EXCLUSIVE: Customizable Epic Universe Touring Plans
Summary: Planning a visit to Universal Orlando’s new Epic Universe? Good news!
Today we’re making available to subscribers two one-day, customizable touring plans for Universal Orlando’s new Epic Universe theme park:
- Epic Universe One-Day Touring Plan with Early Park Admission
- Epic Universe One-Day Touring Plan without Early Park Admission
These plans are fully customizable to your specific travel plans. Make whatever changes you want, then run it through our touring plan optimizer software to get the most efficient, step-by-step itinerary possible.
Key Strategy Highlights:
- Use your Early Park Admission advantage for Mario Kart and Mine-Cart Madness before the crowds hit
- Start at Isle of Berk if you’re not using Early Park Admission
- Visiting Monsters Unchained in the late afternoon might help lower your waits
Epic Universe Touring Plans
TouringPlans subscribers will note that both Epic Universe touring plans are customizable and optimizable. Customization options include the specific day of your visit, the time you want to start and end your visit, how fast you typically walk, and whether you’re like to minimize walking, waiting in line, or a balance of both.
Both plans can also be optimized by adding (or subtracting) attractions, and adding in meals or breaks.
Our touring plan software will number-crunch the billions and billions of options for your day to produce a step-by-step touring plan that gets you to everything you want as efficiently as possible.
Both plans contain all 13 of Epic Universe’s rides and shows:
- Constellation Carousel
- Curse of the Werewolf
- Dragon Racer’s Rally
- Fyre Drill
- Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry
- Hiccup’s Wing Gliders
- Le Cirque Arcanus (show)
- Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge
- Mine-Cart Madness
- Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment
- Stardust Racers
- The Untrainable Dragon (show)
- Yoshi’s Adventure
plus these character greetings:
The plans also contain breaks for lunch and dinner. Other character greetings, activities such as Viking Training Camp and the Bowser Jr. Challenge, and single-rider options are also available for your customized touring plans.
We expect Epic Universe to perform a nightly show around The Cosmos Fountain. We’ll add that once we know the show schedule and duration.
There’s no “one size fits all” touring plan for Epic Universe. That’s one of the reasons why we wrote our touring plan software. Your Epic Touring plan will depend on the attractions you select, the time you get to the park, and how fast you want to walk, among other things.
That said, there are some common things we’ve seen in building and testing these plans over the last couple of months. The observations and tips below will help you as you build your own custom Epic Universe touring plan. When you’re in Epic Universe, use our TouringPlans Lines app (iPhone / Android) to get real-time updates on wait times, ride outages, and touring plans.
Touring Plan Assumptions
Our release of the Epic Universe Crowd Calendar earlier this week included a number of assumptions about how Epic Universe is going to operate once it’s open officially. Our touring plans for Epic also make some assumptions about how crowds and attractions are going to behave:
- Hundreds of guests – perhaps more – using Early Park Admission to spend some of that early entry time lining up at the Dark Universe portal for Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment to open.
- Even more guests will do the same thing for Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry once that changes from Virtual Queues to Standby lines.
In the meantime, technical issues and low ride capacity at Harry Potter and the Battle at the Ministry will add a substantial wait to guests using Virtual Queues.
New “Time Window” Feature for Fyre Drill and Other Wet Rides
Our initial Epic Universe touring plans placed the get-wet boat ride Fyre Drill early in the morning as part of your visit to the How to Train Your Dragon – Isle of Berk portal. Early feedback and testing led us to add a “time window” feature to our touring plan software. This time window feature allows you to specify the time of day you’d like to experience the attraction:
We’ll roll that feature out to water-based rides in other parks over the next few weeks.
Epic Universe Touring Strategy for Mornings
Beginning May 23, Epic Universe will open an hour early for Universal Orlando resort guests using Early Park Admission.
The benefit of Early Park Admission is that the park is empty when it starts. Those are, naturally, the shortest lines of the day. Our touring plan software’s analysis of wait times seems to favor using Early Park Admission for you to see popular attractions, especially those with relatively low capacity.
Epic Universe has attractions in Super Nintendo World open for Early Park Admission, along with Stardust Racers in Celestial Park:
Yoshi’s Adventure, in Super Nintendo World, is a slow-moving ride designed for children. During previews, wait times at Yoshi’s Adventure never approached the high numbers of the other attractions. And Stardust Racers, in Celestial Park, has an enormous hourly rider capacity.
Our Epic Universe touring plan with Early Park Admission starts in Super Nintendo World with Mario Kart: Bowser’s Challenge and Mine-Cart Madness as the first two steps. Based on what we know about Stardust and Yoshi’s, that seems to make the most sense.
It should be possible to see those two attractions during Early Park Admission and still have enough time to line up at the portal entrance for Isle of Berk. That makes sense, since we’re assuming that hundreds of people will use their early entry just to line up for Monsters Unchained (and, eventually, Ministry of Magic).
Getting in line behind those hundreds of guests means you’re giving up visiting Isle of Berk at opening, when nobody’s around. That’s not a great strategy for minimizing your waits in line.
Guests not using Early Park Admission should also start at Isle of Berk for the same reason.
Epic Universe Touring Plans for Late Morning and Beyond
Our two new Epic touring plans are good templates for you to follow, even if you don’t want to use computer optimization. For example, the touring plan software seems to suggest Super Nintendo World and Isle of Berk pretty consistently as the first two lands of the day. So that seems to be good advice regardless of what you want to see.
Likewise, the software seems to suggest Epic Universe’s two indoor shows, Circus Arcanus and How to Train Your Dragon, sometime between late morning and early afternoon.
Character greetings, lunch, and high-capacity rides like Stardust Racers are often placed around this time too. Speaking from experience, I’d ride Stardust Racers before lunch rather than after.
From late morning on, the order of your touring plan steps is influenced by the walking speed you select during the optimization process, and your preferences for walking versus waiting in line.
The Best Time to Ride Monsters Unchained
One strategy that the software seems to embrace regardless of walking speed is visiting Monsters Unchained: The Frankenstein Experiment in the late afternoon or early evening.
Wait times here were very low throughout Epic’s preview period. That suggests that guests who arrived early had done everything available by that time and decided to head home. That seems like a safe bet for now as well.
How are you customizing your Epic Universe touring plans? Let us know in the comments below!
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