We leave in a week. All this stuff about Fastpass + is getting me down. I don't even want to go now. I've been waiting for this trip since July. I don't want to let this ruin it. If the standby lines are shorter, can we just use them instead?
I have used FP+ twice in two completely different ways and and been happy both times.
Trip 1 - Family trip Thanksgiving week. We stayed onsite and booked FP+ in advance, no tiering but limited to 3 FP+ per day. We could have double dipped and used FP- as well, but we didn't. We had no need to double dip because we were able to do all we wanted (including multiple rides at our favorites) by using FP+ and a couple of RD arrivals.
Trip 2 - School trip last week, fairly busy due to some winter breaks the week of President's day. I chaperoned a school trip with two charter buses full of students. I had a group of 9 students with me at all times, and sometimes we met up with another 10 person group or two. We stayed off site and could not book FP+ in advance. We arrived at DHS in the afternoon, we arrived at the other parks in the morning, but 30-60 minutes after RD. FP+ worked well for MK and AK, not so much for EP but we still had a fun day there.
We could not use FP+ at DHS because we used them at another park that morning. FP- would not have helped us at DHS either since we arrived in the middle of the afternoon and the headliners would have been gone by that point. The problem at EP was that every FP+ kiosk we saw had a long line, and the only FP we really wanted was Soarin - heard they were all gone by mid-morning anyway.
Keep in mind that we could not book FP+ in advance, we had to use the kiosks and did not arrive right at RD. Still we rode all the headliners at least once except TSM. Some we rode twice, including Test Track x2 (single rider line both times), EE x2 (once standby and once FP), BTMR x2 (once standby and once FP), Space x3 (twice standby and once FP). We fit in many non-headliners as well - all of this in a short 3 day trip.
FP lines were not long. I can't imagine the standby lines were ever shorter. Sometimes there is a small backup waiting for people to scan tickets and bands, but then very little wait once you pass that point. We found over Thanksgiving that the backups waiting to scan tickets and bands were longer, likely because of using both FP systems, however once we got past the initial scan the waits were not longer than normal with FP-.
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