FastPasses can be a magical – but sometimes stressful – part of your Disney vacation. If you’ve ever googled the title of this post, you’re not alone! This is one of the #1 questions my clients ask. No matter how perfectly everything is planned, there may be that one elusive attraction you couldn’t get a FastPass for. Part of my job is making sure my clients get their ideal FastPasses for their Disney trip, but there are some cases where the availability just isn’t there, even right as the FastPass window opens.
My advice is to schedule the most difficult FastPasses towards the end of your stay. Walt Disney World guests are able to set up FastPasses 60 days in advance of their check-in date. This means you’ve had time to plan your favorite FastPasses – but so has everyone else. Scheduling those hard to get FastPasses, like Slinky Dog Dash or Avatar Flight of Passage, towards the end of your stay can increase the likelihood that they’ll be available. However, sometimes even the best laid plans don’t work out, and there’s nothing available for those popular attractions! In that case, I always recommend checking the My Disney Experience app over and over the morning of your park day to see what opens up.
I did an experiment from the comfort of my own home a few weeks ago to show how this works. I set a FastPass for Tower of Terror at Disney’s Hollywood Studios before going to bed with the hope I’d be able to change the booking to Slinky Dog Dash the next morning. The next morning I pulled up the app and tried my luck. Here’s how it works:
- Click on your existing FastPass
2. Click the “change” button at the top. NOT the one next to the time, because that will only give you different time options for the same attraction.
3. Check out the existing options. If you see what you want, grab it. If not, click the back arrow in the top left.
4. Repeat over and over. You’ll see that the second time I did this, Toy Story Mania disappeared. It went back and forth several times with lots of different time options.
5. I kept doing this off and on until – TA DA! Slinky Dog showed up! Click and confirm it!
You might hear this tactic referred to as “Pounding the App,” and it’s come in handy many times for me! Let me know if you use this trick and how it works for you! Hopefully these tips will help your FastPass experience go as smoothly as possible.
Jo
