I found this thread so useful leading up to my trip, that I wanted to pass on my thanks by reporting on yesterday’s (Friday 21st December) event.
I’ll start by saying that I loved it and felt it was worth the money. We also did the Jingle Bell Jingle Bam dessert party yesterday, which we also enjoyed, but dollar for dollar, I think this Early Morning provided better value.
I checked Thursday night if our party was sold out and both slots were showing availability, so my guess is that this party was still quite some way from being at capacity.
We are staying at Wilderness Lodge, and I started checking buses on the app from when we woke up. The first left at 5:44, which we weren’t ready to catch, but another left shortly after 6 which turned out to be perfect. We arrived just before 6:30 and shortly afterwards they checked us in and held us at the ticket scanners (we were second in the queue) until about 6:45 when we were let into the park for breakfast.
Despite not being too hungry that early in the morning, we made the less popular decision to eat the full breakfast straight away. I wanted to maximise that first hour 9am - 10am of park opening, without wasting time eating and I think we definitely made the right decision (more about that later). We were also second in the breakfast queue, so that helped speed things up.
About 7:15 we headed over to Toy Story Land and it was already open. I’m not sure how long it had been open, but there were still a lot of people over at breakfast so it was empty.
We started on SDD and loved it. I must admit I wasn’t expecting much as it looks like a kiddy coaster, but it is now my second favourite Disney ride after Everest. It’s about the intensity of BTMR, but so much smoother. The wait was about 5mins. We then went straight back on and the wait time was now showing 20mins, but I’d say it was closer to about 8mins.
I’d read on here that SDD tends to get quieter later on during morning magic, so we decided to go over to the Alien Twirling ride which was so quiet half the saucers didn’t have riders.
What a disappointing, jerky ride. Once was enough for that.
On to TSMM, which was a complete walk on, but the walk onto the ride and off it again chewed up quite a bit of time. We were using the fastpass queue, but it’s still feels quite long.
Back onto Slinky Dog, which was now showing 15minutes, but was almost walk on. I looked at my watch and it was showing 8:03 when we entered. Between 8:03 and 8:26, we rode SDD four times.
At this stage, we decided to do TSMM one more time before rope drop and despite being walk on still, it took up the remainder of our time, walking on, riding and then walking off.
So in total we did SDD x 6, TSMM x 2 and Aliens x 1. I should also add, that we also spent quite a bit of time roaming and taking pics of the land. We didn’t ever feel like we had to rush.
At 8:45 we tried to beat the rope drop crew to Rock n Roller Coaster, but we were about a minute too late. Still we got on in about 5 minutes and when we got off the wait time was already about 40mins. Walked over to ToT and did it on standby with a 5min wait. Walked off and did it again using our Fastpass as the wait time had rapidly climbed to 45mins. Out of interest, I also checked the wait times on the app at 9:12am and SDD was already at 90mins.
We then went over to Launch Bay and got pics with Kylo Wren (10min wait), Chewbacca (about 10mins also) and
BB-8 (walk on).
The remainder of the morning, we watched the Star Wars stage show, rode Star Tours on Fastpass, found heaps of photopass photographers to get Xmas photos, and then checked in early for our midday ADR at Brown Derby.
1pm: It was a crowd level 8 day, people were everywhere, popular rides were around 2hours, and we were heading out of the park for a midday nap having done everything we wanted with little to no wait.
We then headed back in about 5:30. Did a TSMM fastpass and laughed at the crazy crowds in Toy Story Land. Enjoyed the Xmas festivities for an hour, before enjoying the dessert party and getting a lovely spacious sitting spot on the back wall for the fireworks (Another tip I have the DIS to thank for).
In all a fantastic day!