Epcot headliners order

[Pdollar88]

I know this has been asked before, but I would like thoughts on the order of the headliners -- Test Track, Soarin', and FEA.

What order would be best if I'm planning to rope drop Epcot on Monday, March 5? And get a FP for one of them.

My initial thought was FP Frozen for early afternoon (since my bf definitely doesn't want to wait at all for a Frozen attraction). In this scenario, do TT first on RD and then head to Soarin and the assorted attractions near it.

 

[Anabelletoronto]

I will jump on here too. I am interested in the answer and also what the predicted wait times are if you rope drop Soarin and TT right after each other. We have dining reservations at 11am for Akershus and will do FEA with (cross fingers) FP after lunch. I just want to know if we could fit them both before our 11am lunch and whether I should stick on another FP in there for something at 10am

 

[pitpat]

https://www.disboards.com/threads/last-minute-epcot-help.3632097/

he did all 3 with no FP this morning in very good time

On a busier day, you can FP FEA and hit TT, then Soarin at RD. Or do TT single rider if that works for you.

 

[RangerPooh]

Our strategy is to FP FEA. We then rope drop Soarin' and follow up with TT.

 

[Pdollar88]

Thanks, all! I'll probably stick with TT and Soarin at rope drop and FP FEA.

 

[Klayfish]

Do not FP+ FEA. The line is sub 20 minutes for the first 2 hours the park is open...in fact it's often a straight walk on. We did that in July, even 4th of July week. Walked on at 9:30am with literally zero wait.

Order is:
Soarin' standby
FEA standby
TT FP+

Alternate:
TT standby
FEA standby
Soarin' FP+

 

[PSUGuy]

Coming through the IG we always walk on Soarin', FP TT then grab a 4th for Frozen early afternoon.

Bill From PA

 

[Pdollar88]

Do not FP+ FEA. The line is sub 20 minutes for the first 2 hours the park is open...in fact it's often a straight walk on. We did that in July, even 4th of July week. Walked on at 9:30am with literally zero wait.

Order is:
Soarin' standby
FEA standby
TT FP+

Alternate:
TT standby
FEA standby
Soarin' FP+

Wow. That shocks me. But I haven't been since FEA opened, and many of the sites stress how crowded it (still) is. Thanks for sharing your experience!

 

[AngiTN]

We opt to

Rope Drop and go right to Single Rider TT
Next is Stand By ride Soarin'
Then do rest of Land rides
FP FEA later in the day

Wow. That shocks me. But I haven't been since FEA opened, and many of the sites stress how crowded it (still) is. Thanks for sharing your experience!

No, not really. Realize, there are no FP issued for FEA until 11:00 so from 9:00 to 11:00 it's all stand by riders. Line moves fast when you have no FP returnees filtering in.

 

[greg9x]

All will depend on crowd level... But last week FP+ TT, Hit Soarin at RD with little wait and then over to FEA with a 20 min wait.

 

[housemartin71]

Based on my experience last week, I would FP Test Track, then do Soarin' and FEA at rope drop. TT consistently saw the longest waits when we were there. If you do single rider line on TT, it goes quickly, but you won't be able to design your own car (you can choose from a list). So if you want to do that, single rider isn't a good option.

 

[julieFitz]

Based on my experience last week, I would FP Test Track, then do Soarin' and FEA at rope drop. TT consistently saw the longest waits when we were there. If you do single rider line on TT, it goes quickly, but you won't be able to design your own car (you can choose from a list). So if you want to do that, single rider isn't a good option.

Agreed! TT wait time gets longer quickly even at RD, whereas Soarin and FEA stay around 20 min or less

 

[Klayfish]

No, not really. Realize, there are no FP issued for FEA until 11:00 so from 9:00 to 11:00 it's all stand by riders. Line moves fast when you have no FP returnees filtering in.

+

Yep, exactly. It's all standby from 9-11am and the ride has a pretty good capacity to move people through. So the line stays really short. TT line will build very fast, very quick. So that's the one ride you either want to do immediately, or use a FP+ for.

I will say that in our July trip, we very commonly would ride the headliners 2 or 3 times each time we went in. FEA via standby early and FP+ later and the other two are fairly easy to get FP+ for same day (after we do Soarin' standby)

 

[Barnabas T Bullion]

Do not FP+ FEA. The line is sub 20 minutes for the first 2 hours the park is open...in fact it's often a straight walk on.

Have things really changed much in the past few months at Epcot. Not long ago it was a significant wait there with some good spells of downtime. IDK.

 

[AngiTN]

+

Yep, exactly. It's all standby from 9-11am and the ride has a pretty good capacity to move people through. So the line stays really short. TT line will build very fast, very quick. So that's the one ride you either want to do immediately, or use a FP+ for.

I will say that in our July trip, we very commonly would ride the headliners 2 or 3 times each time we went in. FEA via standby early and FP+ later and the other two are fairly easy to get FP+ for same day (after we do Soarin' standby)

We don't like to design the car on TT so it works great for us to do it single rider. If you go to it first thing they load it with nothing but single rider because the stand by and FP riders are all in the design room. Last week DH and I rode together because there were nothing but single riders there to fill the cars. They couldn't even get enough single riders to fill the first dozen, or more, cars. When we walked out and looked up at the photo screen there were 4 cars on the screen and 1 person in all 4 cars, total.

So yeah, TT may build fast but if you aren't in to building a car you can still ride very fast. We were on and off before the first design room was done.

And no back tracking going in the front, on to Norway, back out to TT, Soarin' then back to WS.

 

[greg9x]

Have things really changed much in the past few months at Epcot. Not long ago it was a significant wait there with some good spells of downtime. IDK.

I believe so.... Didn't do FEA last year because it was a 50 min wait shortly after RD.
Even Anna/Elsa meet was only 10 minutes. (Didn't do it since he wasn't interested, but remember the multi hour waits not long ago).
These were crowd level 4/5 days.

 

[AngiTN]

Have things really changed much in the past few months at Epcot. Not long ago it was a significant wait there with some good spells of downtime. IDK.

No but things have changed at FEA in that it doesn't suffer as much downtime as it once did

 

[Klayfish]

We don't like to design the car on TT so it works great for us to do it single rider.

My kids, especially the boys, would consider it blasphemy to skip the design center. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree...they love cars.

In reality, if they HAD to, they'd skip the design center. But they really would rather not.

 

[mtemm]

When I went with my sisters last spring we tried to rope drop FEA and had a FP for soarin'. We were also lucky because one of the cms at the BWI CL we were talking with that day was asking our plans and he somehow or other loaded TT FP on for us, too. So out of the gate we were very lucky to have that bit of pixie dust. However, we never got to ride FEA because it was down at rope drop for at least an hour and kept going up/down all day. Lines were crazy, way more than I would wait.

Went again in the summer with dh/kids and decided to fp FEA because I wanted a chance to ride it at some point if it had problems like the first time. We opted to rd TT because my kids won't do single rider, and planned to head right to soarin after. Which is perfect in theory. But rd backed up for TT....IG dropped the rope later than front of the park that day (never have seen that but I think the cm was distracted, some other cm finally said something to her). And then when we got to the already long line for TT they were having some problems so it didn't open for about 20 more minutes. So riding both TT and soarin ended up taking us nearly 2 hours of our morning instead of an hour or so I was expecting. We recovered nicely but a bumpy start to say the least.

Honestly if I went again I would FP Frozen again. Loved the ride but not worth a long line, and it does seem to go down a lot. TT line builds so fast I would always rd it and then head to soarin.

 

[Rwsm2011]

I wish you could skip the design center. My kids could care less about the design center, but aren't old enough where they are comfortable riding alone in the car, so I don't think we could do the single rider line.