RideMax or Touring Plans?

[jenthern]

I'm a fan of touring plans. Used it for our last two trips (2013/2014) and we'll use it for this one as well. I like that if I can adjust things on the fly. If potc has a short wait and my son wants to do it over and over, when we're done I tell the app to reoptimize and it will adjust everything I have left to do based on current and projected wait times.

 

[Fenway1970]

We had good luck with the personalized TP last fall. I also used EasyWDW to help pick days.

I plan on doing the same for next fall. I have even already started making my personalized TPs.

Did pretty much the same here this past September. EasyWDW for day selection and then personalized TouringPlans. Used TP's Lines app to track progress in the parks.

As a PP said, you'll get out of TouringPlans what you put into it. The default plans do tend to have you criss crossing the park a little too much, with the apparent goal of getting in the shortest lines possible based on projected wait times. I set it for reduced walking time (as opposed to reduced wait time) and it helped, but you'll still have to tweak it so that your path through the park makes sense to you. Fortunately that's pretty easy to do.

I also thought TP handled FP+ and ADRs pretty well.

Can't speak at all to RideMax as I've never used it.

 

[wisblue]

I'm considering giving Ridemax a try for our upcoming trip to Southern California that's going to include a couple of days at Disneyland. For $15 and a money back guarantee if I decide it's worthless, it's a low risk proposition.

I've looked at, but never used, the customized plans Touring Plans offers at WDW because our knowledge of the parks and our own priorities serve us very well. But, at Disneyland and DCA we are relative newbies (haven't been to either since 2006) and, since we are going to be there during the peak Christmas season (not much choice when there are schoolteachers in your party and you want to see the Rose Parade) I could use help coming up with a sensible approach.

It will be interesting to see how the two plans compare if I plug the same attractions into them for the same day.

 

[Nuxgwkkw]

Let me start by saying that my information is outdated and based solely on my memory from several years ago. But, I think sharing my experiences will help, since I've used both.

My family used Touring Plans in August 2010 in WDW and it was horrible. My dad did all the planning for that trip, and he is generally pretty good at it, but I think he relied too heavily on the printed plans and didn't think about it himself. After the first day, I took each plan and re-did the night before we went to each park, just based on my own common sense (and I hadn't even been to the parks for over 10 years- I just put some thought into it based on how popular I thought each ride would be), and we were much happier. The problem we had with the touring plans was that we are fast walkers without children or old people, and so we were able to get to each attraction and ride it much faster than the plans said. I think I remember being done by 10:00 with everything that it had planned until noon. But we knew we couldn't just skip ahead because timing matters. I think that if my dad had thought about it, we probably could have made better plans, so this doesn't necessarily reflect on the quality of Touring Plans, but that's what happened for us. We had paid for the subscription, by the way; we were not using the free plans.

In August 2011, I used RideMax when I went to DL by myself. It was amazing! Though it was one of the most crowded times of the year, I didn't wait longer than 10 minutes for anything except the Explorer Canoes, and that was only 20 minutes. The catch is, I spent HOURS on the RideMax site (I think there's an app now, but I didn't have a smart phone at the time so I just did all my planning ahead of time and printed out my own itineraries). I tried several different permutations, compared many different scenarios, and I had several back-up plans. For example, I wanted to ride Star Tours twice, get a Star Tours FP (it's my favorite ride and the new version had just opened), ride Space Mountain and then ride Peter Pan. But if I got to Peter Pan and the line was too long, I had 3 other times during my trip that I knew I could ride it (and I only wanted to ride it once, so once I rode it I checked if off from 3 different places on my list). I had lists and lists of what I could ride at what times and what some alternatives were if certain things didn't work out. I used RideMax mostly just for the expertise of wait times for each day, but I made my own itineraries. If I remember correctly, there were some maps, too, such as for World of Color areas, and they were really helpful.

The short answer is, it really depends how much you're willing to put into it. I can't give you an answer for which is better, because I think either can work as long as you use them for what they're good for and don't depend on them heavily without doing your own research. My family's results varied so much because my dad planned the wdw trip and I planned my DL trip. But personally, I was much happier with RideMax. I'm not using any paid service for my upcoming wdw trip, but if I was, I would choose RideMax.

Since my last post, I found out that I could make personalized touring plans for free, and the family that I am traveling with got a RideMax account, so now I have recent experience with both! Therefore I wanted to share some of my findings.

Unfortunately, I do not think RideMax will work for my trip to Disney World. The problem is that it has no flexibility in regard to FP+. You can choose which rides you want to get FP+ for, but then they tell you what times to get them, and you cannot change it. My trip is in about one month so I have already made the FP+ reservations, and I made most of them early in the day so that I can get same-day FP+ once I have used the first 3. When I plugged in my information to RideMax, it told me what times to get the FP+, but those times are mostly late in the day, and since I don't want to change my FP+ (and at this point, I probably can't change the times for some of the attractions, even if I wanted to), I cannot use the plans. I think I could still play around with it and use the program to find out line lengths for all of the rides at any given time of day, but I cannot use the actual plans.

For touring plans, it used to be that you had to pay for a subscription in order to get the personalized plans, but that does not seem to be the case anymore. I don't know what you get with the paid subscription, besides access to real-time line data with their Lines app (which doesn't quite seem worth it to me). Anyway, the touring plans program is not perfect, either. For example, I used the "Optimize" feature, and it told me to go to the Pangani Forest Exploration trail first (I think that was it, though it may have been one of the other trails), at rope drop! I'm sure it'd be nice to walk around there when it's nice and empty, but really I'd rather go on Kilimanjaro Safaris or Expedition Everest before the line gets too long. I'm really glad it lets you move around the attractions and try out your own permutations, because I was able to cut down on waiting AND walking, while keeping all of the same attractions on the list, by moving things around and then clicking "Evaluate" instead of using the "Optimize" feature.

Right now, it seems to me that Touring Plans are much better than RideMax for Disney World, simply because of the flexibility. I think with either one, you still need to spend a good amount of time to play around with it- it would be better not to use a planning tool and to just use common sense, than to plug in your ride choices and use the first plan that is generated.

I think RideMax would still be great for Disneyland, and while touring plans seems better right now, before I've actually gone on my trip, I admit that I am still skeptical because of my bad past experience with touring plans. It's pretty nice that it's free, though! Can't complain about that.

Summary:
1) RideMax does not allow you to customize FP+ times, so the generated plans are useless, but the program may still be useful to get a sense of ride wait times.
2) Personalized Touring Plans seem to be useful as long as you take the time to play around with the itinerary and use the "Evaluate" option and not "Optimize."
3) Do not use either program if all you're going to do is plug in your choices and use the first plan that is generated.
4) RideMax will probably still work well for Disneyland.
5) Touring Plans is free; hard to argue with that.

 

[bethjones]

I agree with previous poster. I am going end of January and playing around with both Ridemax and touring plans. In the past, I thought Ridemax worked better than TP at WDW but now its TP for sure. TP now has every single feature of Ridemax now plus a ton more as already listed. I love being able to just tweak the plan and re-order a few things and plug in my fastpass times. With Fast pass+ Ridemax is now obsolete IMHO. I'm sure its still great for DL with the legacy fastpass system.