IzzyB
V.I.P. Member
That's from a week or two ago. Touring Plan's predictions have been off by a lot this year, most especially the past three months, so they're doing an in depth analysis of the line & fastpass plus system and revising stuff. WDW lines have been significantly longer. The ratio of fastpasses issued compared to standby is a little over 80%, which Disney adjusts according to the crowds. I was surprised by those percentage numbers since I never realized they were so huge. Those are according to communications between Touring plans & Disney. And the cast members are supposed to follow those general percentage guidelines. You might want to read the blog articles on TP dating back a couple of weeks. There's about 6 or 7 different articles, including each park and the resort as a whole. You might also want to read the customer comments since a lot of people were upset the predictions weren't the same as actual crowds and a lot of people spent way more time in lines than predicted. We were there the first two weeks in October and I'd say more than half of our fastpass lines, and I only got them for E ticket type attractions, were twenty to thirty minutes long. I would think the percentage of people in Universal Express lines are significantly small, nothing like those Disney percentages. Which is one reason I love hotel express since its really a true front of the line pass.
Based on those numbers, yes, there would be more fastpass than express. It is interesting because my BIL/SIL were there yesterday and said the park was really busy. It took them an hour to get from the park to their car because they had to wait in a really long ferry line. I think they said they got on the 4th ferry. So it is higher attendance or high % causing the long lines? I thought their predictions were wrong for Uni too. I thought it was from people changing their vacationing patterns more than the FP %. Our friends were at DHS on Saturday and they said at some point they closed down the park and started directing people to Epcot. They had buses taking people to Epcot because DHS couldn't handle more people. That is just insane.
But yes 80% is just insane. They should not have those kinds of percentages. It is also insane to wait 20 or 30 minutes in FP. I guess I have been lucky when I have gone lately, because the longest FP line was 10 minutes which was ToT and I think it had broken down a little bit before we got there because the stand by was 80 minutes and rockin was only 45 lol But everything else was pretty much walk on from Fast Pass. Well walk on to the merge point that is.
If you use express, express is always going to win. I don't dispute that. But if you don't buy express, I think FP is always going to win. Like you said, they two systems are so different you can't compare, but I am sure everyone has a preference based on their family and how you do parks. That was my point. I think