Walt Disney world FastPass+ reservation strategy

Having recently booked my Fast passes for Walt Disney World, Florida I devised the following strategy in order to secure the FastPasses we wanted for our vacation.

Plan your itinerary

Yes, I think I may have gone overboard here as I have a plan showing my whereabouts down to each five minute slot (I don’t recommend you do this) but know what park you intend to be in on a given day and know when your dining reservations are.

Make a list

Make a list, or in my case three.

• List 1: rides I want to get FastPasses for. To make this list I checked the My Disney Experience app for wait times during peak times to get an idea of rides which have the longest wait times, if I wanted to ride that ride (or see the show/meet the character, etc) then I added it to my list.
• List 2: FastPasses by day. By knowing which days I’ll be in which park I started to arrange which FastPasses I want to book on a given day. I cross referenced this list to the park map to make sure I was grouping rides together that were in the same area of each park. This list also needs to be cross referenced with a list of tiers for each park (except Magic Kingdom which at the time of writing this does not have towers) to make sure you only have one tier 1 ride per day. A list of FastPass tiers can be downloaded from MouseHacking. At this stage you may find you have only 1 or 2 FastPasses at a specific park on a given day in which case I recommend you make it up to three. At this stage I did also find that needed to book more park days into my itinerary so I could do all the tier 1 rides that I wanted to do.
• List 3: order by rides which are hardest to get. This list should contain the date, approximate time slot and park. This is the list you will follow when you book your FastPasses. Rides which you will want to prioritise in this list are: Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, Smugglers Run, Flight of Passage, Slinky Dog Dash, Seven Dwarves Mine Train, Frozen Ever After, Toy Story Mania, after I had listed these rides I then listed the rest of them by date in reverse chronological order.

Book your FastPasses

At 12pm UK time 60/30 days before your reservation, FastPasses will go live. Ahead of this time I had checked my tickets and all guests related to the booking were linked to My Disney Experience and had a copy of List 3 (above) and a printout showing what days I would be in each park with dining reservations listed to hand.

I haven’t blogged how to book FastPasses as MouseHacking have already done a great job of this but I used my laptop for booking FastPasses, my phone app for double checking FastPasses I had booked and list 3 for updating the time slot I was able to book. It’s important to note that in most cases I wasn’t able to book the exact time I wanted but I could generally book around the time I wanted with the exception of Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway so I booked the earliest time available and will check the app regularly to see if I can modify the time.