Wait Times At Star Tours: The Adventures Continue

Wait times at Disneyland Park’s newest attraction Star Tours: The Adventures Continue have been out of this world since opening on June 3rd, 2011. Our fearless researcher Robbie has been reporting from Disneyland since the attraction opened. You can follow Robbie’s reports via Twitter, Facebook or the website at StarTours2Live.com. Check it out!

While the adventures continue at Disneyland let us fly over to the southeast and check in on Walt Disney World’s version of the new attraction. Opening on May 20th, 2011, it had a two week head-start on its west coast counterpart. We have a slough of wait times collected at the new attraction and it is interesting to see how the wait times compare to the previous version.

Thanks to our enthusiastic Lines users and our dedicated staff, we have collected 895 wait times at the new attraction. More than enough to get a sense of what the wait times look like on any given day. In the previous version of Star Tours, wait times typically peaked at 60 minutes on the busiest days. In fact, of the thousands of wait times we have collected over the years, on only eleven occasions did we see wait times higher than 60 minutes at Star Tours version 1. Since the re-opening about 10% of the wait times we have collected have broken the 60 minute mark and we are still seeing wait times for Star Tours in the hundreds at the Hollywood Studios. In fact, during the Memorial Day Weekend, the wait time hit 210 minutes!

If you look at the general trend of the wait times at the new attraction so far (red curve) you can see that the wait times are about double what they used to be. This is what we guessed before the attraction opened, based on our experience with other redesigned attractions in the past. We are certainly seeing evidence that wait times are low enough in the morning and late afternoon to experience the attraction without waiting a long time. Just make sure that Star Tours appears in the morning block of your touring plan or plan to use Fastpass.

Our experience also tells us that the “newness” factor of an attraction can affect its wait times for up to a year depending on the popularity of the attraction. Will that be the case for Star Tours: The Adventures Continue? Only time will tell.