Touringplans.com

I use the free part for dining reservations, that works great!

I also like the app for lines and updates. MDE sometimes locks up, so this gives me another option to look at when that happens and I can compare the two.
 


Yes, definitely worth it, especially if you're a "newbie." Considering how much a trip to Disney costs the subscription fee is NUTHIN'. Getting help knowing how to tour the park, in what order, etc is very helpful to someone who doesn't have tons of experience. The Lines app is great too.
 
A huge fan of Touring Plans. i subscribe. I like the personalized plan and do optimize. I may not always follow it, but it helps. Love the true wait time feature and always time every rider we do to add data to the feature. The crowd planner is nice (even if it may not be accurate). Reservation finder is awesome.
For under $15 a year, compared to what we spend on a disney vacation, its a bargain.
 


Completely worth it! Have used it on the last couple trips and create personalized touring plans. It helps keep our walking to a minimum when planning out in what order to go on rides so we aren’t wasting time.
Our first trip my husband laughed when I handed him a daily itinerary based on the touring plan and when our longest wait was only for haunted mansion and everything else was pretty quick he was a believer.
 
Like others, I've used it for trip planning, mainly the countdown and the room fax option. Also it's great for snagging ADRs.
 
Is tourningplans.com worth the money? We have a disney planner but I also like to plan quite a bit myself.

Thanks

For myself, I would say yes. I actually have a multiyear subscription to Len Testa's Touring Plans. I like putting my vacations on their website and use their suggestions. They email me updates of the park hours for the times of my vacation. They give me reminders about when I can make reservations for dining and fast pass, etc. I can use their hotel room request to see what rooms are standard and preferred and what their views look like from the front door. I can choose a room for them to automatically fax my room request. I usually get what I want. This past time I didn't because of large group bookings during my stay, but that was okay.
 
Yes. I like a lot of things about touringplans. Even if you don't use all of it, there is so much helpful information and the ability to make room requests that it's worth it.
You do know that you can fax in room requests on your own and don't need TP to do it right? This has been available for years, long before TP started to offer it.
 
You do know that you can fax in room requests on your own and don't need TP to do it right? This has been available for years, long before TP started to offer it.

Yes, I am very aware of this. And when I have used touring plans, I actually get the room I request. When I don't use touringplans, I've had to ask multiple times via fax and/or phone and still didn't get anything close to what I requested. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.

In fact, the last time we stayed at CBR, I requested a room with the 5th bed. The woman on the phone had no clue what I was talking about. NONE. Didn't even know there were rooms with a fold down bed. Faxed it, too, and it apparently never got there because they placed our family of 5 in a room with only 2 regular beds.
 
Very much worth it in my opinion - though I won't be testing it until our trip next week.

Main benefit for us (assuming it's accurate) is the personalized plans. We have small kids with us and I loved the "minimize walking" option. While certain plans have you criss-crossing, knowing it optimized so to avoid that is great.

It also recommends which attractions to get FPs for and which that may not be worth it. Again - VERY important when we hit our 60 day mark for advance FPs.

THEN - after we got the ones on that day, I could tweak the plans based on what we did get (versus what we hoped to get).

How anyone could do that without some program is headache inducing to me. So much worth the $15 or whatever it was.

Now - they claim their lines portion is more accurate than posted times. Again, I'll see. BUT on the website (not the app) they publish a summary of how well they did for their estimate vs actual. (Though to be honest, since there are various wait times throughout the long park day, I'm not sure how meaningful that summary is. They could be "right" at say 9:00AM and dead wrong at 9:30AM etc. Then close at 9:45AM, not so much at 10:00AM etc etc. I haven't read how they evaluate their accuracy.

So in summary - very worth it for the customized plans alone - and potentially worth more if the wait times are better than the posted times (which I assume is what MDE uses).

The other features (room requests etc) I haven't even considered.
 
Yes, I am very aware of this. And when I have used touring plans, I actually get the room I request. When I don't use touringplans, I've had to ask multiple times via fax and/or phone and still didn't get anything close to what I requested. Maybe a coincidence, maybe not.

In fact, the last time we stayed at CBR, I requested a room with the 5th bed. The woman on the phone had no clue what I was talking about. NONE. Didn't even know there were rooms with a fold down bed. Faxed it, too, and it apparently never got there because they placed our family of 5 in a room with only 2 regular beds.


I think when you fax it in is as important as what you fax in. I have always sent the fax 2-3 days before I check in as that is when they start assigning rooms for upcoming stays. I am sure that those assigning rooms know what the layout/capacity is, those on the customer service lines, not so much as they may not even be in FL. To me, whatever works is the way to go ! Right :-) Good luck
 
Love their site and their books. I don't use their touring plans feature, but I use everything else.

I prefer to use Character Locator for my touring plans.
 
For what it's worth re wait times, the site says the following:
The attractions above come from our core group of 27 attractions used in calculating crowd levels. To assess accuracy, we calculate the average posted wait time between 11 AM and 5 PM and compare that to our predicted average wait time for that time period. A negative number means that the average wait time was lower than our prediction; a positive number means the average wait time was higher than our prediction.

OK - as a statistician I see a lot of issues with that assessment method but I won't get technical.

They say they pretty good yesterday. They were within 3 minutes on 10 attractions (they list which ones BTW); 5 min on 3; 7 min on 3; 10 min on 3.

But that's only 20 out of the 27. So they were likely worse than that on 7 (and I can't see which they were.)

So the value of the lines portion of this is to be determined. And that makes me a BIT leery of the plan optimizer.

We shall see!

(EDIT - actually there is a LOT more information available for a given day in the past to assess. Far more than I can summarize - but the important thing is they are transparent in their results good and bad. Just not sure a average over a 6 hour period is the right way to assess. Actually, I'm sure it ISN'T the right way.)
 
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