At least Disneyland isn't making people wait in a 12-hour-plus physical queue to get on Rise of the Resistance. Last month, we asked you, What is the best way for theme parks to manage demand? In our reader vote, you collectively endorsed the virtual queue concept, with 47 percent of respondents preferring a first-come, first-served virtual queue that opens on the day of your visit.īut the option that came in dead last in our vote, with just two percent support, was an in-park lottery on the day of your visit - which, essentially, is the system Disneyland now has for Rise of the Resistance. It's one thing to have a lottery to assign people boarding times during the day, but it's something else to have a lottery to determine whether park guests get on a ride at all. Disney World is getting through many more boarding groups than Disneyland, where Rise has opened late its first three days and endured extended downtimes and early closures on its first two days.
#Rise of the resistance virtual queue full#
Our POV video of the full queue and ride experience on Disneyland's Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance.Ĭlearly, Disneyland's version of Rise of the Resistance is not yet putting through as many guests as the original installation at Walt Disney World is each day. And some who do get boarding group assignments are getting "backup group" assignments that ultimately are not called before the ride closes for the evening. While the best estimates at this point are that the vast majority of people inside the park at opening are getting Rise of the Resistance boarding groups, it is clear that some Disneyland guests who have made the commitment to be in the park at opening are not getting an assignment.
Even those who show up within an hour or so of the park's opening have been getting on the ride more often than not. It's just random chance where you end up in the boarding group order.Īt least at Hollywood Studios at this point, everyone inside the park at its opening has been getting boarding group numbers that allow them to ride Rise of the Resistance. In that case, what you have is a lottery. So long as you were tapped into the park by 7am, you had the same opportunity to get into the virtual queue as anyone else inside the park.īut when thousands of people are trying to enter a virtual queue at once, there's really no "first come, first served" when the difference between first and second can be measured only by microseconds. But there would no longer be any advantage to showing up in the middle of the night. (Even as every jet-lagged British tourist chortled quietly at the advantage the early start provided them.) So Disney changed the system to open the virtual queue only at the park's published opening time.ĭisney would continue to allow people to enter the park about an hour or so early, as it always does. Disney didn't want the hassle of maintaining that physical queue in the pre-dawn hours every morning - or to take complaints from guests who didn't want to have to get up at 2am on their vacation in order to ride the most popular new attraction at the resort. People were forming a physical queue to enter the virtual one. But that was leading to people crowding the park's entry plaza in the middle of the night, as they tried to get first dibs to enter the park as soon as Disney began admitting guests. Initially, Hollywood Studios was using a more traditional virtual queue, which guests were allowed to join as soon as they entered the park. What Disneyland has for Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is really a lottery, instead.ĭisneyland is using the same system as its sister park, Disney's Hollywood Studios at the Walt Disney World Resort, adopted soon after Rise of the Resistance opened there last month. In practice, this isn't a virtual queue if all the day's boarding spots are going that quickly.
This morning, all the groups were gone for the day within just two minutes. But guests are slamming the app as soon as the queue opens, resulting in all of the day's boarding groups being claimed within minutes. Guests must be inside the park to join the virtual queue, which opens at the park's published opening time. Park guests must use the official Disneyland app to enter the queue, where they will be assigned a "boarding group" number that will be called via an app notification later in the day.
Disneyland is using what it is calling a virtual queue system to manage the crowd for Rise of the Resistance.