Hey Everyone!
Wanted to share a bit of my Club Level Fastpass experience from our recent trip. Having an AP this year - I was able to score some solid WL Club Level rates. Was PERFECT for this adults only trip.
My thinking for justifying the extra $400 was to cancel our Fantasmic Dining Package, Early Morning Magic and the Star Wars Dessert Party because we would have breakfast at the hotel, and open bar with desserts nightly - so no need for Star Wars outside of the reserved area. We had done the HEA dessert party, and didn't want to pay for that again to get a reserved area for HEA so that was the big thing that seemed to justify the money.
I knew that we would be traveling during the least busy time of year, so the fastpasses were more of a safeguard and convenience in booking before 60 days.
As has been stated before on here... The rolling 4th fastpass can be booked as soon as you use your initial 3 - HOWEVER - the earliest possible time for that is 3pm. The special fastpasses are in your
MDE, and you can not double book during that time. Now - we ARE talking about the 7th fastpass of the day - which is really unnecessary. However - if you are person who loves to book back to back fastpasses as soon as your first 3 FPs are used... This is very frustrating. I feel like I used that many fastpasses before noon back during spring break when I booked 8am, 9am, and 10am - so I was booking 4th same day at 10:05am from the line!
However - I was trying to be more laid back during this trip - so I forced myself to rest and take in the ambiance while waiting for each FP window to open. However - The HIGHEST wait Space Mountain had was 20 minutes all our magic kingdom day - so that created a sense of wasting the money.
So - This comes back to the value of having reserved seating for Illuminations, Fantasmic, and HEA... We didn't do much AK this trip. You could tell they were winding down the reserved seating because I had he same experience everyone else had when it came to Illuminations and Fantasmic - NO castmembers knew what we were talking about, and the managers didn't have us on their list. I had to show the emails from DSS in each circumstance. Management was very polite and let us in, but it still awkward. Finally for HEA on our last night... I had DSS confirm that we were on the list, and that was nice! We were doing a last minute jungle cruise fastpass at 8:40pm and we still got into the viewing area with time to spare which we needed because they started HEA 5 minutes early due to a storm that was moving in.
So now they have taken away the reserved seating. That makes it REALLY hard for me justify it for your Magic Kingdom days... unless you are traveling during peak season and all party members need to do the headliners same day. However - with EMM being $85 a person... You still save $35 a person and you get to eat breakfast in your club level, and sleep in a little.
Our Magic Kingdom Fastpasses for the first day
By putting Space First - we were able to do Astro Oribtor with no wait at park open and you will notice that we did the fastpasses in a way I was booking the 4th at 11am.
They day that probably provided the biggest value for us was our Hollywood Studios day... Followed by EPCOT:
The parks with tiers give you the most value because the first 3 are impossible in that order and at those times. We opened the day with Walt Disney Presents and little mermaid all in between these fastpasses. The idea was to not have us running all over the park. We didn't even use the ToT fastpass, and I changed that to Muppet Vision - but Star Tours was walk on all that day - so the only value was really Toy Story Land. We were seated in the VIP section for Fantasmic - which was nice and center with nobody around us.
Our EPCOT day was interesting - because we did EMH in Animal Kingdom at 8am - we were delayed by bag check and wound up waiting about 80 minutes for FOP... so by the time we got to EPCOT we missed our Spaceship Earth Fastpass, but I was able to easily get it later in the day after we rode frozen. In retrospect - I would have done a special fastpass for FOP in Animal Kingdom at 9am and taken advantage of the face you can book multiple parks.
Hope this helps you guys!