After testing G+ twice and trying both strategies (stacking for evening vs. booking as early as possible), I prefer the evening stack for a couple of reasons.
1) I don’t have to stress about getting an early time for the most popular attractions at 7am. It’s not make or break to be lightning fast (pun intended). As long as I’m on at 7am I have been able to get my ILL$ and G+ with times that work for us no problem.
2) If I plan and refresh so my LL’s go in order of latest to earliest, then my most recent LL will most likely be the first I use when I begin to redeem them, meaning I can immediately book another one. Very little refreshing has been needed on both visits to see a good return time that works for us.
3) I’m only on my phone every two hours. Once I book an evening LL, there is nothing more I can do, so the phone goes away and I can enjoy attractions with shorter waits, walk around, eat a snack, see a cavalcade, etc.
4) Once I return in the evening I have anywhere from 3-5 LL’s lined up and ready to use. I can have even more lined up if I purchase two ILL$. We have split our strategy between using our ILL$ midday or clumping them with our evening LL’s. We like both options depending on the ride and/or the park we are hopping to.
5) After using our last LL it’s usually the end of the night so we can just hop in line at park close for one attraction for which we couldn’t grab a LL. Shorter wait and not wasting park time to ride it. Win win.
I think this strategy works best for guests who (1) don’t plan their vacation in a detailed minute-to-minute way, (2) don’t eat table service often and can be more flexible with the order of operations in their park experience, (3) enjoy the parks in the evening, and (4) have park hoppers and can move to another location after 2pm if other parks have better LL availability.
Used this strategy both in mid-November and the weekend prior to Christmas and was able to get a minimum of 6 LL’s each day no problem (and for good attractions, too). I also find the I’m doing a lot less pre-planning for our visits and I really really like that. We have our next visit MLK weekend and I’ve done zilch for park planning except which parks we might start in and what we might hop to (with the caveat that we might change our plan depending on what LL’s we get). Looking forward to seeing if this strategy continues to be effective for us or if we run into issues.
