Category — w. Most Recent Stuff

OVERVIEW: CHRISTMAS 2011 AT DISNEY WORLD

The Christmas season at Walt Disney World includes both the best and the worst times to visit, with both prices and crowds at both lower and very high levels over the period.

Decorations, special Christmas shows, programs, and events, and Christmas trees are everywhere, making Disney World as special a place to celebrate the holidays as you can find.

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Steve at MilitaryDisneyTips.com has posted key details on the extension of Disney’s Military Salute into 2012.

The details of the 2012 Military Salute are here, including blackout dates.

One key point: families can use both the 2011 program that ends in October 2011 and the program that begins in October 2011 and extends into September 2012.

So yes, you can use the Disney Military Salute program twice, once in the current program year and once in the program year of October 2011 to September 2012.

In case you are wondering, Steve’s post is based on an email exchange with Disney Military Sales, which he has copied me on (we do this for each other to make sure we have the details straight) so this is the real deal!!

THE STAR TOURS RIDE

2016 update: Star Tours now includes scenes from The Force Awakens!

A new Star Wars-themed ride opened in 2011 at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, using the same space and infrastructure as the former Star Tours.

The ride, Star Tours: The Adventure Continues, with fun new queue elements and a totally new 3-D high-def set of films (including scenes from The Force Awakens!) is different enough to qualify (at least to me) as an entirely new experience, rather than an update of the old Star Tours.

I’ve had many chances to ride it, and it’s a lot of fun, even for those unfamiliar with Star Wars.  For those who are fans of the movies, it bears multiple repeat rides!

REVIEW OF STAR TOURS: THE ADVENTURE CONTINUES

The core concept of the ride–an ineptly-piloted adventure in the universe of Star Wars–remains from the old ride.

The simulator technology–which can be a little rough on those with above-average motion sickness–also remains.

New is an enhanced queue and a whole new set of films that create the simulated universe in 3-D.

Any one of the films would be different enough to make this a fun new ride.

But what Disney has done is to create four sections of the film with options.–the first with two, and the next three with three each.

As a result, 54 different experiences are possible.  These experiences aren’t uniquely different–e.g. half have one of two possible beginnings, and half the other–but there’s still plenty of options to motivate repeat visits.

Moreover, these options mostly aren’t minor inserts in an otherwise identical presentation.  Three of the four are entire scenes (though the first one is short).  The result is substantively different experiences.

You have to actually ride it twice just to see how different the experiences can be!

For even more, see David Koenig’s comments on MousePlanet here, and Jim Korkis’s history of the ride here. And there’s much more on Star Tours in my co-author Josh’s post here.

Have you ridden it? What did you think?

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OLLIVANDERS AT THE WIZARDING WORLD OF HARRY POTTER

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter’s Hogsmeade has a branch of Ollivanders–in the books located solely in Diagon Alley. (Ollivanders has also been included in Universal Orlando’s new Diagon Alley.)

As a means both of crowd control to the associated gift shop and as a way of plussing the whole Hogsmeade Wizarding World experience, entry is through a show where the wand chooses the wizard.

Lines for this have been so long on my prior visits to the Wizarding World that I did not bother.

However, I recently had my first chance to take advantage of the early entry available to Universal resort hotel guests.

Even though I had to backtrack because I had forgotten my hotel room key–which serves as your entry pass–at 20 minutes after the early opening only three people were in line, so I did Ollivanders.

The short version: while your results will vary, what I saw was incredibly cute.

THE WIZARDS DEFINE HOW MUCH FUN IT IS TO WATCH THE WAND CHOOSE THEM AT OLLIVANDERS

Small groups of 20 or so are admitted to a tiny high-ceilinged space, filled with wands.

As my group entered, two friends, younger tweens–both, as it turned out, named Sarah–were driven to wordless awe by the space, capable only of “oohs” of admiration and longing.

When capable of words, one said haltingly to the other “Ooh, oooh, Sarah…look at the wands!”

The cast member playing the shop keeper picked the Sarahs, who as they came forward almost levitated with delight.

With show business and effects–which I am not going to give away–the wands picked the Sarah.

All was drop dead charming for me to watch–in the same way that Epcot’s Turtle Talk with Crush is.

However, Turtle Talk gives a much more consistently charming experience.

Part of the issue is that the shopkeeper stays in a most serious role, so the real fun is solely in the response of the kids.  (The actual effects of the wands are minor.) However, the chosen kid or kids have their backs to you, so you can’t see the expressions on their face.

Moreover, even though the space is small, the half of the attendees who weren’t near the Sarahs pre-choice to see their inarticulate awe couldn’t have had as much fun as I did.

So the upshot for many visitors to Ollivanders will be a slight entertainment hardly worth the wait if it’s more than 20 minutes or so–unless of course their own kids are chosen.

How to be chosen?  Have your kids act like the Sarahs…as you enter, try to get them into a position in the front where the shopkeeper can seem them…and have them thrum with awe and longing!

THE LOWEST CROWD WEEKS AT DISNEY WORLD

I’ve been working lately on my formal Disney World crowd calendar for 2012.

(The 2011 Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar is here; my 2012 Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World, Ranked in Order is here.)

For reasons I’ll post about later, the data sources I use as the basis for my Disney Crowd Calendar are becoming a little less reliable—especially for the relative ranking of moderate and high crowd weeks. So I’ve been re-thinking my approach.

See the image for the sophisticated analytic tools I use to support this work.

While doing such noodling I noticed a disboards thread on the lowest crowds at Walt Disney World over the year.

I was surprised at the variance among and vehemence with which various times were proposed.

So I went to my bookshelf and here’s what I found:

• Guidebook 1: Lowest crowds right after Labor Day
• Guidebook 2: Lowest crowds the first two weeks of December
• Guidebook 3: Lowest crowds in the middle of January

My own approach (which is good at “low” but not really reliable for “lowest”) at the first level, before modifications that I apply to it, suggests January-early February, and October.

Well, all these can’t be right. The only people who really know work for Disney World, and TouringPlans.com is the next most reliable source that I know about.

That said, I thought it would be interesting to canvass a number of sources and find how much they agreed or disagreed.

My starting point was the 2011 editions of four well-known guidebooks, the calendars on three strong websites, my own first level 2012 calendar, and a proprietary crowd calendar that the team at LeaveittoGenie.com was kind enough to share with me.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS ON WALT DISNEY WORLD CROWDS

Only three of these nine had a specific point of view on 2012 at all, and only one (mine) was complete.

So what I did was infer their principles and apply them to 2012, adjusting for the changing dates of key holidays. In some cases I also had to infer (usually straightforward—see the analytic resources available in the image higher on the page) the distinction between low and lowest.

(In my “other” job, I’m a consultant specializing in business strategy, so this future oriented inference—I almost said BS—is what I do every day.)

THE LOWEST CROWD WEEKS OF 2012 AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

See the image for the result.

(Click it to open it; once open, click it again to enlarge it.)

Based on my inferences, 21 different weeks would be indicated by at least one source as lowest, with an average of about 3.5 votes each (out of nine possible).

Seven weeks were noted as lowest crowd in half or more of the sources (in the image, they are highlighted in green):

• January after the Marathon Weekend until early February, excluding Martin Luther King Day week, and
• The week after Labor Day until the opening of the Epcot Food and Wine Festival

THE LOW CROWD WEEKS OF 2012 AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

Based on the same approach, I also built a view of the “low crowd” weeks of the year at Walt Disney World.

Click the image to open it up.

• Thirty two weeks got noted as low
• Twenty two got votes as low from more than half of the calendars

A couple more in later April were impossible for me to infer because of the major change in Easter dates compared to 2011.

Likely some of these April weeks will get promoted into the “more than half” category once the sources develop their official 2012 calendars—remember that for almost all I am inferring some or all of their 2102 crowd calendars from their approach to 2011.

Click the image to see all these weeks–the ones with more than half the crowd calendars supporting them are highlighted in green.

(By the way, it’s because I am basing this on such inferences that I’m not identifying the sources—any errors here—and there’s bound to be some—are mine, not theirs.)

So there you have it—a best efforts shot at a broad-based view of the lowest and low-crowd weeks of 2012 at Walt Disney World.

Thanks to Dave Lavender at the Herald-Dispatch for his link to the site in this article!