What you are describing has to do with stategizing, but not the system itself. These are not loopholes, these are features that allow you to enhance your FP+ and Disney experience, if you want to! But you don’t need to. And adding rides ontop of the original 3, just isn’t complicated in comparison to the large picture that is Disney. And here’s my general point regarding that, hopefully this is a little more clear.
You get 3 rides, that’s easy. When you go to Six Flags, Cedar Point, Disney, Universal, etc there are many people going to the park to see and experience these attractions. With that, comes crowd patterns, lines, etc. You could easily go into the park and ride every ride you want and wait in line for every ride, time permitting of course. And you can do that without any strategy and without any line cutting system in place.
Now let’s talk about the scenario of wanting to experience particular rides or attractions. If you are new, then it’s safe to say you have done some preliminary research to learn about said attractions (whether it’s talking to friends or reading about it online, etc). This means, you now have priorities in your head regarding your touring experience. And this means, if you want to experience your priorities then you have to strategize. Executing a good strategy requires a bit of insight into crowd levels, crowd touring patterns and some other logistics. Think, I want to ride X, crowds are lower at night so I will ride Z and Y during the day first and wait in those lines, knowing X will be shorter at night. This isn’t about Disney expertise or being on these boards with a lot of experience. It’s research into strategizing how to optimize your experience. That goes for everything in life, all the way down to planning what route you will take if you drive to work one traffic ridden morning. But those complexities that force you to strategize to create an optimal experience, is due to Disney’s park, the layout, the attractions, advertisements of those attractions, park hours, time of year you are going, is this tied to any events, crowd pattersn, etc etc. Disney World is massive. Is Disney World more complicated then any other parks around the world? Absolutely. There are 4 gates to huge theme parks, each unique with its own offering.
So yes, Disney requires more research to strategize. And this is what you and the poster I was originally responding to is talking about, in my opniob. Because fastpass is a system that sits ON TOP of that and allows you to enhance those strategies. But to say that fastpass is complicated or requires intricate knowledge of the system itself to utilize it isn’t because Fastpass is complicated. It isn’t. As I said, you pick three in one park and then pick more once you rode the original three. That isn’t complicated. Sure there are extra strategies on top of that to help you maximize your fastpass usage that maybe the average person doesn’t realize or Disney doesn’t advertise well on. Those aren’t loopholes though. But that also doesn’t mean the fastpass system is complicated and tilted towards those with huge amounts of experience. It means that the parks themselves are complicated and if you want an efficient touring strategy then you need to understand the parks, how complicated they can be and THEN how to use fastpass to try and make those complications easier (or harder depending on your Disney expertize level).
But to say that fastpass is complicated (or that it compared to the tax system in this country in that people can take advantage of it because it is so complicated) is still ridiculous and completely misses the point that Disney itself is the complication, and now the fastpass+ system that was created to try and MAKE those complications easier for the average guest.
I understand where you are coming from but I believe you and the original poster I responsed to are infusing Disney’s inherent complications with being so massive and offering so much (precovid at least) with fastpass+ which is in no way shape or form as complicated in concept or in practice. If you want to maximize it, then it requires you to research a bit more and figure out how others have maximized it. It’s a learning curve but it assumes the bigger learning curve that is Disney World itself, has already been figured out.
Once again, my overall point, fastpass+ isn’t complicated but Disney World itself is. And that’s the real problem that is being missed here but cannot be fixed. So people blame fastpass, I get that. But if you don’t like complicated, then why are people even bothering with Disney in the first place? But the concept of fastpass+ and the setup of it was not complicated at all in my opinion. It doesn’t require deep level Disney experience that MANY other aspects of Disney actually require in order to cross off those experiences on a list.
My Disney planning training put to good use.
