Who else is glad they do NOT have a trip planned right now?

[btk2333]

What do the do call the 1800 number and say give me any hotel for 5 days with tickets and then hang up and show up the day they check in, head to the parks roaming around from ride to ride and just picking a random place to eat. Then repeat the next day at the next park never noticing a FP lane or a machine. .

How much people watching do you do at wdw? This is exactly what they do

 

[btk2333]

Even then, it's only helpful for those people if they can prebook (so, for now anyway, stay onsite). If same day availability is already at 5pm or later at 10am, then they're likely to be gone by noon. Even during Spring Break last year, headliner FPs at MK were not gone at noon

I think I would agree that this system is vastly more beneficial to people staying on site. Time will tell if Disney intends that to be the case Long term (I suspect they do)

 

[Sammie]

The only thing Disney is "testing" right now is how much crap their guests will put up with.

Ahh, but one man's crap is another man's treasure.

I so look forward to days without maniacs rushing all over park gathering their hoard of Fastpasses, it will be so pleasant, not to do deal with that.

 

[rteetz]

Exactly. The only people who actually benefit from this new system are those staying Onsite, who don't care about the headliners. There are many people who will think that things are better for them because they were ignorant about the prior system. But, in reality, they would have been much better off if someone had just clued them in to as to how to use the old system. I do have a question that your post made me think of, though. If you are staying offsite, do all your tickets need to be scanned before someone in your party can book FP+ that day? Or, is it possible for one person in the group to head over early and book FP+ for everyone? Just thinking about large groups who often book the offsite houses.

not exactly. I always stay on site and definitely care about headliners. Disney obviously has looked into how many FP an average guest uses thats why they went with three. Also just over 50% of guests that walk into WDW use FP. That means thousands don't use it and survive. Disney wants to put everything together thats why FP is changing. They want everything to be in one place your band or your card.

 

[Laketravis]

Ahh, but one man's crap is another man's treasure.

That means somebody is eating....um, nevermind.

 

[Laketravis]

Disney obviously has looked into how many FP an average guest uses thats why they went with three.

I'm sure glad Disney figured that out for me, 'cuz it's something I struggled with every time I entered the parks ... how many FP's do I want? How many FP's do I need? Will it be enough? Or too many? Will I regret my decision? Oh, the agony.

I'm sure the limit of 3 had nothing to do with capacity.

 

[larryz]

I'm sure glad Disney figured that out for me, 'cuz it's something I struggled with every time I entered the parks ... how many FP's do I want? How many FP's do I need? Will it be enough? Or too many? Will I regret my decision? Oh, the agony.

I thought that was for prunes...?

 

[rteetz]

I'm sure glad Disney figured that out for me, 'cuz it's something I struggled with every time I entered the parks ... how many FP's do I want? How many FP's do I need? Will it be enough? Or too many? Will I regret my decision? Oh, the agony. I'm sure the limit of 3 had nothing to do with capacity.

well it had many factors. Capacity how many people use FP and how many on average a guest uses.

 

[BuckeyeBama]

How much people watching do you do at wdw? This is exactly what they do

Very true. I cannot even guess the number of people who I have overheard talking about how they wished they had bought fast passes like so many other guests had, or just asking among themselves what the fast pass machines or lines were. One evening I had extra fast passes for Peter Pan that I was unable to use. The first family that I tried to offer them to said that they couldn't use them because they had not purchased that option with their tickets. It took me more than 5 minutes to explain it to them, and they were very upset that this was the last night of their vacation and they had no idea until that minute how it worked.

I think that the tour groups are well educated about these features, but families traveling alone are not. Probably because most parks require a purchase of some sort to get fast passes. WDW's system was/is very different, and most people simply didn't understand it.

 

[mesaboy2]

Ahh, but one man's crap is another man's treasure.

I so look forward to days without maniacs rushing all over park gathering their hoard of Fastpasses, it will be so pleasant, not to do deal with that.

Let's assume for one ridiculous moment this is what happened every day.

How did it impact your day? Did you get run over? Did hoarders steal your FPs?

 

[btk2333]

I'm sure glad Disney figured that out for me, 'cuz it's something I struggled with every time I entered the parks ... how many FP's do I want? How many FP's do I need? Will it be enough? Or too many? Will I regret my decision? Oh, the agony.

I'm sure the limit of 3 had nothing to do with capacity.

of course it had to do with capacity- Disney only has the capacity for a certain number of FP+'s, otherwise they would let us all book a FP+ for each hour we're in the park.

Disney might only have the capacity for 10% of guests to get 10 FPs per day, but have the capacity for 75% of guests to get 3 FPs per day (numbers are hypothetical) Disney would prefer 75% of guests to access the system.

 

[TinkerBelle_325]

I for one don't see FastPass+ changing the way my family & I tour. We are perfectly happy to continue visiting WDW and have 4 upcoming trips planned over 2014 & 2015.

Even with legacy FastPass we were always of the mindset that if you want to accomplish a lot at ANY park at ANY time of year - rope drop is your best bet!

I for one am happy to no longer RUN to Space or Splash, Test Track or Soarin', Everest or Kilimanjaro Safaris, Toy Story or Tower of Terror.

So you can only use FP+ in one park per day (for now). Ok, either you get to rope drop at one park and hit rides in Standby, using FP+ for your evening park, or you suck it up and use FP+ for the morning park and do standby in the evening.

During one of the tests they added a 4th FP+ to MK, who knows, they may continue with this trend after the full launch.

I also think that everyone forgets that FastPass Legacy changed over the years as well. Initially you were only allowed 1 at a time no matter what. So if you pulled a 2:00pm FastPass for Toy Story at 9am you would have been screwed for the morning - no additional fastpasses until after 2pm. They modified this issue and implemented the "2 hours" after rule. So if you pulled a FP at 9am you could pull another at 11am.

If you fully maxed out Legacy FP in MK on a 9am to 10pm day you could get 6 Legacy FP based on the 2 hour rule. Now, add into that the rule that you can collect a new FP as soon as you have used your old FP and *maybe* you could pull that number up to 8 Legacy FP per day.

However, there were issues that were encountered. Whenever I rode Soarin, Everest etc the FP legacy lines were long. Not Disney's "5 to 10 min wait" but easily 20 min+. This was a sign that the system wasn't optomized properly. In addition, the practice of CMs ignoring the FP end time severely affected the FP Legacy system. There is no chance of this happening with FP+. If I am not mistaken the scanners have a built in grace period (5 mins prior to return time and 15 mins after end time) which is more realistic in terms of balancing flexibility with keeping the system optomized.

I think we will see changes to FP+ as it rolls out and testing continues. Now that Legacy is retiring they will have a better idea of the optimal number of FP+ per day per guest.

As far as WDW resort guests having early access to book - yup, that's life! WDW has always advertised perks for staying onsite and FP+ will become part of those perks on some level. I wouldn't be surprised if we see additional FP+ allowances determined by resort level. Example: Deluxe Guests get 5 FP+ per day, Moderate get 4 FP+ per day and Value get 3 FP+ per day.

At least Disney hasn't gone the way of Universal and started charging for offsite guests to use FP+ and having the price be determined by seasonality of the park attendance. And if Disney does this, more power to them. They are a business and if their direct competitior can succeed in charging for a product like FP+ they could as well.

 

[kmarie99]

Let's assume for one ridiculous moment this is what happened every day.

How did it impact your day? Did you get run over? Did hoarders steal your FPs?

No from my hand, but yes...

 

[mom2rtk]

No from my hand, but yes...

So what ....... did they push you down as you were about to pull them out of the machine or something. I hate when that happens......

 

[Laketravis]

So what ....... did they push you down as you were about to pull them out of the machine or something. I hate when that happens......

Personally, I found the "Hold their pretzel hostage" technique to be extremely effective.

And if that didn't work, there was always the "Knock them over the head with a turkey leg" option.....


Ahhhhhh.....how I long for those days of pilferage and mayhem in the parks.....

 

[mom2rtk]

Personally, I found the "Hold their pretzel hostage" technique to be extremely effective.

And if that didn't work, there was always the "Knock them over the head with a turkey leg" option.....


Ahhhhhh.....how I long for those days of pilferage and mayhem in the parks.....

Well, I would expect that sort of thing over by POTC with all those pirates running around. It's just good theming.

 

[roomthreeseventeen]

Well, I would expect that sort of thing over by POTC with all those pirates running around. It's just good theming.

Appropriate.

 

[LSUfan4444]

I'm sure glad Disney figured that out for me, 'cuz it's something I struggled with every time I entered the parks ... how many FP's do I want? How many FP's do I need? Will it be enough? Or too many? Will I regret my decision? Oh, the agony.

I'm sure the limit of 3 had nothing to do with capacity.

It will be more than 3, and we will be able to make them in different parks; it's only a matter of time before that information is public.

As far as three, on my trip last week, there were days we didn't even need the three we had. But, thats the reason we tour in mid Jan, early December and mid September.

 

[magicbob]

A lot of those people who don't prepare in advance had no idea what things were like before, had no idea how paper FP worked, had no idea how to go about touring the park, and wouldn't have used paper FP at all. Remember those stats that only half of the guests got ANY paper FP at all.

Those guests may have been blindsided, but the result may have been that they got 3 FPs that they wouldn't have had otherwise and had a great time, doing more attractions than they would have done. And they don't know or don't care that people on the Dis think that they shouldn't have enjoyed themselves because of their opinions that WDW is a mess right now.

As I said before, anyone going to Disney should be researching what's going on at that point, and know that it's a risk. Things are always changing, and it's irresponsible not to do your research. It works that way for everything. If you decide to take a vacation to the beach, and you don't do any research and just blindly go to your hotel, you may find that a hurricane destroyed the local pier last hurricane season. Maybe you planned to fish off of that pier and now your vacation isn't what it could have been.

Spending thousands of dollars on a vacation and blindly going on the vacation with little to no research is vastly irresponsible. Someone who does that, especially for WDW, is setting themselves up for a mess of a vacation, and likely has issues with or without MM+.

We're talking about two different groups of people. I'm referring to people who ARE savvy and research their trips. But Disney has made significant policy changes without notifying anyone. Those are the people I'm talking about being blindsided. They did their due diligence and prepared and then Disney pulled the rug out from under them, not telling them until they check into their resort.

While it would be interesting to see the average spread out at each park, I still would be surprised if 5-6 were the average for MK. I would not be surprised if 5-6 were the average if you only accounted for people who used the system (pulled at least one FP); however, there are so many outliers of families who didn't use legacy or thought there was a charge for it, etc that it likely would keep the total average down.

That's the thing about using the "average" FP usage... many people didn't bother, some didn't use them because they thought it cost money, some just arrived too darn late on a busy day. All of those people not using the system causes the average to plummet very fast. If you only sample those guests who actually used FP and not divide by the total park attendance, you'd get a much different figure. Add to this... the average probably is for all parks, which would skew it even lower because of fewer FP rides in other parks.

The way I look at it is that if the other 3 families had really wanted to use fast pass then they would of

Except maybe those families didn't come at rope drop, and the Fastpasses they wanted are already gone.

If they really wanted to use FP they would have come at RD.

Did hoarders steal your FPs?

No from my hand, but yes...

Holy crap, Batman! This is one for the record books. Using more than your "fair share" of FPs has been derided by many (I guess we've finally determined that our fair share is 3), but this is the first time I've actually seen someone make the ridiculous claim that we STOLE those FPs from them.

ETA: Thanks for clarifying on the next page.

 

[kmarie99]

So what ....... did they push you down as you were about to pull them out of the machine or something. I hate when that happens......

Reductio ad absurdum