Quick Glance Showtimes Now in Your Touring Plan
One of the great things you can do with a personalized touring plan is add scheduled shows to your plan steps. When you optimize, we figure out which showtime is best for your schedule, and put the step in the right spot for you – nice and easy! However, there are times when you need to know what other options are available. When using our new Evaluate feature, for example, it’s helpful to know if there’s a 10pm showing of Fantasmic, or if you need to plan around an earlier show.
We’ve made that process a lot easier – now when you add a show with scheduled showtimes to your personalized plan, all the showtimes for your plan’s date are listed in the step. If Disney hasn’t put out the official showtimes for your plan’s date yet, we’ll give you our predicted showtimes, and update them automatically as more information becomes available.
This feature has also been added to Lines – so now you can easily see alternate showtimes for the shows in your plan, without having to leave the plan page. (A big help if your cell service provider is having trouble keeping up with the park crowds!)
What do you think of this new feature? Let us know in the comments – we love hearing from you!
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Love the added showtimes. Really will help if we get behind to plan ahead. I am new to these optimized plans. Having studied the generic plans and book information as well as looking at the cheat sheets. When I create a plan it often has me getting a FASTPASS for example Kilm Safari at 11:30 or even later in the afternoon. I thought that I read that these would run out by noon. I thought that you needed to get these first thing. The cheat sheets also show that late afternoons and evenings are not good for any headliners. Does this mean even with a FASTPASS? What am I doing wrong. Trying to do a late 10am arrival at Animal Kingdom similar to the one in the book with small children.
I LOVE this feature!!! Now if only you guys could add character meet and greets like the step sisters, fairy godmother, peter pan, mulan, etc, I would never have to leave the page when planning! (I spend a lot of time going back and forth between touringplans.com and kennythepirate.com)
But the showtime feature is awesome, thanks for putting so much work into this!
Sarah — can I ask a question? This seems like a good topic to piggy back on. We aren’t going to WDW till next summer, but being one of your more OCD fans, I am already playing with touring plans. Looking at the ones in the back of the Guides and removing stuff we won’t do…. We will have one day in the MK, for example — so we’ll skip stuff like Tom Sawyer Island, Swiss Family Treehouse, Hall of Pres., Country Bears, Dumbo, Pooh — any girlie stuff will be skipped. Originally I thought I’d just stick with the plan as is, but just skip stuff and insert a 4 hour midday break. (This ends up having us in Tomorrowland in the afternoon, for Monsters Inc. Comedy Club, Peoplemover, Carousel of Progress.) But when I use that plan and click evaluate and optimize, it moves around a lot of stuff.
Should I go with the optimized version — will it really be a lot better? Or just use a “canned” plan, skipping stuff we don’t want to do?
And – in answer to the main question, YES — I love the option of adding shows into the plans!
Thanks for all you do! (And PS — I’d love to read an article on fun stuff to do on “off” days — not at the parks — we’ll be staying at the WL villas and husband wants a day and a half to relax. It would be great to read some ideas from the experts!)
Hi and thanks for using the plans. 🙂 The premium plans give a great general idea meant for any day that you’re wanting to do at least most of the attractions on the plan.
However, we do recommend optimizing, the reason being that doing that takes into account the expected wait times throughout the specific day that you’ll be in the park. If you’re wanting to skip several attractions and possibly add some others, this is particularly useful, because all attractions are not alike in how their queues build up, and we have separate statistical models for each attraction which can help you see how to best go about YOUR plan to do the things that matter most to you!
Hope that helps!
PS I love WL! There are a ton of activities there and things to see – they’ll give you a schedule when you check in. I just like wandering around the main building and the trails, exploring!
I love this feature but how do you delete something you don’t want to do?
Hi Alyson, if you’re on the main website just click the “X” button next to the “Edit” button on the step you want to delete. In Lines on your phone, click on the “remove step” link at the bottom of the step you want to delete.
This sounds like a great feature! I just completed a trip to WDW and I also always wrote the showtimes in the note section. I also noticed that when I optimized Epcot TP sum of all thrills was moved to 8:30 PM and innoventions closes at 7 PM
We don’t have attraction-specific closing times available in the system yet (though we do have a few measures in place for some of the popular attractions) – but that is something we’re working on right now, and expect to launch very soon. 🙂
Great. I also noticed that sometimes after I had acquired a fastpass, hit step done and entered in my return time if I hit optimize again sometimes it would forget that I had the fastpass and optimize with stand by wait time. This didn’t happen every time and it is highly possible I was doing something incorrectly!
Hm, I haven’t seen that happen – if you do end up seeing it again, please let me know which plan it is (send me the url if you can) and I’ll check it out. Thanks!
I love this feature. I am an obsessive planner and I always write showtimes into my plans. This is fantastic!
Fantastic, I love it, really helpful
LOVE the feature! I also had started entering show times in the notes and I’m so glad I don’t have to any more! But this highlights something I have been seeing when evaluating the plans. On 8/24 in AK, it has me arriving at FotLK at 3:57 and apparently seeing the show with no waiting. But the show times say shows are at 3:30 and 4:30, so something doesn’t look right. I have not recently optimized the plan, but I did Evaluate it one more time just to make sure of my numbers. http://touringplans.com/plans/167327
Hi Jennifer, looks like the optimizer is returning an error saying evaluating those steps in that order means you’ll always be late for FotLK – that’s why it’s returning odd numbers there. If you want to stick to evaluating, try moving it a step or two in either direction to get a better result – or just optimize and the engine will tell you what it thinks will work best for order.
If you’re still having problems with this, go ahead and email me at sarah at touringplans.com and I’ll run it through the engine a few times and come up with a good viable plan you can work from. Thanks!
Sarah
Shouldn’t the optimizer show some sort of message when that happens? Either a note on the step or at the top of the plan?
We did originally have one, but users were confused by it, so we took it off for now. I’m looking at a better way to present that information so it makes more sense.
I figured it out; forgot to input a time for our meal.
I just tried making plans for our AK day. I have us starting at 9 am and ending at 3 pm, but the optimize feature has us eating lunch at 9 pm. Animal Kingdom closes at 7pm that day.
I added the show times as notes too. This is a great feature.
The correct show times showed up in all my current touring plans. Now I can delete all the show times I had added as notes 🙂 Thanks. Love it.
I have not tried out the feature yet but it sounds great! Hopefully if there are any kinks to work out they will be fixed before my next WDW visit 🙂
I thought this was a very cool feature, so I just tried it out. I found two problems:
1) The showtimes are listed in PT (for example, FotLK starts at 7:00am with a final showing at 2:45pm)
2) You showtimes and Disney’s showtimes don’t match. For example, Disney has released it’s showtimes on its website for August, but they aren’t the same as yours. FotLK has a 10:30am showing, for example, according to Disney’s official website, but you still have it as 10:00am.
Hi Meredith,
Can you give me the url of the plan you’re seeing this on? What date are you planning for? I just looked at several plans and have been unable to see a place where the time zones are wrong, and it looks to me like Festival of the Lion King is listed at 10:30am correctly. I’ll be happy to take a look and correct it if there’s a bug! Thanks!
Sarah
Hey Meredith, I just took a look at the AK plans you had. I don’t see any issues with times being in the wrong zone, but it looks like we did miss FotLK that day – I corrected that. Let me know if you are still seeing a zone issue where I can find that to correct it.
Thanks!
Sarah
Thanks, Sarah. So weird—the times are showing up correctly now. Looks great!