Magical Kingdoms Disney Blog

The height of Summer in Orlando is REALLY hot and air conditioning can only take you so far. Hitting Fantasyland with one and half hour queues for Peter Pan is a demoralizing and frustrating experience. There aren’t many things sadder to see at WDW than parents bustling children away from a ride or attraction because the queue is “too long”. But it doesn’t have to be a bad experience, relax, join the queue and learn to embrace it. Queueing at Walt Disney World is great, the attention to detail and entirety of the story that is put into every ride, most often begins with the queue. However, if you do want to avoid the queue there are two main tactics, timing and the FASTPASS system.

Fastpass is the easiest to master, not available for every ride but for the majority of the most popular rides it is like a virtual queueing system. Outside the Fastpass rides are separate (and thankfully) shorter queues. You take your park tickets (paper or key to the world cards) and put them into the Fastpass machine, this them issues you with a card ticket for that ride with a time slot printed on it. You can then go off and do something else and then return to the ride within the time slot and join a separate Fastpass queue, which has priority entry over the regular (standby) queue.  The card also tells you when you can get your next Fastpass (normally an hour later).  You can only hold one Fastpass for any one ride at a time and unless all of the wait times are massive it is rare to have more than two different Fastpasses at once.  Sometimes getting a Fastpass for a ride will even give you a bonus Fastpass for a different attraction. The only real disadvantage is that the Fastpass queues are not as long as the full of the story – because you are not going to spend as much time in them – and so not always as fun.

The other way to avoid queues is timing, this can be timing your entire visit, timing which park you go to and even timing the rides.  Timing the visit is about time of year – if you don’t like queues avoid the major holidays, spring break and holiday season between Thanksgiving and Christmas are probably the busiest times of year. Summer is busy but there are fewer locals so you can be lucky.  Avoid national holidays, but weeks surrounding them can be good times to visit, one of my favourite times to go is mid-late February – it is warm but not too hot and other than Presidents’ day weekend the parks are relatively quiet (off season is also cheaper and there can be some good offers).  To time the parks look up Extra Magic hours, either before you go (online), when you check in to your resort or pick up a sheet at the parks at the start of your trip.  The parks with Extra Magic hours will be the busiest – so if the Magic Kingdom has Extra Magic hours in the evening go early in the morning and then after lunch head to a different park, if a park has morning Extra Magic hours then the opposite – start somewhere else and come in the afternoon/evening.  Timing rides depends on their popularity, and time of day but the best thing to do is work out which two big rides you just can’t miss go straight there first thing in the morning Fastpass one (if available) and join the queue for the other.  By mid-morning you will have bagged two brilliant rides and set yourself in a brilliant mood for the rest of the day.

Another good way to avoid queues is to make advanced dining reservations (ADRs), you can make these up to 90 days in advance for most of the table service restaurants around the parks and resorts.  To do this call 1-407-WDW-DINE (1-407-939-346) or Disney have recently introduced online booking (currently US only as far as I can tell).  If you have a booked through a specialized Disney Travel Agent they will be able to help make bookings for you, and use a slightly different system so it is worth asking.  But you can also make reservations during your trip – go to Guest Services in the park, in the morning when you arrive to see if you can get a dining reservation for a particular restaurant.  You might still have to queue if the restaurant is busy and it isn’t like a regular reservation with a time slot but it gives you priority seating for that time, so waiting will be reduced.  If you want to do Cinderella’s Royal Table make an ADR when the phone lines open 90 days before your trip.

As a big Disney World geek the queue is part of the experience, I love the themes and stories for the rides and also taking the time to stop and look around. Another favourite past time in queues, which is an excellent way to keep kids occupied, is finding hidden Mickeys – a secret image of Mickey’s head made up of part of the scenery or props, etc. There are official lists of hidden Mickeys on the web and also an excellent pocket-sized guide book. But you can make it up on your own and once you get started it is almost impossible to stop. If you’re anything like me you’ll still be spotting hidden Mickeys when you are home from your trip (and I still am).

Queue early for the Backlot Tour in Hollywood Studios and look enthusiastic – you might be lucky enough to get picked to be in the show at the start of the tour.  If you are with some people get them to video it though because the short loop of video is wiped when it finishes so you don’t get to see yourself.  Also watch out for queue tags, Disney check queue times by actually timing people in the queue – they give someone a tag card at the back of the queue and you hand this to a cast member just before you board your ride vehicle, so they know exactly how long you have been queueing.  In the real world nobody likes to queue and I would be an exception if I said that I did but, like everything else, queueing at Walt Disney World is that bit more magical experience and doesn’t need to be avoided.

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