Walt Disney World Epcot Discussion Thread

[larrygator]

I wonder if extending the ride path by using the old area in between the two stations allowed them add any new boats into the operation or increase the capacity in any way. I never really had much of a feel for the capacity of the old ride because they was never much of a line for it.

 

Good thing you didn't try to visit opening year when the wait times for Maelstrom were over 3 hours.

[CoasterFEV]

I wonder if extending the ride path by using the old area in between the two stations allowed them add any new boats into the operation or increase the capacity in any way. I never really had much of a feel for the capacity of the old ride because they was never much of a line for it.

 

I would assume the longer track length may allow the attraction to have one or two additional boats online during normal operation, however, the hourly capacity of the ride is, more than likely, identical to Maelstrom.

 

The challenge are the two track switches on the upper level of the ride that switch between forward/reverse motion - which are, for the most part, the same track switches from Maelstrom.

 

The hourly throughput of the attraction can't be increased any more than the speed of those two track switches - since both have a mechanical limit to the number of boats they can "process" each hour. Unless the engineers at Disney were able to make the track switches move faster, the THRC of Frozen would be exactly the same at Maelstrom.

[gerstlaueringvar]

Caught up on what's been going on at Epcot finally.

 

Soarin'-Gald the old pre show video and the queue line stayed! The preshow video in Shanghai is very nice but I still prefer the old one because makes more sense. Love the hidden Mickey at the end with Spaceship earth! I'm so jealous Epcot has a third theater because Shanghai Disney's Soarin' line moves painfully slow and DCA isn't that busy anyway.

 

Frozen- Wow this is a great dark ride! Would love to see it appearing around the world! Disney never disappoints at dark rides!

 

SDR Exhibition-God this really made me miss Shanghai Disneyland!

[A.J.]

For a big "celebration", the Ice Palace scenes seem so lonely. Other than that, I generally like how the ride turned out (putting aside my indifference towards Frozen itself).

[Jew]

Looks like a HUGE upgrade over Maelstrom. Can't wait to check it out.

[A.J.]

Apparently "checking it out" is going to be near-impossible for a while. From Screamscape: CLICK

 

While Disney announced to the world that they would open their new Frozen Ever After dark ride in Epcot on June 21st, things have not gone so well for the new attraction. Despite the fact that Disney chose to re-purpose the old existing Maelstrom flume ride attraction that was already in the Norway pavilion at Epcot, the ride has been suffering from a huge case of downtime. This alone caused the lines on the opening day to reach lengths of over 5 hours.

By reusing the old ride system I think Disney was looking for the attraction to be more reliable on opening day, but that has just not been the case. In addition to issues of downtime, the attraction also suffers from low-capacity problems, estimated to only be able to handle 800-1000 guests per hour at the best of times. In addition to Disney not trying to break it in slowly with any kind of soft-opening schedule ahead of the grand opening, they also made the mistake of making the attraction available on their FastPass+ reservation program, which has resulted in every FastPass ticket for the ride being already taken from now through to at least August.

This has caused another huge problem for the attraction, as I've had it reported to Screamscape from many guests that even when the ride is reported as being operational on the Walt Disney World app, by the time you get over to it, even if it hasn't broken down again, Disney Cast Members and Management are only allowing those with FastPasses into the queue, making the ride completely unavailable to guests coming to the park and willing to wait several hours in a stand-by queue. Of course they were not telling guests arriving at the park any of this, much to the dismay of anyone passing by the many billboards on the freeway claiming at the attraction was now open, only to pay for tickets and walk out to World Showcase only to be told that they were essentially out of luck from having any chance to ride the new attraction.

About the only good way I've heard of getting onto the ride without a FastPass is to be at the park as soon as it opens and run as fast as you can to get in the stand-by line before they close it off, but even that wont work is Epcot is the park having Magic Morning access for resort guests on the day you visit.

Obviously this is only based on reports, but if this is actually what's going on, it's pretty brutal. This may be one instance where FastPass Plus has turned out to be a bad idea.

[Morgan]

Surely the better option (if this is true) would be to remove it from Fastpass+ completely, and make it Standby only until everything is running smoothly. Yes you would annoy those who have already made reservations, but they'll be a lot more people that will be even more annoyed when they find out that they have no chance of riding it at all once they are there, not to mention the huge amount of disappointed children.

[Hilltopper39]

Apparently "checking it out" is going to be near-impossible for a while. From Screamscape: CLICK

 

While Disney announced to the world that they would open their new Frozen Ever After dark ride in Epcot on June 21st, things have not gone so well for the new attraction. Despite the fact that Disney chose to re-purpose the old existing Maelstrom flume ride attraction that was already in the Norway pavilion at Epcot, the ride has been suffering from a huge case of downtime. This alone caused the lines on the opening day to reach lengths of over 5 hours.

By reusing the old ride system I think Disney was looking for the attraction to be more reliable on opening day, but that has just not been the case. In addition to issues of downtime, the attraction also suffers from low-capacity problems, estimated to only be able to handle 800-1000 guests per hour at the best of times. In addition to Disney not trying to break it in slowly with any kind of soft-opening schedule ahead of the grand opening, they also made the mistake of making the attraction available on their FastPass+ reservation program, which has resulted in every FastPass ticket for the ride being already taken from now through to at least August.

This has caused another huge problem for the attraction, as I've had it reported to Screamscape from many guests that even when the ride is reported as being operational on the Walt Disney World app, by the time you get over to it, even if it hasn't broken down again, Disney Cast Members and Management are only allowing those with FastPasses into the queue, making the ride completely unavailable to guests coming to the park and willing to wait several hours in a stand-by queue. Of course they were not telling guests arriving at the park any of this, much to the dismay of anyone passing by the many billboards on the freeway claiming at the attraction was now open, only to pay for tickets and walk out to World Showcase only to be told that they were essentially out of luck from having any chance to ride the new attraction.

About the only good way I've heard of getting onto the ride without a FastPass is to be at the park as soon as it opens and run as fast as you can to get in the stand-by line before they close it off, but even that wont work is Epcot is the park having Magic Morning access for resort guests on the day you visit.

Obviously this is only based on reports, but if this is actually what's going on, it's pretty brutal. This may be one instance where FastPass Plus has turned out to be a bad idea.

 

Don't believe everything you read on the internet, I booked Fastpasses for it within the available 30 day window this morning.

[robbalvey]

Apparently "checking it out" is going to be near-impossible for a while. From Screamscape: CLICK

 

While Disney announced to the world that they would open their new Frozen Ever After dark ride in Epcot on June 21st, things have not gone so well for the new attraction. Despite the fact that Disney chose to re-purpose the old existing Maelstrom flume ride attraction that was already in the Norway pavilion at Epcot, the ride has been suffering from a huge case of downtime. This alone caused the lines on the opening day to reach lengths of over 5 hours.

By reusing the old ride system I think Disney was looking for the attraction to be more reliable on opening day, but that has just not been the case. In addition to issues of downtime, the attraction also suffers from low-capacity problems, estimated to only be able to handle 800-1000 guests per hour at the best of times. In addition to Disney not trying to break it in slowly with any kind of soft-opening schedule ahead of the grand opening, they also made the mistake of making the attraction available on their FastPass+ reservation program, which has resulted in every FastPass ticket for the ride being already taken from now through to at least August.

This has caused another huge problem for the attraction, as I've had it reported to Screamscape from many guests that even when the ride is reported as being operational on the Walt Disney World app, by the time you get over to it, even if it hasn't broken down again, Disney Cast Members and Management are only allowing those with FastPasses into the queue, making the ride completely unavailable to guests coming to the park and willing to wait several hours in a stand-by queue. Of course they were not telling guests arriving at the park any of this, much to the dismay of anyone passing by the many billboards on the freeway claiming at the attraction was now open, only to pay for tickets and walk out to World Showcase only to be told that they were essentially out of luck from having any chance to ride the new attraction.

About the only good way I've heard of getting onto the ride without a FastPass is to be at the park as soon as it opens and run as fast as you can to get in the stand-by line before they close it off, but even that wont work is Epcot is the park having Magic Morning access for resort guests on the day you visit.

Obviously this is only based on reports, but if this is actually what's going on, it's pretty brutal. This may be one instance where FastPass Plus has turned out to be a bad idea.

 

Don't believe everything you read on the internet, I booked Fastpasses for it within the available 30 day window this morning.

 

Exactly! I just went into the FP+ system and while it took a couple of refreshes, I got a Frozen ride FP for later this week to show up no problem. I think Lance has always been a bit anti-Disney so his "report" doesnt surprise me.

[A.J.]

That's fair then. In hindsight I probably should have thought to do some snooping myself since I, well, live down here now.

[Hilltopper39]

Yeah, I totally understand how the Fastpass+ system can be a bit "annoying" to some people and you do have to refresh and check back periodically for some of the really high demand attractions, but generally speaking I've almost always been able to get passes for whatever I want on the days I'm going with a little bit of planning. I've even gotten 7 Dwarves Mine Train and Ana Elsa meet n greet as my 4th or 5th pass in the park the day of. I don't have a clue as to the exact formula Disney uses to distribute the passes through the system but I think they're smart enough to not dump all X number of passes per hour for every attraction 60 days in advance so that they are all gone when day guests can make their reservations, again I don't know but based on my usage experience I think they space out distributing the allocation over time even up to the day of. The last thing they want is for millions of people to absolutely hate using the system they spent a billion dollars on.

[PeoplemoverMatt]

It's a capacity and reliability problem, plus overwhelming demand that no system could ever hope to flawlessly handle.

 

So of course FastPass+ gets blamed.

[hydra]

Yeh, like what Robb said, I have been able to get 2 Fast Passes since it opened a week ago. Just keep refreshing.

[gerstlaueringvar]

I don't think Disney is that disorganized. Plus since when did ScreamScape became a reliable source of info? Or ever was for a minute...

[ahecht]

I don't know why Disney felt that the Little Mermaid deserved a 2000 person/hour omnimover attraction, but the highest grossing animated film of all time only got a 900-1000 person/hour ride.

 

Say what you will about Screamscape, the fact is that only 10,000-12,000 people per day will be able to ride even if it never breaks down, which is only 1/3 of the 33,000 people that visit Epcot on an average day (and given that it's the middle of summer vacation, I'd imagine that the next few months are going to see higher than average attendance).

[DirkFunk]

I don't know why Disney felt that the Little Mermaid deserved a 2000 person/hour omnimover attraction, but the highest grossing animated film of all time only got a 900-1000 person/hour ride.

 

Say what you will about Screamscape, the fact is that only 10,000-12,000 people per day will be able to ride even if it never breaks down, which is only 1/3 of the 33,000 people that visit Epcot on an average day (and given that it's the middle of summer vacation, I'd imagine that the next few months are going to see higher than average attendance).

 

Magic Kingdom did 19 million guests last year - that's 52,000+ a day. How many rides there have actual capacity of over 3500 an hour necessary to get through each of them in a 14 hour operating day? Not theoretical; actual capacity.

[Six Flags Haiti]

Do we have a CM that can confirm 1000/hr? The boats hold 16 so that would mean a dispatch of like 58 seconds, seems lengthy for a ride with no restraints, even with the "turntable". I haven't been able to find an uncut video of the loading process. I would have guessed the ride would be able to do 100-120 dispatches an hour at 16 guests, so like 1,600-1,900.

[Hilltopper39]

For whatever it's worth Maelstrom's old Wikipedia page lists the capacity at 1000 per hour. Whatever the actual capacity is it's not going to be enough to keep up with the demand on crowded days, especially while it is still new. On the bright side it looks like the standby line for Soarin and Test Track have been a lot shorter over the past week.

[jynx242]

It's great to see this ride being so popular and I'm sure Disney has plans to help with crowd flow. It isn't like the massive popularity is a surprise.

 

I'm also very glad to see how they have integrated the characters and movies into the Norway pavilion without taking away from the actual Norway theme - it is very nicely and unobtrusively done.

 

I'll get over there to check it out sometime - but am in no rush as the opening few weeks crowd will probably take away from the experience for me

[Six Flags Haiti]

For whatever it's worth Maelstrom's old Wikipedia page lists the capacity at 1000 per hour. Whatever the actual capacity is it's not going to be enough to keep up with the demand on crowded days, especially while it is still new. On the bright side it looks like the standby line for Soarin and Test Track have been a lot shorter over the past week.

 

Sure, you don't build a church for Easter Sunday. It just seems like over the last 3 years the WDW Resort has been VERY capacity focused, adding sims or tracks on popular rides, and you would assume the engineers would have done what they could to get it to a more respectable capacity in general.

[Hilltopper39]

Sure, you don't build a church for Easter Sunday.

 

You're clearly not from the South.....

[robbalvey]

I don't know why Disney felt that the Little Mermaid deserved a 2000 person/hour omnimover attraction, but the highest grossing animated film of all time only got a 900-1000 person/hour ride.

Where are we getting this 900-1000 person/hour ride calculation? Screamscape? I really would question that number. It's pretty rare to see ANY Disney boat-based attraction getting less than 1,400 - 1,800 per hour. The boats have four rows and they can hold 4-5 guests per row. They seem to be dispatching about every 35-40 seconds. So does that add up to only 900-1000? I don't think that number is accurate.

[BotanicalStig]

^I believe at 16 guests per dispatch, every 40 seconds, adds up to 1,440 guests per hour.

[A.J.]

It's pretty complicated. I doubt it actually runs at 1,440 because of every real-world factor known to man, but I don't believe Disney would willingly plonk one of their most popular IPs of the decade onto a low-capacity attraction. From what I understand, the new configuration of the station definitely helps to keep things moving.

[pianojohn]

Just rode Frozen today.

 

Some observations regarding capacity:

 

The boats have 4 rows. The MOST people I saw per row was three adults. I suppose you could have 2 adults and 2 children, but that is rare.

 

The boat I rode in had only 6 people in it. 2 in the 1st 2 rows and 1 in the last 2 rows. This is a BIG reason why the lines are so long. The cast members need to fill every single boat as full as possible. They just loaded people and never bothered to ask for groups of 2 or single riders. If they really want to increase capacity, they need to fill the boats.

 

Single rider line. It works for Test Track and Radiator Springs Racers. It could work for Frozen too.