The Blog

The team has safely returned from our recent Disneyland trip, so you can expect more activity here on the blog and over on Twitter as well. We want to particularly thank all of our awesome readers who showed up for our meetup on Saturday. We numbered 20 people at our peak!

One thing we wanted to test was the ease at which you could send us wait times from the parks. We’ve received a flood of fastpasses and wait times since we asked for them, and we couldn’t be more thankful. The data we collect is going straight to Fred to keep the Crowd Calendar as accurate as possible.

For wait times, it boils down to four things:

1. The park you’re in
2. The attraction you’re standing in front of
3. The current posted wait time or fastpass return time
4. The time of day

One thing we observed on this recent trip is that the iPhone, while ridiculously easy to take a photo of a FASTPASS and email to someone, is often too blurry to read all the info (see above). So if you take a picture and timestamp on the lower-right-hand corner isn’t visible, including the timestamp in the email would help us out a lot.

Another thing we realized is that Twitter is a great way to send us wait times because of the variety of apps available for it. Just direct message or reply to @TouringPlans with the park, the attraction, the posted wait time or fastpass return time, and the time of day. The last one is pretty important as it gives us reference.  If Twitter isn’t an option, a short cellphone message to (336) 686-7791 would also work.

We’re really excited over here by the possibilities of receiving more data from the parks on a regular basis, so let us know if you have any thoughts on how we should best collect the data!