Read the other sections in this blog series
Part 1 - List of attractions visited
Part 2 - How to plan for such a challenge
Part 3 - Hollywood Studios recap
Part 4 - Epcot recap
Part 5 - Animal Kingdom recap
Part 6 - Magic Kingdom recap
Part 7 - Final concluding thoughts
In today's entry, I'm going to discuss the planning that I did for the "Four Disney Parks in One Day" challenge. There were several steps I took - I'll walk you through them all here:
Step 1 - Figure out the "must visit" attractions
This was extremely important - to make this an impressive achievement, I needed not only to visit a lot of attractions, but I needed to visit the best attractions. Anyone could get 25 rides done in a day - just get on the Peoplemover when the park opens and stay on for 25 straight runs. Big deal. What I wanted to do was visit the biggest rides - the ones everyone talks about when they get home, the ones with the huge lines, the ones that make Disney Disney. So I went through the list of attractions and made the "must do" list. My initial list was the following attractions:
Magic Kingdom - Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean
Epcot - Soarin', Mission: Space, Spaceship Earth (I would have also included Test Track but it is currently under refurbishment)
Hollywood Studios - Star Tours, Toy Story Midway Mania, Rock N Roller Coaster, Tower of Terror
Animal Kingdom - Kilimanjaro Safaris, Expedition Everest, Dinosaur
That's 17 attractions. I added the next layer of "appealing, well known attractions" to get up to a list of 25, which became my goal. And then I noted other potential attractions that I would try to fit in if possible. Generally I avoided the long show-type attractions as fillers (as they take more time), though you'll see I ended up visiting many of the biggest "show" attractions anyway!
Step 2 - Figure out the best day to visit
I needed to pick a day that fits two criteria:
When I advise Optimal Magic clients about best times to visit, I actually don't worry about sending them to the parks on crowded days. With the exception of the week after Christmas and a couple of other days of the year, you can easily avoid all the crowds and long lines, and have a great time at Disney World, regardless of the overall crowd level.
However for this challenge, crowds were going to be more of an issue. It's physically impossible to be at all four parks at opening (the least crowded time of day). So I needed to pick a day where I could successfully tour a park in the afternoon (the busiest time of day).
When looking at calendars over the month of October, October 29th stood out as a perfect day. Three factors made it ideal:
Step 3 - Figure out best times to visit each attraction, and create a plan for each park:
I know when rides are busier and when they're less busy - it's the underlying data that drives all my recommendations. I also know that there are certain attractions that will have extremely long lines, and I was going to have to slot them first. There are several attractions that have lines that build to over 60 minutes, and at least a dozen more that would have expected waits of 30 minutes. I simply could not wait in any of these long lines. Unfortunately, the "arrive at the park first thing in the morning" strategy wouldn't work for all of them, because these long-line attractions are spread among four parks! So I had to determine a strategy to avoid these lines even with these major constraints:
When looking at all the variables, it became crystal clear that the first park to visit simply had to be Disney Hollywood Studios. Toy Story Mania builds to 60 minute waits in the first 30 minutes the park is open. In addition, the Fastpasses for this attraction disappear extremely quickly. So unless I wanted to wait an hour or more for Toy Story Mania, it had to be first. In addition, the other major attractions at Hollywood Studios build big lines (30-60 minutes) relatively quickly.
The other easy park to figure out was the Magic Kingdom - with Extra Hours until 1am (four hours after the other parks close), it was a no-brainer to head there last.
That leaves two other parks - Epcot and Animal Kingdom. Of the two, Epcot has the ride with the longest waits and latest Fastpass return times - Soarin'. So I planned to head to Epcot next and check out the Fastpass situation for Soarin'. I estimated that I could complete the four major attractions at Hollywood Studios in a little over an hour and be at Epcot by 10:30. My plan was to get Soarin' Fastpasses, and if the return time was early enough, visit the rest of Epcot at that time. If not, I planned to head to Animal Kingdom, and return to Epcot later in the afternoon.
So the overall order was set:
Once this order was set, I used my custom-built Optimal Magic planning tools to put together a rough plan for each park, so I could visit attractions at their least busy times, and also use Fastpass as best as possible. Because I needed to optimize my trip on the fly (every second counted), I also created ridiculously complex sheets with wait estimates and contingency plans for various possibilities (don't worry - the plans I make for my clients don't have the complexities and are MUCH easier to understand, but work just as well as long as you're not visiting four parks in one day!)
In addition, I downloaded Disney's excellent "My Disney Experience" app, which has real-time wait and Fastpass return time info (not always 100% accurate, but a good guide for on-the-fly decision-making).
Step 4 - Test run
No - I didn't fly down to Disney for a test run. However, I noticed that October 22nd was a very similar day to my planned visit day of October 29th (same season, same day of the week, and same operating hours). So I used this day to run through my plans while looking at Disney's wait estimates through the day. I know the walking time between attractions and the length of each attraction (all important data for any planning I do). So I would continue through the plan, while checking Disney's estimated wait times throughout the day.
This test run was incredibly helpful. I made many tweaks to my plan after this test.
Step 5 - head to Disney!
I flew down the day before, visited two parks (and walked 5 miles, which was probably stupid the day before a "marathon"), and then tried to get a good night's sleep!
Starting with the next post, I'll start walking through the entire day, attraction-by-attraction. And I'll feature lots of photos of me at all four parks - you won't believe how much I got done!
Read the rest of this blog series
Part 1 - List of attractions visited
Part 2 - How to plan for such a challenge
Part 3 - Hollywood Studios recap
Part 4 - Epcot recap
Part 5 - Animal Kingdom recap
Part 6 - Magic Kingdom recap
Part 7 - Final concluding thoughts
Part 1 - List of attractions visited
Part 2 - How to plan for such a challenge
Part 3 - Hollywood Studios recap
Part 4 - Epcot recap
Part 5 - Animal Kingdom recap
Part 6 - Magic Kingdom recap
Part 7 - Final concluding thoughts
In today's entry, I'm going to discuss the planning that I did for the "Four Disney Parks in One Day" challenge. There were several steps I took - I'll walk you through them all here:
Step 1 - Figure out the "must visit" attractions
This was extremely important - to make this an impressive achievement, I needed not only to visit a lot of attractions, but I needed to visit the best attractions. Anyone could get 25 rides done in a day - just get on the Peoplemover when the park opens and stay on for 25 straight runs. Big deal. What I wanted to do was visit the biggest rides - the ones everyone talks about when they get home, the ones with the huge lines, the ones that make Disney Disney. So I went through the list of attractions and made the "must do" list. My initial list was the following attractions:
Magic Kingdom - Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, Thunder Mountain, Peter Pan, Dumbo, Haunted Mansion, Pirates of the Caribbean
Epcot - Soarin', Mission: Space, Spaceship Earth (I would have also included Test Track but it is currently under refurbishment)
Hollywood Studios - Star Tours, Toy Story Midway Mania, Rock N Roller Coaster, Tower of Terror
Animal Kingdom - Kilimanjaro Safaris, Expedition Everest, Dinosaur
That's 17 attractions. I added the next layer of "appealing, well known attractions" to get up to a list of 25, which became my goal. And then I noted other potential attractions that I would try to fit in if possible. Generally I avoided the long show-type attractions as fillers (as they take more time), though you'll see I ended up visiting many of the biggest "show" attractions anyway!
Step 2 - Figure out the best day to visit
I needed to pick a day that fits two criteria:
- The parks needed to have long operating hours
- Crowd levels need to be moderate (there is no such thing as "light" crowds at Disney World any more, but there are definitely less crowded times and more crowded times.)
When I advise Optimal Magic clients about best times to visit, I actually don't worry about sending them to the parks on crowded days. With the exception of the week after Christmas and a couple of other days of the year, you can easily avoid all the crowds and long lines, and have a great time at Disney World, regardless of the overall crowd level.
However for this challenge, crowds were going to be more of an issue. It's physically impossible to be at all four parks at opening (the least crowded time of day). So I needed to pick a day where I could successfully tour a park in the afternoon (the busiest time of day).
When looking at calendars over the month of October, October 29th stood out as a perfect day. Three factors made it ideal:
- October has more moderate crowds than other times of year.
- Animal Kingdom had morning "Extra Magic Hours" opening at 8am.
- Magic Kingdom had evening "Extra Magic Hours" and was open until 1am.
Step 3 - Figure out best times to visit each attraction, and create a plan for each park:
I know when rides are busier and when they're less busy - it's the underlying data that drives all my recommendations. I also know that there are certain attractions that will have extremely long lines, and I was going to have to slot them first. There are several attractions that have lines that build to over 60 minutes, and at least a dozen more that would have expected waits of 30 minutes. I simply could not wait in any of these long lines. Unfortunately, the "arrive at the park first thing in the morning" strategy wouldn't work for all of them, because these long-line attractions are spread among four parks! So I had to determine a strategy to avoid these lines even with these major constraints:
When looking at all the variables, it became crystal clear that the first park to visit simply had to be Disney Hollywood Studios. Toy Story Mania builds to 60 minute waits in the first 30 minutes the park is open. In addition, the Fastpasses for this attraction disappear extremely quickly. So unless I wanted to wait an hour or more for Toy Story Mania, it had to be first. In addition, the other major attractions at Hollywood Studios build big lines (30-60 minutes) relatively quickly.
The other easy park to figure out was the Magic Kingdom - with Extra Hours until 1am (four hours after the other parks close), it was a no-brainer to head there last.
That leaves two other parks - Epcot and Animal Kingdom. Of the two, Epcot has the ride with the longest waits and latest Fastpass return times - Soarin'. So I planned to head to Epcot next and check out the Fastpass situation for Soarin'. I estimated that I could complete the four major attractions at Hollywood Studios in a little over an hour and be at Epcot by 10:30. My plan was to get Soarin' Fastpasses, and if the return time was early enough, visit the rest of Epcot at that time. If not, I planned to head to Animal Kingdom, and return to Epcot later in the afternoon.
So the overall order was set:
- Hollywood Studios
- Epcot (get Fastpass for Soarin' and then make a call on whether to stay or come back later)
- Animal Kingdom
- Return to Epcot if necessary for Soarin'
- Magic Kingdom
Once this order was set, I used my custom-built Optimal Magic planning tools to put together a rough plan for each park, so I could visit attractions at their least busy times, and also use Fastpass as best as possible. Because I needed to optimize my trip on the fly (every second counted), I also created ridiculously complex sheets with wait estimates and contingency plans for various possibilities (don't worry - the plans I make for my clients don't have the complexities and are MUCH easier to understand, but work just as well as long as you're not visiting four parks in one day!)
In addition, I downloaded Disney's excellent "My Disney Experience" app, which has real-time wait and Fastpass return time info (not always 100% accurate, but a good guide for on-the-fly decision-making).
Step 4 - Test run
No - I didn't fly down to Disney for a test run. However, I noticed that October 22nd was a very similar day to my planned visit day of October 29th (same season, same day of the week, and same operating hours). So I used this day to run through my plans while looking at Disney's wait estimates through the day. I know the walking time between attractions and the length of each attraction (all important data for any planning I do). So I would continue through the plan, while checking Disney's estimated wait times throughout the day.
This test run was incredibly helpful. I made many tweaks to my plan after this test.
Step 5 - head to Disney!
I flew down the day before, visited two parks (and walked 5 miles, which was probably stupid the day before a "marathon"), and then tried to get a good night's sleep!
Starting with the next post, I'll start walking through the entire day, attraction-by-attraction. And I'll feature lots of photos of me at all four parks - you won't believe how much I got done!
Read the rest of this blog series
Part 1 - List of attractions visited
Part 2 - How to plan for such a challenge
Part 3 - Hollywood Studios recap
Part 4 - Epcot recap
Part 5 - Animal Kingdom recap
Part 6 - Magic Kingdom recap
Part 7 - Final concluding thoughts
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