Touring Plans or Kenny the Pirate??

[edk35]

I can't stand to plan a trip without the use of a crowd calendar. Gone are the Tour Guide Mike, now WDW Easy isn't showing future calendars. I have purchased the Touring Plan before but how is that one stacking up these days? Worth it? Is Kenny's accurate? Maybe I should just say the heck with it and just not worry about it.

 

[ellbell]

I use kenny's but have never used Touring Plans. Kenny's is customizable and has a lot of info but is more character centric. I'm not sure hiw touring plans is different. I love Kenny's but I do a lot of characters.

 

[coasternut22]

You can still use Easy WDW's discussion and reasons he picked the recommended parks when picking your own park days. These should hold mostly true if EMHs don't change. What I found is that for the past couple of months Easy WDW and Touring plans have had some very conflicting recommend parks. At least with EasyWDW you know why. All rational will be thrown out the window for AK come Pandora opening.

 

[ChasingLeslie]

Ditto to @ellbell

I subscribe to KtP and it has been extremely helpful

 

[MickeyMinnieMom]

I look at these when deciding when to go to WDW -- just to have a general sense of what's out there at the time.

• http://touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar
• http://www.kennythepirate.com/crowd-calendars/
• http://**************.net/2015/10/18/2017-weeks-to-visit-walt-disney-world-ranked-in-order/
• http://wdwprepschool.com/disney-world-crowd-calendar-for-the-2017-2018-school-year/

Beyond that, we follow tried and true guidelines that have worked for us for 12+ years, no matter what time of year we travel.

If I could ONLY use one, I would pick TP. And that was true even when easywdw was still putting out their calendars.

 

[SaintsManiac]

I'm using both this year

 

[TeamEvansGo]

I look at these when deciding when to go to WDW -- just to have a general sense of what's out there at the time.

• http://touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar
• http://www.kennythepirate.com/crowd-calendars/
• http://**************.net/2015/10/18/2017-weeks-to-visit-walt-disney-world-ranked-in-order/
• http://wdwprepschool.com/disney-world-crowd-calendar-for-the-2017-2018-school-year/

Beyond that, we follow tried and true guidelines that have worked for us for 12+ years, no matter what time of year we travel.

If I could ONLY use one, I would pick TP. And that was true even when easywdw was still putting out their calendars.

The only one I don't trust is WDW Prep School. She had the cheerleading competitions listed completely wrong for this year and for those of us that go in the spring and stay in value resorts, that could really screw up your trip if you picked the wrong dates.

 

[Brian Noble]

I'm getting to the point where I'm not sure it matters. Partly, that's because your touring plan is probably more important than what day you use it, partly because I can't stick to an itinerary I made six months ago to save my life, and partly because the calendars are often just guesses. For my week in Feb/Mar this year, TP consistently under-predicted MK crowds---missing by three (out of ten) on three of those days.

 

[MickeyMinnieMom]

The only one I don't trust is WDW Prep School. She had the cheerleading competitions listed completely wrong for this year and for those of us that go in the spring and stay in value resorts, that could really screw up your trip if you picked the wrong dates.

That's the benefit of looking at 4-5 of them just to get a big picture sense. And as I said, if I had to pick only one I'd go with TP. Nothing is perfect, but I think they're generally more reliable.

 

[ForeverAlice]

Kenny! We use his character schedules, crowd calendars, etc every trip and we love it!

 

[Surgie2]

That's the benefit of looking at 4-5 of them just to get a big picture sense. And as I said, if I had to pick only one I'd go with TP. Nothing is perfect, but I think they're generally more reliable.

TP has worked well for us on previous trips. Hoping the same for May 2018.

 

[tigerlilly]

We are planning our first trip in 12 years and I have read and joined just about every itinerary planning/crowd calendar determining site there is lol. We used tourguide Mike plans way back in 2005 and they worked like a charm. I also just read these boards as you can really learn a lot.

I joined TP and have been playing with itineraries but find that it doesn't like the way we plan on touring (ie. lots of breaks and park hopping. Do others find this to be true?

After all my reading I have determined you just have to pick which parks work for you and which days. I plan on using a combo touring plans plan every day and my own plan and hope for the best. One thing I have kind of found too is making ADR's seems to at least a little bit help me determine how bad a park might be. I have second guessed so much and decided to change my mind for park days on our August trip ADR's and trying to switch days for certain restaurants is impossible but I can find what I want on the days that I already had chosen..so I decided to just leave as is. I don't know if others have found the ADR thing to be true or not.

I do wonder about Kennythepirate site as we do not do characters at all... so is Kenny's purchased plans even worth it?

 

[MooseBucks]

I'm not a fan of Touring Plans. I used it for the first time recently and found their app to be subpar and the custom touring plan wasn't very effective.

 

[madchatter]

I can't stand to plan a trip without the use of a crowd calendar. Gone are the Tour Guide Mike, now WDW Easy isn't showing future calendars. I have purchased the Touring Plan before but how is that one stacking up these days? Worth it? Is Kenny's accurate? Maybe I should just say the heck with it and just not worry about it.

We subscribe to both and use both quite often for all their various features. Sticking to crowd calendars only: KTP has very 'general' guidelines for crowds and planning while TP offers far more analytical, data driven models. But in fairness, we just returned from a trip where TP was off by multiple digits on a couple of days. So it's a definite educated guess.

I recommend referencing two or three and coming up with an average based on park hours and crowds.

TP will email you updates as crowd predictions change with their "tracker" feature. That might be their biggest advantage. They also have very good info on current waits, predicted waits and various times and FP+ availability. But they have very little on characters.

If characters will figure into your planning then KTP is still without competition there.

 

[Surgie2]

I joined TP and have been playing with itineraries but find that it doesn't like the way we plan on touring (ie. lots of breaks and park hopping. Do others find this to be true?

Someone on this forum (sorry, I copied info but can't remember who to give credit to) recommended tweaking TP by making these choices under Plan Preferences: Walking Speed: slide to "Slow"; Waiting vs. Walking: Minimize Walking.

Of course we also want to minimize waiting but we are hoping to do this by arriving at rope drop on at least some days and using FP effectively. But we would like to stick to one or two lands of MK at a time to minimize criss crossing - so that's why we need to choose minimize walking.

If you want to park hop, you need to create two plans for the same day. There is a spot to insert your "plan time". So if you want to be at MK in the morning, you could choose 9:00-12:00 and make your plan. Then create a new plan for the afternoon at Epcot and make the plan be from 1:00-5:00 or whatever you choose.

My trip is 14 months away so I can't create a plan yet in TP. So I have a trip set up called "Fake Trip" using this year's dates in May to correspond to 2018 when we are actually going. This is letting me play around with the planning tool. I've used it before but I'm pretty rusty.

 

[Babydreamz]

I use both. I think they each have their strong points. KTP has all the character info and that really important for us. I use TP for the personalized touring plans. And a combination of the crowd calendars. I look at all the ones like a Pp had mentioned and take into account all the info.

 

[studiojmm]

I'm not a fan of Touring Plans. I used it for the first time recently and found their app to be subpar and the custom touring plan wasn't very effective.

I only used them for one trip, but I liked them. We only did one park per day. What I realized is that we chose way too fast walking for the days my husband was along, but it was fine for when it was just me and my daughter.

I found the plan really good for MK, but not so good for AK because we took WAY longer than suggested in all of the walk through attractions. 20 min for Gorilla Falls Trail? Try an hour for us. Also, HS and AK are harder to plan than MK and EP since HS/AK have so many shows with specific start times, making it harder to do all the attractions anyway.

I don't have a lot to compare it with but I did a combination of letting TouringPlans optimize and then adjusting from there to balance line waiting with geograpic efficiency. For example, I'd rather stay in one MK land for a chunk of time, than save 5 min in line across the park and have to come back, but I find it useful to see what the tool recommends without choosing to minimize walking. So, I'd optimize my plans for balance of waiting/walking and then move things and have the times reevaluated without reordering (that's an option). I found the wait times to be reasonably accurate.

One feature I wish it had: the ability to lock an activity to a specific time. You can do that with meals and breaks (but can't say 0 min flexibility, which I'd like to do). Also, it doesn't seem to do well with the train at MK. It assumes you go all the way around even if you intend to, say, get on in Fantasy Land and get off in Adventureland. There's also no reasonable way to account for doing things like Sorcerers of Magic Kingdom. It puts in time for your initial visit to the headquarters, but not playing the game. Could deal with that by choosing slow walking spread to account for it.

(Similar issues with the Universal version, btw. It seemed to want to plug in round trip on the Hogwarts Express and I had to put in a break labeled "Explore Diagonally" etc for when we would that. Other than those HP quirks the Univversal version seemed right on.)

Still, overall I thought it was pretty useful.

 

[Rusty2rules]

I joined TP and have been playing with itineraries but find that it doesn't like the way we plan on touring (ie. lots of breaks and park hopping. Do others find this to be true?

I'm using TP for the first time and plan on park hopping almost every day. I've basically had to create a plan for the morning and a separate plan for the evening. I wish it would let you make one plan and take park hopping into consideration. If somebody knows how to do this I'd love to know how.

Additional note: After I posted this I went to the TP forums and posed the question. The response I got is there's no way to accommodate park hopping in their current planning structure. The best/only way to do it is to create a separate plan for each park for the timeline you plan on being at each park each day.

 

[Doug S]

TP had some trouble last fall with the higher than normal fall crowds (outside of the start of September). They pushed an update a few weeks ago that bumped up fall numbers a good 2-3 points. I think for the price, they do a great job and they're the only ones out there who truly have it as a career. They also have the historical data to back it up. TP is usually within 10 minutes with wait time predictions, which is really good IMO. Just remember: it's a prediction and no one, not even Disney, can accurately predict.

 

[Lovemy3babes]

Thanks for this post! I really need a calendar telling me where to go and when. I just do. I'm horrible at this kind of stuff.