New “Ride at Night” Option for Kilimanjaro Safaris Touring Plans
Today we launched a new “ride at night” feature for our computer-optimized touring plans. The “ride at night” setting is designed for attractions that have a significantly different nighttime experience, such as the Animal Kingdom’s Kilimanjaro Safaris.
When your touring plan includes one of these attractions, click “edit” on that step to specify the time of day you’d like to ride:
The optimizer will place the “ride at night” attractions so that you experience them after sunset in Orlando, on the day of your visit. (The optimizer now calculates the sunset time in Orlando for every day of the year, too.)
Kilimanjaro Safaris is the first attraction to have this “ride at night” feature on the touring plans. If this feature proves useful, we can add it to other attractions such as Big Thunder Mountain Railroad and Jungle Cruise – anything that seems better after dark.
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I would love to see Jedi Training added to this, along with the correct timing for participants (arriving 30 min early).
I agree with others about the pin feature- or for starters so you can reuse what you’ve already built- a ride in afternoon feature. Plans like to schedule Kali River Rapids at 10am, meaning the rest of the day I’m walking around drenched and cranky.
Please add this or an ability to pin a ride or two. Also, don’t forget Disneyland while you do this. Even the Haunted Mansions feels better at night even thought its just the queue. It would be awesome to have that flexibility other than just the “don’t touch my plan” button.
Be aware that sunset does not correspond with “night”. It is not dark at sunset. What you probably want to be calculating is either civil (still kinda bright, sun at an altitude of -6 degrees) or nautical (can no longer distinguish the horizon, pretty dark, sun at an altitude of -12 degrees) twilight. If it were me, I’d calculate a time halfway between the two (sun at -9 degrees) so that it’s darker than civil twilight but features can still be distinguished.
As an example, sunset today is at 7:47pm in Bay Lake, Fl. However, civil twilight isn’t until 8:11pm, and nautical twilight isn’t until 8:39pm, a full 52 minutes after sunset.
I still think a “pin” option for steps in the touring plans would be the greatest addition. It would be nice to “pin” Kali or Splash Mountain in the afternoon and let the plan form around that.
I completely agree! I often know for one reason or another that I MUST do an attraction at a certain time, but I don’t really care what comes before or after. Being able to “pin,” say, Jungle Cruise for 3pm would save me from hours of manually trying to “set” a time. I usually end up creating 3 plans: one for before the attraction in question, one that is just that attraction (with filler I ignore because you can’t just have one attraction), and one for after the attraction. It’s doable, but the user experience is certainly flawed.
Regular folks? I thought only exceptionally intelligent people used TouringPlans.
I dunno. They let me in. 😉
These are all good ideas. Let’s try them, a couple at a time, to see how regular folks adapt to the new options.
CHANGE??!?????
Very cool new feature, thanks. I’ve done this manually in the past with BTMRR at DL. Checking sundown times and manually adjusting my touring plan accordingly to get that after dark experience.
Great feature, and great ride suggestions from the commenters above!
Test Track might be another candidate, although it seems to close down so often that it’s hubris to try to choose a time of day to ride it.
Expedition Everest, too, assuming nighttime at AK is here to stay?
Living with the Land would be an example of a good ride to select the “Before Sunset” feature. The experience is definitely different after dark–it’s measurably worse.
Dumbo and the Carrousel look mighty cool with the lights on, but the kidlets probably don’t care one way or the other, and might be done in for the day by nightfall anyway.
Is there a list of the attractions that currently have the “Ride at Night” option?
Splash Mountain would make that list for me…
Yes! Love this! People Mover, Jungle Cruise and Tower of Terror, please!
Seven Dwarfs Mine Train seems to be made for this feature. I think it is much better at night.