Good Morning. I wanted to clear up a few things for you all. We were at DLR on Sunday 1/19 and we were a VIP TOUR group with a celebrity client. Our tour started at 7AM at the Grand Californian Hotel. From the day our client confirmed with Disney Special Activities the date of the tour they made it 100% clear that ROTR was NOT a ride that we could use for special access. They told us we would have to arrive early and use a boarding group process for a chance to ride the ride. We arrived at the Grand Californian at 7am, met our lovely guide who confirmed they ahve no extra access to walk ANYONE into RoTR for at elast the first 3 months. There were 8 of us and our guide and our clients mother is in a wheelchair. She said she would love to help us, but if they even take people to the ride without boarding passes they can be disciplined. We headed over to DLR. She escorted us through the turnstiles and we all added each others tickets into the
disneyland app. She explained the process thoroughly for all of us. There were 8 of us in our group plus our tour guide. We waited with our guide near the Jolly Holiday Bakery at at 8am we had to use the process everyone else did. We were extremely nervous and it was so weird to ahve to do this but we did it. We managed to get boarding group 73. Our day was spent traversing the park and enjoying the services provided. We started to stress when the ride kept going down and our guide kept telling us that we should make it but it depends on the rides reliability.
The tid bit that sticks out most that noone on here has mentioned is that the ride needs a minimum of 8 hours of downtime every might to reset and that it generally will need to close between 10 and 11 with boarding groups stopping at around 9 each night. Our group as called at 752pm with a return by 852pm. We were inside the haunted mansion when our group was called and we went over to the ride as soon as we excited. As we went through critter country down by hungry bear our guide stopped to speak to a Guest Servjces Team Member. The line for the ride was all the way down near the entrance to the Galaxys Edge entrance. We used
DAS entrance/fast pass entrance for the ride as our clients mother is in a wheelchair. We had all of our tickets scanned and boarding passes verified before they would allow us to enter. We got the the first preshow in about 5 minutes.
The ride is absolutely stunning. I cannot even tell you how many thoughts I have. My jaw was on the floor and I will need to ride about 15 more times to see everything. Our clients mother's wheel chair was taken when we loaded the R5 vehicle and it was waiting for us as we got off the ride where LT Beck is. Our guide told us she had noticed some things that time that she had not seen before so that gives me more excitement for further rides.
So I guess the take aways from all of this are that even though we had VIP tour we had to do the BG process just like everyone else, that the ride needs to go down for 8 hours min for maintenance and reset and that noone gets special access. Oh our guide also said that the boarding group numbers begin at random numbers. There is no super secret back entrance and there is no recovery numbers. Its dependent on the algorithm and the rides expected start time!