Category — w. Most Recent Stuff

FASTPASS+ AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

You see a lot of concern about Disney’s FASTPASS+ program, which–someday, and perhaps soon–will give people the opportunity to reserve ride times from home months in advance, on discussion boards and in comments on this site.

The concern is mostly about what happens to people who can’t, or won’t, make their plans in advance. Will they be shut out of rides and not able to get regular FASTPASSES any more?

While Disney World has not told me its plans 🙂 , I don’t think so—I think things will be mostly fine for everybody—and I think the math backs me up.

THE MATH OF FASTPASS PLUS

The operational insight behind FASTPASS+ is that everyone on a ride at Walt Disney World could have been on that same ride at without waiting if, instead of standing in line, they had a reservation for a specific time.

Riding a ride thus becomes like eating at a Disney World restaurant, and this is where the concern comes in: these days it’s hard to get a reservation at the most Disney World popular restaurants unless you are willing to commit months ahead, so will the rides become like that too?

Math comes to the rescue here:

• There’s much more ride capacity than restaurant capacity
• Ride capacity is being increased
• Not all available slots need be allocated to the FASTPASS+ program, and
• The current day-of-visit FASTPASS ride program can be largely retained, although it will have less same-day capacity

In a program that’s been under-reported in the Disney World blogging community, Disney World is spending millions to expand ride capacity.

At least 20 rides have already been attached to this program, and just two (Space Mountain and Pirates) have added between them additional capacity of 1.2 million rides a year. Treating these two as examples twice as good as average results, this program alone could add 16,000 rides a day—the equivalent of another headliner attraction.

And of course two more headliners are coming to Magic Kingdom, one this year and one next.

But most importantly, over time, the number of FASTPASS rides will more than triple.

These days, on a typical day, about 20 rides offer FASTPASSES (more on busier days). The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2013 suggests that over time, the number of FASTPASS-like reservable experiences will cross 70, including new opportunities to reserve good spots for fireworks shows and parades.

More than tripling the number of FASTPASS attractions and events means that Disney World could, for example, keep the same number of regular FASTPASSES available to people with no advance ride reservations, or not as many as they’d like, while having twice that many available to those willing to commit to a ride reservation in advance! It’s just math…

Now, where adding FASTPASS attractions doesn’t help so much is with the current FASTPASS rides. Space Mountain now has half a million more seats available, from the capacity expansion noted above—but that’s a drop in the bucket, less than an hour’s worth of extra capacity, compared to the demand it will see from both advance reservation seekers and guests without advance reservations.

So Disney will have to be very careful about how it allocates the capacity of the current FASTPASS rides among advance reservations, regular day of visit FASTPASSES, and riders with neither. Many of the advance reservations—the FASTPASS+s–will go to people who otherwise would have drawn day-of-visit regular FASTPASSES, but not all of them, so for these rides it’s easy to foresee that some will be disappointed and others will face very long standby lines.

But overall, with the added base capacity, new capacity, and more than tripling of FASTPASS rides, guest experience on average should better, and those who show up without any FASTPASS+ passes, or many fewer than they wish they had, should still be able to have a fun visit!

There still will be a higher payoff for guests who can

• Plan in advance, and
• Stay in a Walt Disney World resort hotel

…but this has always been true. The FASTPASS+ program will make it even more true, but I don’t expect it to do so at the cost of making everyone else just miserable. And tripling the number of FASTPASS rides available is the key to that…it’s just math.

For the first page of this review of the Family Suites at All-Star Music, click here.

THE FAMILY SUITE BEDS AT ALL-STAR MUSIC

One key difference between the Family Suites at All-Star Music and those at Art of Animation is the number of beds.

Each has a queen in the master bedroom and a two-person fold-out sofa. After that come the differences:

• The final two spots at Art of Animation are together in a fold-down dining table sleeping two
• The final two spots in All-Star Music are in two separate beds, one folding out of an ottoman, the other folding out of a chair

These last two sleeping spots are much more comfortable at Art of Animation, but–so long as one of your kids is short and light, and also has not named you in his or her will–much more flexible at All-Star Music. [Read more →]

DISNEY WORLD NEXT WEEK: SEPTEMBER 15 TO SEPTEMBER 23, 2012

The material below details operating hours, Extra Magic Hours, parades, and fireworks.

The same stuff is in the table, but organized by park, not by topic.

(For more on September 2012 at Disney World, see this)

[Read more →]

AN ALTERNATE VIEW OF THE BEST WEEKS OF 2013 AT WALT DISNEY WORLD FOR YOUR FAMILY

This site has a couple of easy ways and a hard way to figure out the best times to visit Walt Disney World in 2013.

The 2013 Weeks to Visit rankings are the easy way for first time visitors to pick a time, and the 2013 Week Picker takes a few more clicks but is great for returning visitors—and for first timers who weigh the key issues of crowds, prices, etc., differently than I do.

The harder way is to drill down yourself into weather, prices, crowds, ride closures, and the hurricane season, and use the conclusions you draw from this material to pick your time to visit Walt Disney World in 2013.

Or you could just go in later October… [Read more →]

PERSONALIZATION AND DISNEY WORLD’S NEXTGEN PROJECT

Disney’s NextGen project has several parts.  Most widely discussed is the planned ability to reserve ride times, parade spots, etc., from home months ahead (people are currently calling this the “FASTPASS+” program). The part people have been seeing for a while is enhancements to the experience of waiting in line for those not able to reserve a time.

And then there’s “personalization.”

Most speculation about personalization has focused on the potential ability of cast members and digital signs to recognize and respond to guests, keying off of identity data encoded in either an RFID device or—in the longer run more likely—two way communicating smart phones.  It’s a technologically enabled way to say “hi” before you’ve been formally introduced.

Well, OK on that…but personalization could involve a lot more…

PERSONALIZATION THOUGHTS SPURRED BY DISNEY’S 2012 ANALYTICS AND OPTIMIZATION SUMMIT

[Read more →]

THE 2013 UNOFFICIAL GUIDE: BEST DISNEY WORLD GUIDEBOOK IN A DECADE

The 2013 edition of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World came out in late August.

This installment of the series of guidebooks that has been ranked #1 on this site since it opened is the best in a decade.

The 2013 update includes

• Nice material on potential ways FASTPASS+ will operate (85-86)
• Good updates on the Art of Animation Resort and on the Fantasyland expansion, and
• Some other updated frank assessments—e.g. sharp fresh material on the Downtown Disney Resort Area (197).

Most importantly, it’s finally taken the old presentation of the Studios—which combined it with Universal and Sea World, an approach that has made no sense since 1999 (when Islands of Adventure opened), and little sense even before then—and divided it so that each of these parks has its own section.

This puts the Studios at the same level as the other three Disney World theme parks, while at the same time giving appropriate prominence to the non-Disney parks.

Another nice change is much more detail in the Table of Contents, with 11 pages compared to last year’s 4, making it work nicely as a topical index, and the material of the Guide more findable.  (The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2013 still has almost 40 pages of indexes at the back, a page more than last year.)

These last two changes together fundamentally improve the usability of the Guide–and are why it’s the best Disney World guidebook released in the last decade.

The team also did a really nice job at fixing last year’s errors, although a few new ones have crept in (and/or I’ve noticed them for the first time). (Frequent readers of this site know that my expertise is more in creating errors than in noticing or fixing them…)

Overall, the work is nicely updated—including late breaking (at publication date) stuff like the 2013 shift of evening Extra Magic Hours from 2 hours to 3 (39). This makes it all the more surprising that there’s a lot of outdated or just incorrect schedule info—e.g.

• The schedule of “typical” Extra Magic Hours (40) is anything but—shifting the second Animal Kingdom morning EMH from Friday to Wednesday would have made it indeed typical.
• Neither of the first two sentences in the second full para on 539 “The evening parade is staged once or twice each evening, depending on the season. During less busy seasons, the parade is presented only on weekends…” is correct, and of course the first essentially contradicts the second. An accurate statement would be “Evening parade performances vary by season, happening as often as twice a night during the busy times of year, to two or three times a week during the less busy seasons.”
• The material on Fantasmic staging is less factually incorrect, but only because it uses the words “at least,” and in its overall impression is similarly outdated (618)

There’s many other updates and additions—see Len Testa’s highlights of what’s different for 2013 here.

OTHER TYPOS, ERRORS, AND QUESTIONABLE JUDGMENTS

Accommodations.  As usual, most of the errors I’ve noticed are in the “Accommodations” section…perhaps because I’m one of the few geeks on earth to have recently stayed for multiple nights in every single Disney World owned and operated hotel…

Errors, or questionable interpretations, in the 2013 material on accommodations include:

• I don’t see how the Port Orleans resorts are “centrally located,” but Coronado Springs is not. (115)  The Port Orleans resorts were centrally located until Animal Kingdom opened, perhaps…but Coronado Springs is about as close to Epcot, the Studios and Magic Kingdom as are the Port Orleans resorts, and is much closer to the Animal Kingdom. So both are central or neither is…
• The Cabins at Fort Wilderness are not “the most cost-efficient Disney lodgings for groups of five or six persons” (116).  For five people, the Alligator Bayou rooms at Port Orleans Riverside are the most cost efficient, and for six, the Family Suites at All-Star Music are the most cost efficient.
• The floor plan for the Contemporary (119) has been out of date for a while—although the write-up beginning on 146 is correct.
• The material at the bottom of 120 is much improved compared to the equivalent last year, but it still gets capacities of 4 vs. 5 and 8 vs. 9 wrong, and has comically promoted the Treehouses to Grand Villas
• The dining room chairs in the Art of Animation Family Suite floor plan have been randomly scattered around the suite (122), creating a false impression that the master bedroom can double as a conference room.
• Saratoga Springs has some real weaknesses, but it seems a bit much to ding it three times for lacking character meals (table on 168)
• The final sentence in the para on 178 that begins “Each of Riverside’s 2,048 rooms…”—“All rooms feature two queens or one king”—should be corrected to include the 5th sleeping spot in Alligator Bayou rooms.
• The material on the Animal Kingdom Lodge has a strong discussion of the Kidani vs. Jambo villas…but seemingly at the expense of enough material on standard Jambo rooms.
• The Family Suites at All-Star Music don’t have “two chair beds”—they have a chair bed and an ottoman bed.

Other errors

• Captain EO is “Not to be Missed” (554)? I fear this is a typo copied over from another book in the Unofficial Guides series, the “Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World for Zombies”
• There’s no “Magic Kingdom” at the Disneyland Resort…there’s a Disneyland! (94)
• The reader comment on free admission on birthdays (773) should be eliminated, since the program has stopped

The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2013 doesn’t have the gorgeous images and sprightly prose of The Complete Walt Disney World, nor the clarity and fun design of PassPorter’s Walt Disney World.

What is has, instead, is the most comprehensive and best-organized Disney World vacation information you can find in a guidebook. The 2013 edition started from a strong base, made it much better, and is in sum the best Disney World guidebook I’ve seen in years!

(Disclosure: As noted here, since summer 2011 I’ve had a business relationship with TouringPlans.com, part of the Unofficial Guide intergalactic empire.)