Please review our Hollywood Studios plan

[Benoit]

Hello all,

Will be visiting WDW for the first time, after Tokyo Disney Sea and CA Disneyland a couple of years ago.

We are doing HS on 03/07 with our 10 years old daughter, staying on site, using Genie+ and planning on rope dropping.

This plan is based on the optimistic assumption that we will manage to get a pass for Slinky in the morning and an LL$ for Rise in the afternoon. (If we fail we can then switch our plans, or improvise around it).

I would be very happy to read your expert comments and suggestions.

These are the hoped riding times.

8:00 - Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway
8:25 - Toy Story Mania!
8:50 - Alien Swirling Saucers
9:15 - Slinky Dog Dash
9:35 - Muppet*Vision 3D
10:00 - Market / Pixar Place break
10:40 - Star Tours: The Adventures Continue
11:00 - Lunch at ABC Commissary
12:30 - Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance
12:45 - Galaxy Edge
2:00 - Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run
2:25 - Lightning McQueen's Racing Academy
2:40 - Hollywood Scoops Ice Cream in Sunset Ranch Market break
3:10 - The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror
3:50 - Pixar Pals Motorcade
4:30 - Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular!
5:00 - Beauty and the Beast - Live on Stage
5:30 - Cocktails and dinner

 

[Meglen]

Its sad to say but this plan won't work and the more you try it to will cause anxiety or worse disappointment.

Most sdd call back times even at 7am will be after 12pm. With genie being next available you might end up with a ride you wanted only having a time after 4pm while other would be sooner.

Imo plan for ILL and hope for the best. The shows and such can be placed anywhere to fill on gaps from genie+.

Let's say you book sdd at 7am and get a return time of 3pm. Than you can't book another genie till 11am (if park opens at 9). With your plan you would be standby for 5 rides. By that time. And than your next ride would be to book smugglers run and that might not have come back time till 6om. I love to plan and love your ideas and back with fp+ this might have been possible. Man I dislike genie+

 

[mouschievous]

I completely agree with @Meglen. I think you need to have a general, loose plan, but also realize that you are likely going to be looking at a somewhat later return time and you'll need to ride standby for a while. Also, the HS LLs seem to go really fast, probably because there just aren't a ton of rides. I was on right at 7 and saw MFSR for 10:30, but when I clicked book it changed to 1:30. That was in direct conflict with our restaurant reservation so I tried again and got 3:00 - and that was all within 2 minutes of being able to book.

With that in mind, here are some things we found when we were there in January
1 - Lines get long FAST. We didn't rope drop, but we were there by 9 and most lines were already posted at over an hour

2 - Wait times are way inflated. Many times the wait times were 50% of what was posted

3- Shows are great when lines are too long!

So I would adjust your plans to do as many rides at rope drop as you can, and then once lines get to a point where you're not willing to stand in them, do shows to fill your time until your LL starts coming up.

For our second HS morning, we rope dropped Rise, then did Star Tours on the way to MMRR (though we could have easily done MFSR again if we'd wanted, it had a posted wait of 10 minutes), then MMRR, then Muppets. We got all that done and were leaving the park just after 10. If we'd been able to stay (we had a family event to get to at Disney Springs), we probably would have switched to shows at that point because it was starting to get busier.