I'm curious why you think your sister experienced so many more attractions at Disney than Uni. Did she prebook FastPass+, or arrive earlier at Disney? With a good touring plan (shameless plug) it's equally possible to see 10+ attractions on a busy day in either resort.
My sister was not with us at MK, I was using that as a one for one, because both weekends were minor holidays. One being MLK and the other being Columbus day weekend. So the parks are going to be heavier than a normal weekend because of people getting those holidays off and school being out. But they are not going to be summer, spring break, or Christmas level crowds. We did fast passes the day of at MK. We decided to go out to the parks around 4 PM and my husband made dinner while I worked to get us fast passes. So we had fast passes to Space Mountain, Pooh, and Peter Pan. We ended up not using Peter Pan as we decided to do the Mine Train right before closing. We arrived at the park around 6 PM and left right around or a little before midnight. We started with our Pooh fast pass, then did Tea Cups, Carousal, Little Mermaid, Dumbo (we did the play area because my daughter wanted to), then we did space mountain. My husband did it once with a fast pass and got a child swap, I did it with fast pass with my 5 yo and got a child swap. We then watched the fireworks on the bridge and then my husband went on space mountain with my 5 yo using one of the child swap passes (we ended up with one left because we wanted to go see the parade). We then got a snack, relaxed, watched the celebration thing, and then watched the parade. We did this all at the funnel cake/waffle place. Then we went over did the mine train with child swap so that both of us could do this with our 5 yo. We were originally going to do Peter Pan and then do Mine train right at closing but someone gave us a couple fast passes, so we skipped Peter Pan and decided to do the Mine Train twice (once with each of us) and leave a little earlier since it was starting to rain.
At universal we got there around 11 AM and the wait time app I discovered sucked. So the wait times didn't match up and we ended up all over the place in those parks. So I am sure that didn't help matters much. But we did Gringotts and explored the stores, did MIB, got counter service food, transformers, and HE both ways. To be honest we could have gotten one more ride in, but my sister was tired and so we skipped doing DM right at closing. I have to say the wait time app is better at Disney. It actually matches the wait times at the entrance, for some reason the wait times at the entrance were way off what the app says. So I used the Disney wait time app on Saturday at MK and was able to navigate to lower waiting rides in between our fast passes.
I think the other reason you can ride more at MK is the longer hours. With MK being open until midnight one can go later in the day and really benefit from the lower crowds. Where the day we went to Uni the park was closing at 7 PM so you can't really do that late at night thing. I am hoping that when Uni does their 3rd gate they make it so they can grow it into a park that has extended hours with quality night time shows/fireworks. My family has never been a rope drop type of family, so Universal is a harder park to navigate on busy days. But I can't imagine I am the only family out there that prefers night time park going than daytime park going. The lights, the no sun, etc to me make parks so much better at night.
I am remarkably perturbed sometimes by how little people claim to do.
If doing everything is what needs to happen for value to be acheieved you show at rope drop, you hightail, you don't eat, and you single rider when possible.
Sure, you may not enjoy that but it's doing everything so that's value.
She didn't want to do everything, but she surely wanted to do more than 5 rides in 8 hours. Why does everything have to be taken to extremes with you?
Also, single rider doesn't work when you have a 4 year old with you. If we could have done single rider we would have been able to do more. But families with children can't utilize those lines which is why those lines are so short.
Yeah, I didn't understand that either. We did two day trips to Universal(while staying on site at Disney) that same Columbus Day weekend and we were able to do as many, if not more attractions, than we did at Disney. Now, of course, we didn't even bother to try Despicable Me's line, and we did arrive around 10:00 in the morning rather than mid afternoon.
Me and you had this discussion I believe the biggest difference was you being there a little earlier than us and you being able to utilize single rider lines, which we could not. I am not saying everyone would have our experience, however, if we did, I am sure others do also. So if Universal can add just a couple queue less lines then I think they could really help out families who can't use single rider. I think my example was probably on the extreme side of things because I tried and failed at using the app to figure out where to go next and if we had realized it would be that busy I think we would have tried to go earlier.
So I am sure with better planning we could have ridden more. My point in all this was there are probably families out there that don't know how to navigate the park and can't use single rider lines. So if Universal can do something for those families to get a couple more rides in their day, I think it would give more value to their ticket price that people pay. If they can do this they may get some return visitors that they may have not gotten before. I see no harm in trying to do something like that and I am not sure why there is so much anger or hate around this idea.
