Today, I have info on making the most of your FastPass+ reservations, including a quick reference chart that you can save to use later.
I also have a quick tip to help you save room on your phone for vacation pics.
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These are notes from this episode. There’s much more info included in the audio so be sure to listen to the episode for a better explanation.
In this article (click for table of contents)
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Tips for making FastPass+ reservations
- Use FastPass+ only for attractions that require it. You can use my guides for all 4 parks to see which ones I suggest (and the graphic below).
- Consider not using FastPass+ for rides that offer a single rider line (Expedition Everest, Test Track and Rock N Roller Coaster)
- Use FastPass+ at attractions that take longer such as Enchanted Tales with Belle (see length of more attractions)
- Make use of Rider Switch
- Don’t use FastPass+ if the standby line is short
- Save FastPass+ for late morning or early afternoon
- You can park hop and use 3 FastPass+ reservations in 1 park and then hop to another park to get another FastPass+ using the kiosks in that park
Use this quick reference graphic to help remember the rides that are the best to use with FastPass+:
Quick tip of the day
Install the Dropbox app on your phone and use it to store your photos so you don’t run out of room during your trip.
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Do you have any questions or additional info about FastPass+? Feel free to share in the comments.
24 Comments
I’m torn between Fantasmic and Toy Story mania for my tier 1 fastpass + I’ll be there with my 3 year old. We go to Disneyland regularly so we can ride toy story mania when back home but we can’t see Fantasmic. In this case would you use your tier 1 FP+ on Fantasmic?
Why would you ride the single rider line?
Should you use a fastpass for “Celebrate the magic” parade? Help! I’m so confused and overwhelmed lol!
I just wanted to clarify…I noticed on TheDibb that Elsa and Anna were booked out beyond the 60 day reservation date i.e. 63 days out. So, I’m taking it that if you are staying at a resort for say 6 days, you can book all 6 days FP+ attractions for all parks 60 days out from the check-in date?
Yep. That’s correct.
Great! I knew you could book dining reservations for the length of your stay from your check in date (i.e. 180 days out + 10 days), but didnt realize you could do it for FP+ also, thank you for getting back. Great site by the way.
Depending on availability, and what your fastpasses are… you can move the times up after you’ve used the one before.
For example, we had a 11:10 FP for Peter Pan’s Flight, and the next FP was at 12:10… after we had gone through the second FP checkpoint, my husband jumped on the app and moved the next one up to 10:30 instead.
Obviously, this only works if there’s availability to do this and if the attractions are close. The other nice thing about this is that you can then get even more FPs later! I think the first day we did this, we ended up with 8 FPs for that one day. (We have a 2 year old and a 4 year old, so a LOT of the things we wanted to do had high availability. Over the ten days we were in the parks, I know we did Finding Nemo in Epcot 14 times, Pooh bear ride in MK 6, etc.) This might not help everyone, but I hope this tip helps someone!
I just had an online chat with Disney. They said the fastpass+ system is not tiered and I would be able to book, in advance on the same day, Fantasmic and Toy Story mania – both tier 1 above. I’m confused.
Haha. The online chat people crack me up as they’re so, so wrong most of the time. There are tiers and those are both Tier 1 so you’ll have to choose one.
Shannon, I just wanted to thank you SO much for this site! I’ve been following it for about 6 months while planning our first trip. We just got back and our family got to eat at all the restaurants we wanted to, see all the characters they wanted and ride every ride they wanted- and other than we only waited in one line for 20 min, we didnt have more than a five min wait for anything! We were never rushed and had a wonderful time because of all your tips and planning! Thank you so much!!!! 🙂
OMG!! Definitely FP+ the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. You can’t even ride it at rope drop and expect to get on in less than an hour. I have been tracking wait times and it looks like 90 to 105 min is the average at ROPE DROP!! Augh. Rumor has it, this is because they now pace the crowd on Main Street. So, about 300+ people make it to the ride around the same time.
Disney inflates the wait times most of the time though.
When I saw it, I thought it had to be wrong. I hope you’re right about the inflated times. I have never seen a wait time like that at rope drop, like EVER! LOL
We just rode the SDMT two days ago. We got to the park 30 min before opening and walked straight there. The sign said 110 minutes and there were a ton of people in front of us but we were done with the ride in only 20 min! So glad we decided to wait:-)
So we just got back from disney. We tracked our wait times to see how well they matched up with what disney had posted, both online and on sign. For a lot of the popular rides like mine train, (where we were unable to get FP) we waited 20 min beyond the posted time. The Winnie the poo ride was usually posted at 30 min we clocked our stand in line wait time at over an hour. This was mostly what we found at MK. The other parks we didn’t have any trouble. MK even on the days that were marked as low crowd days was far more crowded than any other park.
As far as I know, you can book all days of your trip when your fastpass window comes open similar to dining. That would make the most sense.
Great work on this Shannon!
Hi there!
Thank you so much for all that you do! I do have a quick question about fast pass that you may have answered already and I do apologize if you have. When making reservations is it like dining, you can make up to 10 days in advance? Or, do I have to stay up till midnight for seven days straight to make the reservations?
Thanks so much!
Jennifer
You can make them all in the one night.
This was great! Thank you! I am still bummed that you cannot use the app to make bonus FP+ reservations. As park hoppers, our options will be limited in the parks we plan to “hop” to later in the evening. It’s just not reasonable to send someone to a park just to secure FP+ reservations for later on. The upside, however, is that if we save lower priority rides for the evening, there may not be much of a wait anyway.
I do have a question – since we won’t be able to use the single rider option for Test Track (I am guessing my children won’t want to be by themselves, at 5 and 7 years old), would it be a viable option to ride Soarin’ at rope drop and then FP Test Track around 11:00 am or so?
We rode soarin at rope drop for a 15 min wait a few days ago.
I would recommend OneDrive better, it’s available in all mobile platforms and it offers 7Gb for free (more for a fee), it will upload full resolution images and back up the camera roll an any other files. It’s the Windows 8 default cloud storage and has clients for win7 and macOS. Also makes very easy to share those pictures later on the web.
This is great! My husband and I were just starting to try to figure this out. Thanks!
This chart is genius! I was just on your site last night with my kids trying to figure this out by park. I love that you now have it all in one spot. Thanks!!!
Thanks, Shannon!
Our 60 day FP+ reservation window is coming in 8 days! This came in very handy. Your site has been very helpful in planning our 1st WDW trip. I didn’t even know we had to “plan” when going to WDW to get to do some of the things I really want to do, but WDW Prep is one of the first planning guides I read and decided that I should plan. Thankfully, I found out about ADRs and FP+ and what to do to book them in time! I’m so excited about our upcoming trip!