Wasting Time in Lines

I spent a few weeks down in Orlando at Disneyland and Universal Studios - and about 20% of my time in the parks I must have I stood in lines. In our society you always stand in lines: food, movie, toll booth, on the road going to work (in Portland Oregon a person driving on a road spends around 45 minutes no matter from what direction to drive the 12 miles to get into town - and that is BY DESIGN of METRO (the useless regional government), City of Portland, and the county - they want you to feel pain and waste your time, & gas to get you motivated to waste even MORE time on public transit to get to work - another blog topic) but in the destination entertainment Mecca of Orlando - standing in lines is a waste of time and is a good sign of overselling - with a profit motive.

If you go to any of the parks they have the wait times posted that it will take to get on a ride - some as short as 5 minutes and some I saw running 70 minutes. Now if you REALLY want to get on that ride you spend the time in line. On a busy day that means in a 10 hour day you could spend 6 hours in a line - and with 15 to 20 attractions per park it forces you to go back another 2 days in order to see them all. Thus they make more money by purposely having long wait times and forcing you to purchase more days in order to see everything in a park. 

It does not help that some of the rides only last 5 minutes for that 70 minute wait.

Each park has a different method to help you 'manage' you wasted time. Disney has what they call 'Fast Pass' where you can get a ticket that prints out a time you can go back to the ride and bypass the 'standby' line (there still is a line, but it is much shorter so you may only spend 0 to 20 minutes in it). Problem is you can only 'own' one pass at a time. If the ride you want has a time of 3:30 PM and it is 10 AM now, then you cannot get another pass till after 3:30. Thus you will stand in all the standby lines for other rides till your Fast Pass time comes along. They limit the number of Fast Pass per ride per hour to keep the time short. So you save some time but it restricts you in other ride times.

Universal has a simpler method: you pay extra to get into the short line side. They use money to limit their 'fast' line. Using price to weed out people has always worked since there will always be only a small portion of the people going there who are willing to pay an extra $25 a person a day to get the higher level ticket. If too many people pay for the ticket and those lines get too long they can raise the price to eliminate some more people and still make money.

So before you go to the Sunshine State® and visit Disneyland®, Universal® or the many  other parks around there know in advance that on average you will waste no less than 20% of you day in lines talking with your family - and if you don't want to talk then pay for the fast line or plan the Fast Pass strategy to get those tickets as soon as you get in and walk around to find lines that are 15 minutes or less to make the most of you time relaxing.