Standard Epcot FassPass+ Selections
We used to be huge fans of Disney’s FastPass system — Disney’s method for managing lines for popular attractions by assigning specific timeframes for riders. In the original incarnation of FastPass, you could redeem printed FastPass certificates by swiping your park tickets in a FastPass machine; the printed tickets would indicate your return time window for the ride. With the old FastPass system, one member of our traveling party would run around the park collecting FastPasses to avoid waiting in lines. You could obtain as many FastPasses in a day as you could use, which meant that we could sometimes ride as many as 5 or 6 rides per day via FastPass. If we found ourselves with Fast Passes we couldn’t use, we would hand them off to another family as we left the park to create some magic.
The original FastPass system ended at Disney last year, to be replaced with the FastPass+ system. Now, you make your attraction reservations up to 60 days in advance if you have a Disney resort reservation. One major change from FastPass to FastPass+ is that not all rides are treated equally; Disney has implemented a tiered system, which allows you to make one reservation from the top tiered rides and two reservations from less popular rides.
After using FastPass+, we certainly don’t like it as much as the paper FastPass system. It’s less conducive to our preferred way of touring the Disney parks. However, it’s the system we have now, so how do we go about using it to our advantage?
The basic rules of the FastPass+ system are as follows: 1) You can make up to three FastPass+ reservations at one park. 2) You can make reservations up to 60 days in advance if you have a Disney resort hotel reservation, or 30 days in advance if you have annual passes, 3) Once you have used up your three reservations, you can go to one of the FastPass+ kiosks in the park and make another reservation. These FastPass+ reservations can be made at the My Disney Experience website or on Disney’s mobile app.
How do we use the FastPass+ system? Since we tend to arrive at the parks for rope drop, we can get a lot of attractions done in the first two hours the parks are open without much waiting. We usually don’t try to even touch FastPasses at that time. We like to save our FastPass reservations for later in the day when the lines have grown too long to wait in, or to make reservations at another park if we are planning to park hop later that day. We also try to get FastPass reservations for rides that we like that will have the longest wait times. If we decide to change our plans after reserving the initial FastPasses, we can usually trade down to less popular rides, but it’s hard to move from less popular to one of the more popular rides.
Magic Kingdom FastPass+ Selections
At Magic Kingdom, we tend to pick the major rides for FastPasses (e.g., Space Mountain, Big Thunder, Splash Mountain, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train), if possible. There are more options for FastPasses at Magic Kingdom than at other parks, so if we are visiting Magic Kingdom for more than one day, we like to vary our FastPass selections to cover as many as possible. In the above list of selections, we have an extra one because one member of our party does not ride Space Mountain, so she selected Winnie the Pooh instead.
Epcot presents a unique set of challenges with the different tiers of attractions. You can only get one FassPass for Soarin’, Test Track, Living with the Land, or Illuminations. We usually pick Soarin’ for our FastPass and make a beeline for Test Track at rope drop. We can usually get two or three rides in at Test Track before the line gets too long. We will even hit the single rider line in order to get a couple of rides in. The waits are generally around 5 minutes in the morning. The second tier of FastPass+ attractions at Epcot include Captain EO, Journey into Imagination, Epcot Character Spot, Mission Space, The Seas with Nemo, Spaceship Earth, and Turtle Talk with Crush. We usually will grab Mission Space or The Seas with Nemo, then finish up with Spaceship Earth (which we try to ride at least twice every time we are at Epcot).
Animal Kingdom is always fairly straightforward, at least for us. You have a choice of Dinosaur, Expedition Everest, Festival of the Lion King, Finding Nemo the Musical, It’s Tough to be a Bug, Kali River Rapids, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Adventurers Outpost Character Spot, and Primeval Whirl. We usually always grab Expedition Everest and Kilimanjaro Safaris. The third pass will vary between Kali River Rapids, Festival of the Lion King, or perhaps Dinosaur.
At Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you can choose one of either Toy Story Midway Mania, Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, Beauty and the Beast, The Great Movie Ride, or Fantasmic. You can select two FastPasses from Disney Junior Live on Stage, Frozen Sing-Along, Indiana Jones, the Lights Motors Action Stunt Show, Muppet Vision, Star Tours, Tower of Terror, and Voyage of the Little Mermaid. Similar to Epcot, we always grab the most popular ride — Toy Story Midway Mania — and only plan to ride it once. We head right at rope drop to Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster to get two or more rides before the line grows too long, sometime shifting to single rider to make it through quicker. After that, we always grab a pass for Star Tours. Sometimes we pick up a third FastPass, but rarely use it. We haven’t stayed in Hollywood Studios for a full day in years. I’m sure that will change once Star Wars and Toy Story Land come online, but it will be bleak until then.
The basic aspect of our strategy is to get our FastPasses for rides we definitely want to ride, but we save them for later in the day for when the lines get long. Not getting to the parks at rope drop can really hurt the number of rides we get done in the day. Of course, if you like to sleep in late, you can schedule your FastPasses for later in the day and plan to ride some less popular attractions — we don’t tend to tour this way, but your mileage may vary.
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