We went last week for a few pre and post cruise days 1/22, 1/29 and 1/30. While I understand we only did weekend days and that adds to the madness/crowds it was a miserable experience. First the fact that the current ticket expiration policy makes it impossible to buy multi-days for pre and post cruise (a 3 day ticket expires in 4 days). Making my 3 days much more expensive then they should have been. Then the parks were very crowded for January. Touring plans had the days listed in the 4 - 6 range which it did not feel, at all, based on line times and walkway crowds. We noticed a bunch of tour groups both kids sports and overseas. I'm glad people can travel again but it was surprising to see so many people in a traditionally super quiet week.
Our 1st day was a Friday and we didn't have hoppers, so we did HS. We arrived around 1 and left at 7. In that time we only managed to do 4 things (falcon, muppets, mania and railway). This was without any meals and only a small blue milk break. We didn't even get to try to get on rise as it was down most of the day.
2nd day was the following Saturday, we had hoppers and did AK and Epcot. We only managed 3 things this time. Wait times we're horribly wrong on both touring plans and
mde. Half of our party went to flight with a 105 posted and it took a full 2 hours. The other half did dinosaur which was correctly posted at 35 minutes, and then went to navi which was posted 70 and also took a full 2 hours. When we finally got to the front of navi we found the issue, they were allowing 2 standby parties for every 20 genie parties. Party size didn't matter, so 4 people would get through on standby and 60 people would go through genie. I understand they are trying to make the "paying guests" happy but all it did was throughly piss off everyone else. At epcot we only manged to ride remi which was thankfully shorter than the post 165 and only took 2 hours. It was fun and nice to do something new, going forward it's probably a 45 mins or shorter for me. I've never waited 2 hours to ride anything in past trips in October, November, December and January so the idea that multiple rides were regularly running that long across all 4 parks, just baffles my mind. The wall and food situation are still a big issue. Even with the event booths we were scrambling to find dinner. The only real upside was the new spaceship earth lights. They are beautiful and a really nice upgrade in the park.
Day 3 was Sunday which we only had time to do MK. After the AK experience the day before we caved and paid for Genie. We manged 6 things. We genied pirates, pan, buzz and mansion, and waited for jungle and laugh floor. We would have managed 1 more however the peoplemover went down just as we made it to the escalators. The main issue with genie is that with the 2 hour window by the time 1st window reopens, all the bigger items are already pushed out until 3pm or later. We ended up feeling in the end that genie is pretty much required but not worth the cost.
Sadly I think this is going to be our last wdw trip for quite awhile. We're dvc and while we usually go about every 3 years this was definitely our least enjoyable, and that includes the one where we all had the stomach flu. I hate being so negative about our trip but it was so shockingly different from any of our other trips. I'm starting to understand the people paying for private tours.
