Disney: A wait not for the weary on Flight of Passage in Animal Kingdom
The popular Walt Disney World ride Flight of Passage makes computer scientist Len Testa rethink the question: What’s the longest people are willing to stand in line to ride an attraction?
Animal Kingdom’s Flight of Passage has posted unprecedented high stand-by wait times that haven’t diminished, instead getting longer since it opened — something unheard of for a new Disney ride, said Testa, who has clocked wait times at more than six hours on occasion.
“It’s kind of amazing. There is no other ride that has done that,” said Testa, who runs the website and app Touring Plans from Celebration and has been featured in the New York Times for his analysis on theme park wait times. “Pandora is a juggernaut.”
More than 4 million people have ridden Flight of Passage since it opened in May, and the company says it’s the Orlando resort’s top-rated ride from guest surveys.
“Avatar Flight of Passage is an experience like no other we have ever created,” Disney spokeswoman Andrea Finger said in a statement.
For locals eager to check out the buzz about the new ride or tourists who aren’t lucky enough to snag a FastPass, that could mean spending more than half of the day in line to ride one attraction at Animal Kingdom.
It also foreshadows what the lines could look like when Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge opens in 2019 at Hollywood Studios.
Earlier this month, Disney executives credited Pandora — World of Avatar for helping fuel growth for the company’s theme-parks division.
On Feb. 11, the company raised prices on tickets and annual passes. Part of the company’s pricing strategy is to try and even out crowds during the year, the company said.
On a chilly Sunday in mid-January, Sydney Quinlan and her sister waited about four hours to ride Flight of Passage.
They passed the time chatting with the British tourists next to them who happened to live in the town where Quinlan will soon study abroad. Sometimes, the siblings sat on the ground to rest their feet. They ate granola bars since they skipped lunch. By the time her sister needed to go to the bathroom, she was too far in line and had to wait until after the ride.
Yet, when Quinlan recounts the day, she has no regrets. It was worth it, she said.
“I would totally say to anyone, ‘You have to go and ride this.’ It’s amazing,” said Quinlan, 20, a Disney annual passholder who lives in Atlanta and attends Valencia College online. “Your jaw hits the floor. You want to ride it again after you just got off.”
On the ride, people crouch as if on motorcycles during the simulation that makes them feel like they are whizzing through the air on the back of a winged creature.
“People just like that feeling of flying,” said Matt Roseboom, owner and publisher of Attractions Magazine that covers Central Florida’s theme-park industry.
Visitors who did not have FastPasses waited in stand-by lines an average of about 2 hours and 15 minutes in June, according to Testa’s numbers. He bases those on a rolling average, which helps eliminate outliers, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., the busiest time of day, he said.
Through Touring Plans, Testa’s 140,000 paying subscribers (plus half a million who use his website for free) feed him data. He’s collected 20 million data points to guide his analysis, he said.
Fast forward to Dec. 16, a Saturday, about 6 p.m., the wait time hit 6½ hours — the highest Testa has ever recorded, beating the previous 305-minute wait for Soarin’ Over California at Epcot.
In January — about eight months after Pandora opened — the average wait time was nearly three hours.
One recent extreme wait time was recorded at five hours at about 5 p.m. Jan. 5, a Friday, Testa’s data showed.
“It’s getting close to a year [since Flight of Passage opened]. It hasn’t seemed to wane any,” Roseboom said of what he’s seen.
The wait time tends to dip slightly by late afternoon, according to Disney.
“Everybody gets to ride it once then it sort of drops down to where it’s going to be,” Testa said pointing to the new Fantasyland that opened in 2012 at Magic Kingdom.
Or look at Frozen Ever After. The dark ride based off the popular movie opened at Epcot with average wait times about 2 hours and 15 minutes in June 2016, Testa’s data showed.
But by September 2016, despite continued popularity, that wait had whittled to around 1 hour and 20 minutes.
Not so with Flight of Passage.
“The line has held its length. The ride is more popular so much later than it debuted than any other ride we’ve seen in a long time,” Testa said.
He speculated the popularity has stayed because there aren’t that many rides at Animal Kingdom as say, Magic Kingdom. And Flight of Passage also has won overwhelming praise. Robert Niles, author of the popular Theme Park Insider blog, rated Flight of Passage as the best new attraction in 2017.
“We are delighted that our guests continue to be wowed by this latest example of our creativity, relentless innovation and storytelling,” Finger said in a statement.
Meanwhile, a social media post recently highlighted a 15-minute wait for Flight of Passage.
It was in the middle of the Super Bowl.