The Big Top Tent, as the name implies, is an indoor waiting area. But it's not a traditional queue. It's actually an indoor playground, where children can burn off steam while they wait their turn on the Dumbo ride. Parents will be given a restaurant-style pager which will light up when it's time to ride.
Here's a look, from Disney:
Dumbo long was known as the most brutal wait in the park. The spinner ride offers a low capacity (only a couple hundred riders per hour) and used to be positioned in a shadeless place in Fantasyland, with a simple back-and-forth linear queue. Given the huge number of kids who wanted to ride with Dumbo, the wait time for the ride blew up early in the morning, and typically remained among the longest in the park throughout the day.
As part of the New Fantasyland expansion, Disney smartly added a second Dumbo carousel, doubling the ride's capacity. (And causing some of us to dub the new version of the ride "Dueling Dumbos.") That should help to cut the ride's wait time in half, and the addition of an indoor wait area should help make even that wait more bearable.
But here's my question: Will some kids decide that they prefer the new indoor playground to the ride itself? It looks kinda neat, and you can't beat an indoor, air-conditioned play area during a hot, sunny Central Florida summer. Will the play area become an attraction unto itself, drawing even more kids to Dumbo and expanding the wait? Will the need to pry kids away from the play area and onto the ride when their "ticket" buzzes slow down the loading on the ride, negating the capacity advantage of the second carousel?
I'm curious to see how this new wait area concept plays out in the world's most popular theme park. If it is a hit, and does make the wait more enjoyable without making it significantly longer, I suspect that this might be a move that Disney - and other parks - look to duplicate on other child-focused theme park rides.
Update: Hearing that the Big Top Tent play area soft-opened today. Reports?
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The doubled capacity should reduce the wait, but I doubt it will cut it in half. With such a huge line before, no doubt there were people who wanted to ride but skipped it altogether because of the wait. A reduction in wait time will draw in additional riders who would have otherwise skipped it, partially offsetting any capacity improvements.
This new style virtual queue makes sense for Dumbo, but I fear the day it will no longer be possible to just go to a Disney theme park and simply ride what you feel like riding. Instead, you'll have to plan every last minute of your day months in advance. Woo boy, that sure sounds like fun.
Maybe, but they still expect to ride Dumbo. I was wondering how long it takes to go from indoor queue to ride. It should not take longer than 30 minutes or the kids will get bored.
There will still be an outdoor queue. Will there be 1 hour waits outside?
To answer an earlier question. The pagers page you, but you'll still have a cycle or two wait before you can ride. Disney will queue up people enough people so they don't reduce capacity and have to wait for people to arrive.
Doubling up Dumbo was the best thing Disney could do to address capacity. This new queue approach is kind of nonsense. It's like FastPass, it just drives up the overall waits across the park. You may get front-of-the-line access on one ride, but you'll wait twice as long or longer in the stand-by line for another compared to the days when FP didn't exist.
I actually hope this isn't repeated anywhere else @ WDW. WDI has turned what used to be a bear of a wait for an iconic ride, into a full blown immersive experience. It would be a more cumbersome attraction where the ride capacities are higher.
Any operational aspects of this addition are going to ebb and flow with experience. Disney will make adjustments as needed in order to address any major issues.
I'm suprised at the negative feedback so far. I would think folks would see this as the ultimate solution to snaking queues and an hour of staring at the butt infront of you. The cynic rules the web, I guess.
I am quite sure they already have it worked out in their heads how the page system will work and I imagine they will probably have it set up that they call two rotations of the ride to come to the ride staging area at once for each ride so there will be no chance of having empty "Dumbos" flying around.
What I dont see as working is the pagers. It would seem the number that they would need could really become untenable. Maybe more like getting a fast pass ticket. but with a really small time window? That seems like it might work better.
Plus, yuck to all those buzzers that are completely manhandled by all those sweaty, grubby hands. Yeah, I know, handrails and whatnot. But this really grosses me out.
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