Will my trip be useless if I don't rope drop?

[jrtoastyman]

My question is, will my trip not be fun if we do NOT go at rope drop? ...
So tell me - is rope drop my only way to go? Am I going to ruin our trip if we show up at 10 am? Or tell me some success stories of how you manage without RD.

Definitely not. If the thing you care most about is avoiding long lines, then getting there at RD can really help, but you can still have plenty of fun showing up a little later. We probably do it one day per trip, because it is nice being there when the park is empty and you can walk on most things, but most days, we stroll in at our leisure and it works fine. Honestly, the existence of FP+ has made getting there early less necessary than it used to be, IMO, because you can assure yourself that you're going to get on at least 3 things with no wait.

 

[mickeyluv'r]

Thanks again for so much useful input -

One person mentioned seeing the active lion at RD time at AK.
What about RD at the other parks? It seems at MK it is more critical... but is it less critical (with FP+) at the other parks?
Keep in mind my DS is just 5 and too litle for RnRC and I think Mission Space (fine w/ me as they'd make me sick anyway!). That takes a couple of the big headliners out I think...

Not to pound the bully pulpit, but I've done AK safari at both RD and late in the day. Our two best safari trips were late - near 5/6pm! The animals get fed/housed at night, so maybe that's why they are more active late in the day. I thought the first late safari was a fluke, but second time kind of confirmed it for me. Both trips, it wasn't just one animal that was active, it was many.We have so MANY safari pictures from years of trips to WDW, that we banned more. That is, until the two late day safaris! We got lots of amazing shots! by far our best!

Of all the parks, MK is the busiest, and more importantly, has the most (popular = FP+) attractions. So of all the parks, it is the best one for rope drop and FP+ (followed by Epcot, if you use this strategy: Park hop. combine RD Epcot (beeline Test Track, skip Soarin'), and planned FP+ in HS, then return to Epcot for best dinner options) though Soarin is a considerable sacrifice to make that plan work. Still, Epcot has the lowest # of FP attractions. Epcot is more walking and viewing stuff. MK has tons of FP attractions.

There's a tame side to Mission Space, he could totally do the green side, if tall enough. and you won't have a wait. Even orange doesn't usually get much wait. You really should see the Flowerfest if you can! Even if it's your last partial day and you can only go for a few hours.

At 5, it really depends how brave he is, and how tall. WDw allows guest to do rider swap. Ask about it, read up about it. Also, RnRC has single rider lie.so if only one of youw ants to ride, that person could do that, while the other takes the boy to a show maybe. Also near RnRc, is a cute little free sticker station for kids. It literally looks a bit like a radio station, and gives the kids a paper 'record' disk and a sheet of stickers to put allover it, for free. Also, the outdoor food stands are in that area, so snacking is another option while waiting on SR RnRC riders.

 

[mickeyluv'r]

Objection overruled. The OP is not going during the more crowded holiday week with extended hours.

They could overlap Pres week by a day or two, since it is the week before. and there's always PM emh if they are onsite. PM EMH goes pretty late at MK and Epcot that week.

Since OP mentions a small child, I agree keeping him happy is key. You may want a stroller. To take advantage of evening hours a nap/break may be in order, even for some adults. There's also, in Feb, a chance someone will have a cold, which reduces endurance. If someone is not happy, do something different. That's a goldren rule of WDW. Sometimes, it's fun to hang out in a deluxe resort lobby watching folks go by, especially after a big meal. (GF, WL, AKL are all great!)

I'm not saying the nine am hour isn't useful, just not essential. Part of enduring a cool day well, can be starting it around 10:30am, because it's already warming up. So much depends upon the weather! Lots of times that week we've had really perfect warm weather too! Do pack layers, furry-type fleece coat with a hood.

As the day warms up, you shed clothes, then you have to carry. At night the opposite happens,

Last, I always get slammed saying this, but the die hard rope drop crowd can be a little over eager. Some can be so eager to be First!, they are plain rude. That's another reason I usually prefer to arrive just after they have left the gate. Some are cheery, some are rushing. Tough on your first visit, especially using buses, timing arrival for nine am is hard. that's another reason many don't make RD!

Conversely....the resort food courts experience a morning 'rush' hour about 8:15 to 8:30am, since mostly all the parks open at 9am. If you despise crowds, it may be good to arrive before the rush, or after, or send one person to get food while the rest get ready.

Where are you thinking of staying? Onsite or off? I've been assuming onsite in my posts.

 

[OasterP]

I once read a trip report where the author made fun of people who don't rope drop saying, "I can sleep in and have a big breakfast when I'm at home!" My response is, "That's nice for you. I can't. I have what's known as a 'job'."

Ha THIS! I'm up at 5 a.m. every single day to work out, get my kid up and to daycare and get to work!

That said - this is our first trip to Disney World, and I know we'll hit at least a few rope drops, and we do have some earlier breakfasts. But we also don't have a list of "we must do this ride or our vacation is ruined" rides. For sure I've done my research and there are rides/attractions we would like to do, and we'll try for fast passes. But none of us will want to ride something bad enough to stand in line for an hour. I'm just glad we have 11 days in the parks, so I'm pretty sure we'll get to do most/all we would like to do. We are also going at a relatively slow time of year I believe (late September).

Obviously we haven't gone yet, but I am really hoping we can be somewhat calm about it. We do have a LOT of ADR's (or I feel like it's a lot) because we have the "free" dining and wanted to do character meals. But I'm just hoping instead of feeling like it's taking park time we'll look at it as saving time waiting in line for characters!

I think you need to do what makes you happy. And you can always change it up mid trip if you want! I'm always shocked at how people "fight" over the "right" way to tour. You're at Disney - tour the way you want and what makes you happy.

 

[JimmyV]

Hi, my first post here... planning our first trip to WDW. I have planned to go end of Feb, begining of March 2015. I've used TouringPlans and EasyWDW to view the historical crowd levels at that time. We are squeezing in between the week of President's Day breaks, and the March spring breaks.

They could overlap Pres week by a day or two, since it is the week before.

I don't see any overlap here. RD is not essential, but later hours are not going to be a fair substitute at that time of the year.

 

[JoeA]

We've been over 40 times and am usually still asleep at rope drop!

 

[abctriplets]

Never done a rope drop. Any tips? We'll be staying off-resort (actually driving in that morning). Can rope drop at MK be done easily by parking on site? (I think the parking lot opens before the park does). Last time we were there we drove also, and got there extra early and everyone was roped off in the area just past the ticket booths. Then there was a mad rush for the boat/monorail wait lines. Felt like forever before we actually got into the park.

Is there a better plan?

 

[Dannek]

Hi, my first post here... planning our first trip to WDW. I have planned to go end of Feb, begining of March 2015. I've used TouringPlans and EasyWDW to view the historical crowd levels at that time. We are squeezing in between the week of President's Day breaks, and the March spring breaks. Historically, this has been a relatively quiet time (although not the slowest). Some crowd levels are as low as 2, or higher like 5. I am working on a touring plan so I will have some ideas of where to go. Also, on vacation, we do not mind being nightowls, even the 5 y.o. (as long as we do not wake up at 6 a.m.!)

My question is, will my trip not be fun if we do NOT go at rope drop? I plan to get my FP+ for my group, and get them wisely based upon top rides for our group, etc. We plan for quick dining except maybe sit down one or two evenings (which I'll reserve!!!).

I am having a hard time getting ready to tell my DH and MIL that we need to wake up at 6:30 a.m. on vacation, and then wait 45 minutes outside a gate, and then walk 10 minute directly to a particular attraction, no passing go, etc.

It is our first visit, I want to see and do alot, but I know we won't do everything and I am OK with that. I want to let the "magic" happen and I want my 5 y.o. son to feel like we have some freedom to go where we want when we want.

So tell me - is rope drop my only way to go? Am I going to ruin our trip if we show up at 10 am? Or tell me some success stories of how you manage without RD.
Thanks all!

Lol, what's rope drop?...

I go to Disney World over fifteen times per year as I am blessed to live locally. Three times are for week long vacations or longer. We always get up at 8:00am, have breakfast where ever we are staying at 9:00am, and head off to the parks between 10:00-10:30am. We make our first FP reservations at 11:00 am and finish them after lunch by around 3:00pm. The rest of the day and in the evenings, if we go back, we have no problem waiting on short lines to see or ride what we didn't book (excluding the major tier ones) and always have a wonderful trip. If we don't get to do a tier one ride one day due to the tier limits, we book it the next day and rinse and repeat....

Every person wants a different experience so it will depend on what you want and expect for yourselves, and how it works out will also be affected by what time of the year that you go on your vacation. We always plan what is important to us, but always leave part of the day to "go with the flow" as they say. Enjoy your trip and don't worry, be happy...

 

[Carrie in AZ]

My #1 tip to anyone going to DW is to do RD. You will never regret it.

Have fun on your first trip!! You will love it!

 

[Sharpdisney]

Thanks for all these ideas.

I think I am going to plan for a RD on our first MK day, which is the first full day we are there. I bet our anticipation will get us up early enough!

Per historical calendars, the day I think we will pick as our 2nd MK day may be a later night (like 11 pm - or least that it was it was last year same week). So, maybe that 2nd visit day we'll not go so early with plans to stay later.

Maybe our Epcot day we may also try RD so that we can do Test Track and FP Soarin or vice versa, right?

With our FP at HS, maybe we'll not need to RD that day. Historically that may be a "3" crowd day anyway.

AK - Haven't thought much about that yet. DS loves animals so seeing them active on safari would be a blast.

Do you think this plan could work alright?

 

[itchin2go]

We did not do rope drop and found MK and AK all but impassable by lunch time.

Impassable is right.

We generally do rope drop. Here's what it's like at MK (after the rope drops). At first, the world is your oyster. You can go to pretty much any attraction with little to no wait. Second attraction, same thing. Third attraction, same thing. Gradually, the waits start building, but they're not bad for some time. By lunch time, on a busy day, it's gridlock. So it went from bliss to blech in the course of several hours.

That's just my subjective view. At some point in the day, it eases back up. Others can help you with that. We generally leave the parks after lunch and only come back for evening ADRs or nighttime entertainment. We get everything done early so there's no need to continue to fight the crowds. However, I DO understand that wait times can be much less in the evening, so maybe that's a better strategy for your family.

Full disclosure, we're early risers anyway.

 

[mickeyluv'r]

SharpDisney that sounds like a great plan.

With a tiny caveat, that no matter how one plans...things don't often go quite as expected. I don't say that to be mean, I say that as the person who plans vacations for my (often extended) family trips to WDW. Days I think we'll sleep in, we're up early. Other days, we don't arrive until noon. It takes patience! But we still manage to see pretty much everything. That's the thing here. As others have said, do what works for your family. The drill sergeant approach just makes everyone miserable. It's a vacation. Working as team is part of the fun. You do what you can do, and you don't get upset. (cue music) "Let it Go! Let it go!...."

 

[mickeyluv'r]

YEP! Exactly! I love it when I see all the sleepy head people standing in line for Peter Pan for 80 minutes when I rode it 3 hours earlier in 5 minutes

No doubt!

As much as we love returning late to MK with front row parking, ENTERING MK as the tired throngs wait 30+min for the buses, then enjoying 2+ hours of walk-on e-rides.

I once rode BTMRR so many times in a row...I lost track after 15. The CM's just let everyone stay put. It was awesome! Everyone re-riding became part of the same club. We were all high fived each other, memorized the opening, "Cause this here's the wildest ride in the wilderness!"

We also have multiple keepsake legacy fastpasses...where the return window was 2am or later. We think of them as trophies.

 

[jade1]

1) Where are you staying-wake up at BLT/CR at 8:30 and make MK RD.

2) Where are you from-west coast means 6:30AM is 3:30AM

3) Schedule some later day FP+ on highly popular headliners and sleep in those days. If you are up-hit AK and knock that out easily, or check the app and make acceptable changes.

4) Schedule some late AM FP+ and if you get there early-great, if not it will be fine.

5) Enjoy the late evenings-it's by far our favorite time at the parks/resorts/DTD/BW.

6) Keep the family useful/rested.

This is useless (cutest ever though) and I see it all the time, running the kids ragged:

 

[mickeyluv'r]

Impassable is right.

It really depends when you go. The last time I think I truly found the parks impassable was Easter week in 2006, before the economy tanked.

But OP is not going on a week like that. When WDW is truly super crowded, then the best strategy is max one's use of ALL the peripheral hours. If you are going on a week where MK opens at 8am every day - AND has EMH at 7am, then be prepared to use those peripheral hours.

If MK closes at 9pm every night, and HS closes before 10pm, and AK closes at 5pm..it's not going to be very busy The second week of March can be quite a bit busier than the week OP is going. Much depends when Easter falls. The two weeks around Easter are busy, as are the two middle weeks of March. (spring break)

Much depends upon the weather! We were supposed to get slammed one trip. Lo and behold, what were supposed to be two very busy days (I consulted crowd calendars for a hoot) ,the area had downpours and wind warnings. We donned plastic ponchos, and had MK to ourselves.

 

[P00H1010]

First of all, Congrats on your first trip and welcome to DIS!

Everyone vacations differently and everyone has their own opinions/tried and true methods that work for them. There is no right or wrong way to tour the parks...rope drop, no rope drop, EMH or no EMH, park hop, no park hop...its all in how you want to spend your vacation to be honest.

For us, we are not morning people and have never done a rope drop. We go normally during the busy season of July and have never even so much as looked at a crowd calendar. We have had wonderful vacations and like to take it as leisurely as we can.

If you are interested in ideas for a non-rope drop trip here is what we do:

Planning:
* After our trip is booked our first plan of attack is to look at park hours. We love to attend the evening EMHs so we want to make sure we know when those are.
* Once we have hours in mind we get a rough estimate together of what parks we might be on on what days. We park hop so it varies a lot for us. Our rule of thumb is to plan on attending every evening EMH and avoid the park that has a morning EMH until that evening...the rest we just fill in to our liking. (Our reasoning for avoiding the morning EMHs is since we do not get to the parks until say 11ish the crowds seem to be on the heavy side due to the EMH attendance. By late afternoon/early evening the crowds die down generally).
* Once we know a basic idea of where we are going to be we decide when to make our dining reservations. We generally only do a few of those per vacation and fill in the rest of our eating with quick service and snacks.
* This upcoming vacation for us is a little different with the addition of FP+. Generally after we make dining ressies that is the end of our planning. But this year we decided to pre-book our first 3 FPs for each day.

Park Touring:
* Our general park day would be to be at our first park around 11ish give or take a little and stay until closing (with park hopping in between..maybe throw in a water park or downtime and the resort and then heading back out).
* We use a few FPs for some headliner attractions and utilize the evening EMHs to also do some headliners. (Again this will a little different with FP+ this July for us but we are still planning on the same basic plan).
* We stay out until rather late normally...park closings in July are normally midnight, 1 or 2am. And we are never the out of the park until a while after closing....we linger a while, maybe grab some ice cream or sit and wait until some of the crowd thins out so the bus won't be as crowded.

 

[Stinky_Pete]

I noticed that most of the people saying "don't worry about rope drop" have visited WDW multiple times. I've also visited multiple times, and I still do rope drop. Since this is the OP's first visit, I will try to approach it from that perspective.

On my first "real" (staying on site/doing a whole week at Disney) visit, on the first night, my partner (former CM) said "What time should I set the alarm for?" I replied "Alarm?!? I'm on vacation! I don't want to set an alarm." He said "Disney isn't that kind of vacation." So he set the alarm.

We showed up at the Magic Kingdom for what was then called "Early entry" (now EMH). We experienced five attractions during that first hour with no waits whatsoever. I remember noticing around 11 a.m. that every attraction we had experienced with no wait now had a posted wait of 45 minutes. So we saved almost four hours of standing in line by getting up a little early.

Since we had enjoyed the attractions that would have lines later before there were lines, we were able to relax for the rest of the day and just do things as we wanted and came across them.

I found it so wonderful! I went to Disney and never waited in a line!

I've heard from people who went to WDW and came home saying they hated it because they spent so much time just standing in lines. "Everything begins with a line and ends with a gift shop."

If you think waiting in lines would give your family a negative experience, then you might suggest to your group that you do rope drop, at least at the Magic Kingdom.

 

[Wishing4magic]

Although RD is great it really depends on your family and how they will feel about being up early while on vacation. FP also give you an opportunity to do some rides without crazy long rides. On our last trip DH and DD wanted to sleep in. I however couldn't sleep at all thinking of the things I wanted to do. So I let them sleep in. I took the monorail to MK on my own for RD. I loved RD!! I had some nice me time. Was able to happily do a lot of the things I wanted to do. After about 2 hrs I went back to the hotel to join my family for breakfast. Funny thing is they never even knew I was gone.
For our upcoming trip I am planning RD days for MK and later starts for Epcot and HS. However, my family has been warned I reserve the right to sneak out for RD

 

[ashleyfallis]

First off, welcome to the board!

I've been to the World numerous times both on site and off site and I've never been to RD once. I don't think it will ruin your holiday but I do think it's something you might want to experience at least once, I know I do!

Like a previous poster said, if you class all day as rope drop to close, that's a damn long day!!

Have a great trip when it comes!

 

[OfTheWind]

Impassable is right.

We generally do rope drop. Here's what it's like at MK (after the rope drops). At first, the world is your oyster. You can go to pretty much any attraction with little to no wait. Second attraction, same thing. Third attraction, same thing. Gradually, the waits start building, but they're not bad for some time. By lunch time, on a busy day, it's gridlock. So it went from bliss to blech in the course of several hours.

That's just my subjective view. At some point in the day, it eases back up. Others can help you with that. We generally leave the parks after lunch and only come back for evening ADRs or nighttime entertainment. We get everything done early so there's no need to continue to fight the crowds. However, I DO understand that wait times can be much less in the evening, so maybe that's a better strategy for your family.

Full disclosure, we're early risers anyway.

I experience the same thing. I would say from 11:30 am on, it's very crowded. Those first few hours are great.

As far as a useless trip, no. It won't be useless. It will be crowded however. No, not Christmas Day crowded, but nevertheless crowded if you arrive at 1 pm, especially to MK. If you have your 3 FP+ booked and you don't mind waiting 30 or 40 minutes for a ride at 1:00 that would have been under 15 at 9:30, then you will be okay. I'm up at 5 am everyday so RD doesn't bother me. I'd rather wake up earlier, knock out multiple rides and then have lunch than show up at 12 when it's shoulder to shoulder and stand in longer lines until park close.