This is my experience after two days at MK (08/12) and Epcot (08/13) for a party of 4.
Refresh worked so good that I felt bad for people at the end. But thanks for everyone who commented here and shared their experience. I don’t think many people will catch on to this, because it does require some tech saviness, good planning, and patience in many cases. It’s easy to abandon that strategy and giving up after a few minutes of refreshing and not getting what you want. But for me, as you will see, standby line is much worse than digging in your phone after tapping in, to get your next FP before your current ride starts. I will never touch my phone when I’m on the ride since you want to enjoy the rides so make sure you don’t get carried away with this as it’s easy to do so. Make that a rule. In queues where there is no service, turn your WiFi on and use the Disney free WiFi. Also bring a power bank charger if you have one, as your phone battery will run out.
At MK, I only stood in standby for pirates. I had EMM (which I highly recommend) so didn’t have to worry about 7DMT, PP, and Winnie the Pooh. But for everything else, FP was always easy to 1) grab first time available 2) refresh to move it up to the current time. We rode space mountain twice, Splash mountain twice, BTMR twice, JC, buzz, tommoroland speedway, dumbo, barnstormer, tea cups, under the sea twice, it’s a small world, HM, meet Mickey, both princess fairy tail halls, meet ariel, all with that strategy. We started at 10 am after our EMM breakfast, and were done with everything listed above before 7 pm. On the splash mountain ride my 6 year old was skipping and singing/whistling through the fast pass line and getting these looks from the people in standby line that I just felt bad for them.
At Epcot, the only thing we waited in standby for was FEA a little after opening, for a whole 15 minutes. Fast passed all rides, doing soarin twice, and FEA 3 times total. Daughter is a big fan so that made her day. We had pre booked FP for TT, but we didn’t look for more because on that ride, even the FP line was around 30 minutes (standby was 145). Everything that had a FP line we were able to grab, even illuminations at the end. Soarin was popping up a lot when refreshing btw. FEA took a bit of refreshing to get. Abt 10-20 mins each time. Standby line was never under 40 mins after we finished our first ride.
I will be doing the same thing at HS and AK later this week. I’m worried about SDD and NRJ with this strategy, but will see if we get them.