Although we love Disney trips, our least favorite aspect is standing in lines.  One of our favorite tools that helps us avoid lines is Touring Plans — a website and service that helps you plan around the crowds to maximize your time while on vacation.  Touring Plans has studied hundreds of thousands of wait times from all over the Disney parks, and has compiled a statistical model of how the parks run.  They can predict, with surprising accuracy, what the crowds will be like at different parks on different days.  They also have extensive models of what those crowds do in the park, giving you accurate attraction wait times at different times of the day.

How does knowing the wait times help you? First, it can help you decide what parks to go to on what days.  Predicted crowd levels for each park are posted months in advance, which can help you decide which park to choose.  Touring Plans takes into account holidays for major school systems around the United States, religious holidays, and even the holiday seasons of other countries (I’m looking at you Brazil!).

How do we use Touring Plans specifically?  We review the predicted crowd levels in advance of a trip and try to pick the less crowded parks, if possible.  We don’t always follow Touring Plans’ suggestions exactly — sometimes, you want to go to a specific park no matter the crowd level because you haven’t visited yet.   One of the Touring Plans suggestions that we try to follow is to avoid parks on the days they have Extra Magic Hours.  Why would you avoid extra time in the parks?  Extra Magic Hours tend to drive larger crowds, since everyone staying at the Walt Disney World Resort Hotels tries to go to the park(s) with Extra Magic hours.  This leaves the other parks less crowded.

The second way that Touring Plans helps with Disney trip planning is that it shows highly accurate wait times for the current rides.  Touring Plans provides a mobile app that can be used to look at and report current wait times in the parks.  Not only are Disney-posted wait times reported, but actual wait times as reported by app users (app users can track the time elapsed from when they enter the queue to when they get on the ride vehicle).  The Touring Plans app also provides timely reports of ride closures, which can save you a trip across the park.

Another way that Touring Plans helps with trip planning is to generate an actual touring plan — a suggested itinerary for your day at the parks.  You can use one of the many pre-built touring plans or have their software customize one for you.  The customized plans can be built using just the rides and attractions you want to see and will take into account your FastPass+ suggestions.  We haven’t used the “plan” portion of Touring Plans, because if we find a ride that has a short line, we just keep going on it over and over again if we really like it.

Touring Plans is not free, but has a subscription-based model.  It currently costs $12.95 for a full year’s subscription for their Walt Disney World planning tools.  With your subscription, you can also add on plans for other parks — for example, a Disneyland subscription can be added for $5.95, and a Universal Orlando subscription can be added for $3.95.  These add the same functionality for those parks that you get for Walt Disney World (crowd calendars, wait times, and customized touring plans).  There is also a Disney Cruise Line subscription that can be added for $7.99 that gives you fantastic information on Disney Cruise Lines, along with a Fare Tracker so you can see when prices tend to go up or down for particular cruise sailings.

We have used all of the Touring Plans available, and currently have Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, and Disney Cruise Line subscriptions.  Since we are planning a return trip to Disneyland, we will be adding on another year to that subscription as well.  We look at Touring Plans as a time saving tool that we can use both for planning trips and when we are in the parks to avoid waiting in line.

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