Planning Those FP+ Passes..

Clarify for me, anyone in the know, the hopper they are referring to is NOT going to added free, right? It will be the usual add on price?
We have found that we usually waste more time on the bus going between parks to actually benefit, so we just plan to be in one park and possible a resort TS that evening. It's a little less.....well, rushed.

When they mention park hopping they are saying that if you have already purchased the park hopper option you can utilize the FP+ with it. So you could make a FP+ at MK for the morning and use your other two at EP in the evening (which you currently can't do with the FP+ system). You still have to purchase the park hopper option in order to park hop.

Resurrecting this old topic..Now that changes have been made at DHS and Epcot..Does anyone know where the best site is to check out the Tier system, as for booking FP + on my 60 day..I believe at Epcot the character spot and Maelstrom have moved from a tier 1 to a tier 2..and Living the Land has went from 1 to 2..Likewise at DHS where The Great Movie Ride is now a tier 1 and TOT is now a tier 2...

Another quick question..Can I book twice for Star Tours ( tier 2 ) in one day..Example..10.00am and 12.00 noon.?

Touringplans.com has them up to date I believe! And unfortunately you cannot make FP+ For the same ride twice with your initial 3 choices. However, when you're at the park and have done your 3 pre-chosen FPs, you can choose Star Tours again

Cheers Katie..

TOT has always been a tier 2 attraction.

I tried there and they keep trying to offer me a deal, so I went to a different site. But once you're 60 days is here, you can see them all on the My Disney Experience site. Seems silly to me that you can't see their tiering there until then....

Well, I have just had an interesting time making FastPasses for our November trip. Our FP+ window opened nearly three weeks ago, before we left for our Saratoga Springs stay. But we have friends coming along in November and I needed to (1) get them to make My Disney Experience accounts, (2) get them to link their 6-day passes to their accounts, (3) get the person whose DVC points we're using in November to add our two friends to our Animal Kingdom Lodge reservation, and (4) send invitations to the friends to link our MDE accounts so I can make FastPasses ASAP for all four of us. What with planning and prepping for the September vacation, the first day of the FP+ window for the November trip came and went without my doing a darn thing about any of it.

But now that hubby and I have returned from Saratoga Springs, we have everything set up so the WDW folks know there will be four of us at AKL and all our accounts and tickets are linked up. Yesterday evening I phoned the friends and we sat on the phone for a good hour going over what attractions are available, what they would like to do most, and then synchronizing everything. This was extra fun because the guys want to do all the thrill rides, while we gals want to avoid most of them. So we have a day at Animal Kingdom park when I need to arrive before everyone else to do my solo Kilmanjaro Safaris FP. Then we all do Finding Nemo: The Musical, then everyone but me rides Expedition Everest (I didn't put my Kilimanjaro FP in this window because they would be on and off Everest in the time I would need to walk back to Kilimanjaro). After a lunch break we all do Festival of the Lion King. Fortunately, the shows have specific times, so we can all FastPass our way into both shows at the exact same times.

Here is where it gets interesting. Our first day at Epcot everyone else is going to ride Mission: Space and Soarin', which I can't handle. So at 10:30 the others have their Mission: Space FP window open and at the same time I have a FP for Test Track. Then we'll graze the Food and Wine Festival booth for lunch. And then timing gets all screwy. They'll do Soarin' with a FP window starting at 2:30, while I have FP for Turtle Talk with Crush starting at 2:40. Then they have The Seas with Nemo starting at 3:40, but even though I'll ALREADY BE IN THE DARNED SEAS BUILDING and my FP window for Crush will be over by 3:40, I could not get a FP window for that attraction until 3:55, meaning the four of us together have only a 45-minute window in which to enter the ride. (I also tried getting them a FP window starting at 3:55, but that time wasn't available for them.) Same problem later in the week at the Magic Kingdom: the guys are going to ride all three mountains, finishing up with Splash; we gals are going to do Peter Pan's Flight and Monsters, Inc. and then finish with Splash Mountain. And once again, even though all our FP windows will be over by then, we cannot get the exact same window for Splash Mountain and have roughly a 40-minute window during which all four of us can enter the FP queue. At Hollywood Studios, the guys and gals aren't doing any of the same attractions, and yet I can't get the same FP windows for our different schedules so we'll at least be on the same schedule. All told, I think that on four of our six full days at WDW parks our FP schedules don't synch.

Another conundrum: making FPs at Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom wasn't all that difficult; I was able to find plenty of stuff for all of us to do, either separately or together. But at Epcot and Hollywood Studios, with the tiered system they have at those parks, it was difficult. Of course everyone really wanted to do Test Track AND Soarin' (except me for that one) AND Living with the Land, but they're all Tier 1 attractions. (Come on, Living with the Land is Tier 1? We have never even needed FP for that attraction.) So we'd get Test Track or Soarin' and then look at what was left and try to find something everyone wanted to do. What with the Food and Wine Festival, we've got three days at Epcot with three sets of FPs. We didn't want a lot of duplication in our FP choices and didn't want to bother with some attractions at all (once was enough for Captain EO, and the guy in the couple we're traveling with isn't interested in most of the cartoony attractions). By the third day of Epcot FastPasses, I found myself making throw-away FPs we have no intention of using just so we could use up our three initial FPs quickly and maybe get back on Test Track or Soarin' later in the day. This cannot be what the designers of the FastPass+ system had in mind.

On the positive side, this was my first attempt at making different sets of FastPasses for the same group of people, and it actually wasn't difficult aside from the timing issues. For each day we were planning to split up, I'd do FPs for the other two or three in our group first, then I'd make them for myself or for myself and the other gal in our group. Of course the initial three or four options presented weren't synched at all, so once I'd made the initial choices I went into one set of FPs and then the other and tweaked them until I had our schedules as close to the same as I could get them. On future trips with just hubby and me, he will not be getting to ride Tower of Terror using my MagicBand any longer - while he's doing ToT I will be off doing, I don't know, SOMETHING else. Beauty and the Beast, the Little Mermaid, whatever.

Woah! Credit for major organisational skills