So we were at Disney-MGM today (anyone reading Kath’s blog is getting a blow by blow of our vacation) and Ariel was interested in riding “Tower of Terror.” But when we arrived, there was a sign indicating that there would be no Fastpass available: A way of checking in early at a popular ride and getting a set time at which you can return and head straight in, thus enabling you to plan your day more effectively. Without Fastpass, the popular rides are going to have formidable waits.
We decided to check the status board on Main Street, the one that tells you what rides are open and what the projected wait times were. Curiously, there was a little sign blocking the wait time for TOT, and the sign read, “Guess the Wait Time!” Ariel guessed a half hour and the Disney cast member overseeing the board shook his head. He turned to me. I gave it some thought and said “Fifty seven minutes.” He said, “We only go in increments of five.” “Oh. Okay.” I rounded up. “Sixty minutes.” He blinked in surprise and removed the sign to reveal “60 Minutes.” He asked if we were planning to go on (“We” being Ariel, myself, and a friend of ours, Jay, with whom we’d met up at the park.) I said yes. He then gave us Fastpasses for TOT, telling us that today the ONLY way one could get a Fastpass for TOT was to guess the wait time.
We walked over to TOT with the passes and the cast member to whom we presented them said, “These are rare as gold” before waving us past a huge line.
Cool.
PAD
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*sigh* My wife and I are planning on taking our 4 year-old girl next year and I’ve already resigned myself to reading various “Disneyland for Dummies” books for the next six months. Maybe I’ll just get her a goldfish instead…
Peter, now that discovered your forecasting powers (and you’ve already been to Disneyworld) will you be joining the X-Men, X-Factor, Heroes, The 4400 or be fleeing Painkiller Jane?
— Ken from Chicago
P.S. Please, don’t use your powers for EVIL!
Related to Col. MacKenzie are you?
Mike D.
For some great Disney info, check out TourGuideMike.com. The wife and I use it every time we go there, has never failed to save us time and effort.
Jeff
Congrats, Pete!
I know it would contribute to a great day if it happened to me 🙂
Mike, also check out allearsnet.com and wdwinfo.com for a couple of very good sites. wdwinfo has a great message board with tons of topics and info on it.
Thanks for Disney-info sites. I’ll need all the help I can get to avoid feeling overwhelmed and wind up in the Disney parking lot curled up in a fetal position, weeping and muttering “Captain EO, Captain EO” over and over again…
Rock on, PAD. Rock on.
A hour to stand in line for a ride? Boy, makes you wonder why they call them amusement parks ..
It’d have been funny if he’d let you wait for a hour to make sure your answer was right.
“60 minutes! You were right, here’s your fastpass”
Cool!!
We brought our daughter to DW when she was 5 and she just barely made the height requirement for ToT and it being February the lines were almost nil. so we would exit the ride and turn right around and get back on. The funny thing is the guy checking the heights would have my daughter stand next to the line marker and be amazed that she just made the cut off and he would do this everytime we showed up (which was about every 10 minutes)That dude was on automatic.
My daughter is now 14 we lucky if she wants to be seen with us now. Oh.. the good old days.
FastPass is such a great idea, but it’s too bad that they’re so useless on some rides, like Space Mountain: the queues for some rides are so ridiculously long, and the FastPass only gets you ilke a third of the way along.
They occassionally hand out a unique type of FastPass, I forget the name, but it’s like good all day for any ride that takes FastPass. Supposedly, anybody can be lucky enough to get them, but all the reports on the forums my wife reads indicate that they only ever give them to families. Disney says otherwise.
Anyways, glad to hear you had a good time, PAD.
Day One of SDCC down, 3 more to go. I’ll catch you at one of the half a million signing sessions you’re going to have this weekend. 🙂
Good going, Peter, and I congratulate you on being able to do so.
On the other hand…think about it a minute. Turn the tables around. Imagine you were one of the people who’d been standing there, waiting in line for close to an hour, so you were nearly but not quite at the front…and then some guy who had just showed up got ushered to the front of the line, not because he’d paid for and owns a special pass, but because he answered a guessy trivia question. You’d be pìššëd, would you?
There’s something fundamentally wrong with that process at Disney, and it’s one of the reasons I’m most frustrated with large-scale theme parks and exhibits.