Are there usually more people arriving early on 9am openings?

[disneyholic family]

When we're at home, DW and I get up at 4am, so I can assure you when on vacation we have zero desire to get up extra early and stand outside of the gates for an hour. Therefore, we don't do "rope drop" the way a lot of people do. If the park opens at 9am...which it usually does...we show up at 9:15am, maybe 9:05am on a good day. With only a small handful of exceptions, my opinion is that showing up extra early gives very little advantage to showing up right at open time. Yes, for FOP my understanding is that you want to show up early (we didn't, see my first sentence above...and we lucked into a FP+). Same with Na'vi, though FP+ are becoming increasingly easy to get for that. 7DMT and TT are good rides to show up at park open for too, though I don't think you need to be extra early for those.

For FEA, you definitely do not need to show up at the gates early. For the first 90+ minutes, the line will be short, you can get on standby no problem.

that was very helpful thanks!
yes, we get up early every day of the week, so doing the crack of dawn thing at WDW is less than enticing...
.
.

 

[KimBean]

My favorite rope drop story:

I had a co-worker recently telling me about her trip to Disney World. They seemed to be pretty good planners and tried to maximize their time the best they could.

She was very excited to tell me about her experience riding Midway Mania without a Fast Pass. The got up really early, got to the gates about 45 minutes before they opened and waited in a pretty large crowd. Then they hurried as fast as they could to the ride and the wait was *only* 15 minutes. By the time they got off the line was almost an hour long. There were people all over the place.

I rode the same ride 4 times in about an hour late at night and didn't have to deal with the crowds.

That's great if you have a late night. When I'm going HS closes at 8 and we will have to be in the Fantasmic arena way before that. Not all of us get late nights.