there will be a move to trying to eliminate park passes entirely for everyone else and potentially eliminating the 2pm Park Hopping restriction. So this may end up being a positive change for many?

This effectively allows Disney to continue restricting APs by volume and restricting an AP to only have so many Park Passes at one time while removing all of the complexities for guests who aren't as familiar with Disney's rules. APs when staying at a resort would not have these restrictions (similar to how APs today pull from the Resort guest Park pass pool instead of the AP pool).

Would be nice if they actually had some positive changes for once - but who knows as these are all rumors right now and whatever the "insiders" are saying now could easily change before it is made official too.

 

[CeeCee101]

After that long your basically a first timer
You have to learn everything all over again
It would be the same no matter what they’d switched to
Paper FP was actually the worse of all because of the actual running and zero idea of what time you’d get

That’s probably true but we thought they were the cat’s meow when they came out. It beat zero options other than lines. Perspective is personal.
anyway guess we will see what happens. cheers

 

[Mackenzie Click-Mickelson]

For WDW, park hopping has challenges just due to the transportation and geographical separation of the 4 parks, which makes purchasing a park hopper suspect. Truly the only 2 parks (and I'm intentionally excluding water parks) that are close enough within walking distance are DHS and EP. Everything else really depends on driving/parking or Disney Transportation. That can be time consuming and really an inefficient use of time. After all, time is money and that old adage is very true for Disney parks.

Now, DLR and parking hopping is an entirely different story due to the proximity of the two parks.

I agree with another poster your outlook is completely dependent on your preferred touring style.

Park hopping is one of our only extra expenditures and it's one of my fav things to do. Time is money you're right so I like to maximize my time such as using park hours to help make plans. We often plan around that too. We like to experience the parks once in the morning and once in the evening with repeat. All of that is possible with park hopping. Plus it allows flexibility due to nighttime shows if say weather gets in the way.

As far as time consuming well we do rent a car but we also use a combo of Disney transportation. It's really easy even driving to go between Epcot and DHS. It's easy via the monorail to get from MK to Epcot. AK is the park that's a bit out there but that's fine it's not a big deal.

We maximize our money spent on park tickets and other costs by park hopping. Without it tickets and the whole experience really isn't worth it as much to us.