“Just Open The Line!” “Make It FastPass Only!” Nope. Here’s why Rise of the Resistance’s Boarding Groups Are Here to Stay… 

Imagine you lead Walt Disney World’s operations team.

You preside over the operations of the world’s most talked-about theme park experience – Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance… a single attraction so sought-after, families are willing to set 4AM alarms on their vacation to rouse kids from their peaceful slumber just to get a chance to see what’s inside; a ride unanimously called the world’s most ambitious; the attraction that’s literally redefining the capabilities of a theme park experience before our very eyes; the ride everyone wants to ride.

Now all you need to do is figure out how to get people on board.

We’ve all seen it on Facebook, Twitter, or Disney Parks discussion boards: “Just open the line!” “Make it FastPass only!” Would it really be that easy? Well, next time you see those comments, send them this article… Because today, we’re going to tackle this problem once and for all. With some detective work, we’ll see exactly what the future may hold for the queue of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance.

The case…

If you and I are going to untangle the best way to get guests into Rise of the Resistance, first we need to know what we’re dealing with.

As of February 2020, Rise of the Resistance is reportedly averaging 700 – 1,400 people per hour (gradually working its way toward a reported ideal capacity of 2,400 people per hour).

That means that on a typical 12-hour day, the currently-possible best operations of the ride can get through about 17,000 guests (even though, once it’s running efficiently and continuously, it’ll be closer to 28,000 people per day). So right now, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is reportedly maxing out at 17,000 guests per day. 17,000 slots to be filled; 17,000 seats available; 17,000 guests who can realistically experience the world’s most sought-after attraction on any given day. 17,000, period. And 17,000 guests seems like a lot…

… Except, it isn’t. In 2018, Disney’s Hollywood Studios attendance was estimated at over 11 million guests. In other words before Galaxy’s Edge opened, Disney’s Hollywood Studios reportedly averaged 30,000 guests per day. (Disneyland’s attendance is even higher at an average of 50,000 guests per day, making its version of Rise even more of a hot ticket.)

To recap: more than 30,000 guests; 17,000 slots. There’s no two ways around it. That means that for right now, only half of guests visiting Disney’s Hollywood Studios on any given day can even potentially get on the world’s hottest attraction. And sure, some guests don’t want to ride Rise of the Resistance; some aren’t interested; some don’t know it requires a unique process to get on board, and many aren’t present at park opening; a good chunk aren’t tall enough even if they wanted to! Once the ride is operating fully, efficiently, and continuously, its 28,000 people per day capacity should be enough to handle the demand; but for now, demand for this ultra-E-Ticket outweighs supply. Period.

And this is important: for now, there’s nothing you do can make more “slots.” The “slots” are the “slots.” Period. 17,000. Sure, some days you may only end up to 12,000; some days, you may hit 19,000! But for the purposes of planning, you should count on 17,000 available slots per day.

Let’s make the situation a little bit more complex. It’s not just that your headlining new ride is only regularly handling 60% of the capacity it’s designed for; it’s also prone to frequent downtime. Made of three separate but deeply interconnected ride systems, it occasionally sputters to a halt. Some fixes are fast, merely interrupting the movement of guests through queues and carefully-coordinated pre-shows that rely on precision timing and guest flow. Sometimes, downtime means a system shut-down, emptying not only the ride, but queuing guests who’ve earned a coveted spot in line. 

And speaking of those guests, if you think you’re upset that your headlining attraction is operating with only 17,000 slots even realistically possible, imagine the frustration of the 30,000+ daily guests who are all counting on this ride to be the capstone of their once-in-a-lifetime trip. 

Yes, you are in charge of the world’s best trackless dark ride, featuring the most amazing Audio-Animatronic on Earth… and twice as many people want to ride it as can physically fit on it on given day. You’ve got the pieces of a really complex problem… so let’s run some solutions.

Solution 1: “Just open the line!”

A common refrain heard by frustrated guests today is simple: just open the line! And it sounds like it makes sense, right? Just open the line. Let people into the ride’s queue. If I choose to wait in a twelve hour line, I should be able to. 

But hold on… Remember those 17,000 slots? Remember those 30,000 eager guests? So if Disney simply “opened the line” and let guests walk into the queue, what would happen?

While there’s no way the park’s full, average attendance of 30,000 guests would be present at park opening or that all 30,000 guests would want to ride even if they were, the daily sell-out of the ride’s capacity within a minute tells us that there are enough guests in the park each morning to fill the ride’s daily capacity, and then some. Put simply, there are more guests present at park opening and hoping to ride Rise of the Resistance than there are “slots” available in the day. (If that weren’t the case, Boarding Groups wouldn’t sell out immediately, right?)

So if Disney “just opened the line” in the most orderly and controlled method possible, guests would need to tap into the park, then immediately join a queue of thousands and thousands of guests whose sole intent would be to march to the ride’s entrance. First, this seems to incentivize early arrivals – a temporarily-tried solution in the ride’s first few days that saw guests arrive at 5 AM, then 4 AM, then 3 AM in successive mornings… something Disney actively wanted to avoid (for obviously reasons – try explaining to a DVC family splurging at the Grand Floridian that they need to wake up at 2 AM to get on the new, hot Star Wars ride).

Best case scenario, Disney would carefully, slowly, and thoughtfully guide those guests present at opening (by nature of today’s sell-outs, 17,000 or more) through a massive, sprawling, makeshift queue wrapping throughout the entire park. (Worst case scenario, we can imagine fist-fights, trampled strollers, sprinting parents, and massive bottlenecks as guests race for the line, knowing its supply can’t meet the demand of the present crowd.) But even once guests made it to the line, Disney would need to cut the queue entirely after 17,000 guests had entered, leaving at least a few thousand guests (the ones currently disappointed by missing a Boarding Group at park opening) out in the cold. 

And for the “winners” of this migration to the ride’s queue, the misery is only beginning. By definition of those 17,000 guests accounting for the full day’s capacity, those in the middle of the line would be looking at a 5-6 hour wait; it’s more like 10-12 for the last folks in. And based on the continued willingness of Resistance hopefuls to wake up and Uber to Disney’s Hollywood Studios before dawn, it’s clear that the “buy-in” and percieved worth of this attraction remains massive and unprecedented, meaning that despite common industry knowledge, guests probably would queue all day for this experience! They’d hate it; but they’d do it.

And that’s where the real problems begin. So to take stock of this situation:

1. The line would still be “full” (with all 17,000 daily spots spoken for) within a minute of park opening and would be closed to new guests.
2. Disney would still have a crowd of incredibly angry guests who didn’t get their chance, just like they do now… except there would be no way to communicate to the crowd of thousands gathered outside the ride’s entrance that its line was full for the day.
3. The ride would still be limited to 17,000 people per day, only now all 17,000 would need to physically stand in a queue line for up to 12 hours – a miserable, outrageous, and practically inhumane situation that would ruin the day for most. And sure, some people argue, “Hey, if you’re willing to waste 12 hours in line, you should have that as a choice.” But…
4. When the ride’s physical queue space needs emptied due to inevitable downtime, those 17,000 people – the ones who’ve been standing and waiting for up to 12 hours – would literally just be tossed back out into the park. How do you get them back when the ride’s ready? How do you keep them in order? How do you keep others from “sneaking in” with them when the ride re-opens?
5. Even if Disney managed to cut the line at 17,000 guests, what would happen if it was a particularly bad day for the ride? A day when it only made it through, say, 15,000? It’s not just that 2,000 guests “promised” a ride didn’t get on board… is that by nature of being at the back of the line, guests who ultimately don’t get a ride spent 11 – 12 hours waiting… an entire day.

So even though some fans rally that Disney should “just open the line,” that would literally be the absolute worst decision possible. The takeaway here? 17,000 slots are 17,000 slots. Opening the queue to guests doesn’t magically give the ride more capacity. The queue would still need cut off once the ride’s daily capacity had been reached, and that would still happen in a matter of seconds after park opening. It’s just that now, those guests who survived the process to get there would be trapped physically standing in a queue line for a ride subject to frequent evacuations and breakdowns. Yikes…

But hey, Disney has a built-in system designed to keep people from being trapped in queues, right? What if Rise of the Resistance went full-on “FastPass only”… Hmm… Could this often-repeated line really solve Rise of the Resistance’s operational limitations? Read on…

Solution 2: “Make it FastPass+ only”

A-ha! Another answer that seems to make perfect sense at first glance!

Okay, so admittedly, we’re not big believers in FastPass anyway as evidenced by a similarly-scientific, must-read editorial explaining why FastPass makes your Disney waits worse, not better. But for the sake of argument here, let’s imagine FastPass being the method of getting aboard Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance. Right off the bat, we can eliminate any hope of a “Stand-by” option at all given the mess we saw in Solution 1. But maybe that’s not so bad! Why shouldn’t Rise of the Resistance be 100% FastPass? Like, FastPass only? Why can’t a 100% pre-booked virtual queue be the solution? 

So let’s try it. Let’s dedicate 100% of the ride’s capacity to FastPass. That seems clever enough, simply allowing its realistic capacity (remember, currently about 17,000 guests per day) to pre-book into 1,400 person, hour-long return windows. Sure, this would cause the My Disney Experience app to essentially crumble every morning at 7:00 AM when FastPass becomes available to Disney World Resort Hotel guests, creating a Hunger Games style refreshing tournament… but hey, at least the carnage would be digital instead of the morning-of, in the park. 

So voila! FastPass solves it, right? After all, it removes the massive crush of “just opening the line” and prevents day-of heartbreak. But let’s take a look at the results of a “FastPass only” option:

1. … the line would still be “full” (with all 17,000 daily spots spoken for) within a minute 7:00 AM, just 60 days out instead of the morning of.
2. … this FastPass-only system would somewhat inadvertently mean only guests staying on Disney property could ride Rise of the Resistance, period, since they book 60 days ahead of time rather than 30… and sure, Disney making the world’s most-desired ride essentially exclusive to guests staying in their very pricey hotels would look pretty bad… But at least everyone would know 60 days out whether or not they’re riding. No early wake-ups; no day-of disappointments. Two months out from your day, you’d have a “yes” or a “no” (and the guarantee that, if you’re staying off-site, it’s a “no”). Right?
3. … except, not right… Because what this solution fails to account for is that pesky downtime we mentioned in the case. Sure, while FastPass would elegantly hand out the ride’s expected hourly capacity of 60 riders in neat, clean, hour-long return windows, there’s a problem. What if the ride closes for 10 minutes? 30 minutes? For a few hours? What if the ride was entirely closed from 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM?

Let’s expand on that last scenario… that FastPass reservations have been fully distributed for the ride, claiming all 17,000 of its daily slots by sectioning guests into 1,400-person, hour-long return windows. If the ride is closed from 1:00 – 3:00, the nearly 3,000 guests assigned return times between those hours will need to return after 3:00… That’s standard procedure for FastPass even today; if a ride is down during your return window, you can return any time for the rest of the day (or another experience, but let’s be honest, who’d choose Slinky Dog Dash over Rise of the Resistance?)

But hold on… we handed out 100% of the ride’s capacity, remember? If the ride loses two hours of operation, it loses two hours of capacity, period. Those 3,000 guests who were assigned a return window between 1:00 and 3:00 will expect to get their chance to ride…! And since 100% of the capacity for every remaining hour is spoken for, the only way to allow that to happen is:

1. to make those 1:00 – 3:00 people come back after every other guest with FastPass has been served during their assigned hour
2. to slide everyone’s return window two hours, so the 1:00 – 2:00 window gets on board when the ride re-opens at 3:00, the 5:00 – 6:00 window rides from 7:00 – 8:00, etc… How would you communicate that to guests? Organize that chaos?

Either way, this two-hour downtime didn’t just displace 3,000 people promised a ride; it did so on a ride whose capacity is 100% spoken for the rest of the operating day. You have two hours worth of riders who are going to want to ride, which means whether you choose option 1 or option 2, you are going to need to extend the ride’s operating day by two hours. So not only is your ride working overtime, but it’s extended operation is eating into the precious overnight maintenance time needed to make it all happen again tomorrow!

And as unlikely as it may seem, imagine the opposite: that the ride is running so well, it handles the 17,000 guests planned from 1:00 – 2:00 by 1:30! Now, the ride will sit idly for 30 minutes waiting for the 2:00 group to return… literally just wasting time… sitting… unused… the most sought-after ride on Earth. Uh, yikes.

Put simply, FastPass has the right idea, but inherently lacks the flexibility this temperamental ride needs; the ability to call guests back as available and not in pre-set time increments.

What doesn’t work

So let’s review.

• “Just open the line” would create a wildly inefficient entry experience, a line that reaches the ride’s 17,000 person daily capacity within seconds of park opening, a miserable waiting experience, a chaotic situation during any ride closure… and would still only serve 17,000 guests per day.
• “Make it FastPass only” would mean the ride would still sell out seconds after slots become available… just months in advance. Not to mention, this would all-but-officially limit the ride to only Disney Resort Hotel guests, would basically shatter the ride’s flexibility around its numerous and frequent breakdowns… and it would still serve only 17,000 guests per day.

Here’s the ultra-important key to understanding the operational plan for Rise of the Resistance: for now, the ride can handle 17,000 people per day; 17,000 slots to fill. Its capacity is its capacity. Period. And because there are fewer slots available per day than there are Disney’s Hollywood Studios guests hoping to ride, the fight is over how that capacity is distributed. And while folks online are quick to declare that they should “just open the line” or “make it FastPass only,” hopefully you can see that both of those “Solutions” would literally be catastrophic in their own ways.

So what would solve it? 

Solution 3: Boarding Groups

Let’s reimagine that FastPass strategy. Maybe 100% of Rise of the Resistance’s slots should be available via FastPass with absolutely no miserable, fruitless Stand-by option… Maybe all 17,000 slots should be up for grabs and reserved…

• … but to give non-resort guests a fighting chance, maybe the opportunity to get that FastPass should be the day-of, and to keep guests from arriving at 3 AM, they should only become available the second the park opens – equally available to any guest in the park at the moment of its opening regardless of how early they got there or how much their hotel cost;
• … and to avoid the inherent inflexibility and rigidness of pre-scheduled return windows that would decimate the ride’s operations during closures or exceptionally good periods, the FastPass shouldn’t have an exact time listed and instead simply be numerical;
• … and then, Disney should have a system for calling those FastPass groups back in small batches, so that when the ride is running well, more groups can be called; and when the ride breaks down, only a small number of guests even knows while the rest are simply waiting for their promised – but not concretely timed – invitation to return.

Congratulations: we just invented Boarding Groups!

Yes, Disney’s solution to both keep access to the ride equitable and to remain flexible and fluid to adjust to its ever-changing capacity essentially solves as many problems as a queuing system can solve. 

Sure, the virtual queue “Boarding Groups” distribute the ride’s daily capacity in seconds (an inevitability with any system, as we saw) but do so safely (no stampedes), efficiently (no park-spanning makeshift queue) and equitably (available day-of for any guest in the park, not months ahead of time for Hotel guests only); and without the restrictive “return times” promised by FastPass (inherently at odds with the ride’s ebbing and flowing capacity), Disney can call back small groups to experience Rise of the Resistance as available – more or fewer guests than anticipated at any given hour, as the day goes!

While it’s easy to see why some guests (particularly those who don’t manage to snag a Boarding Group) rally against the system, their argument against it typically labels it a “Lottery.” And the truth is, they’re right. For the very reasons we’ve explored above, Disney purposefully de-incentivized arriving at 3 AM; they intentionally and equitably ensured a Disney Resort Hotel stay was not a requirement to ride; they thoughtfully developed a system that can remain fluid during the day and between days, adjusting in real time to the expected and unexpected tides of Rise of the Resistance. Boarding Groups are equally available to everyone present at park opening, with only uncontrollable variables (like Internet speed, app performance, or reaction time) dictating the end result, and the percentage of “winners” determined by the ride’s expected capacity for the day and the number of guests who show up.

Is the Boarding Group system perfect? Of course not. But with demand outweighing supply for the foreseeable future, “just opening the line” or “making the ride FastPass only” would be catastrophic mistakes that would fundamentally shatter the ride’s operations.

The end result…

There’s a reason Boarding Groups are still in effect… and may be for a very, very long time. After all, until Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance is able to effectively, efficiently, and regularly handle most guests who wants to ride it, demand is going to outweigh supply… and that means Disney must have a system that’s viewed as equitable and flexible.

For now – and for the foreseeable future – that’s Boarding Groups. Now, do we think it’s possible for Disney to release a batch at park opening, a batch at noon, and a batch at 5:00, adjusting the number of Boarding Groups as the day progresses? Maybe… But those pesky inefficiencies, hurt feelings, and broken promises would still be a part of this flawed – but ultimately, equitable – system.

Until then, those eager to snag a coveted seat aboard Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance will need to continue planning on being outside of Disney’s Hollywood Studios (or Disneyland) no less than an hour before park opening. Get through security, tap in, and get your My Disney Experience app ready… Once the park’s opening second strikes, all bets are off… but at least there are no stampedes! After all, it’s easy to understand why guests would be frustrating with Boarding Groups (particularly if they didn’t manage to snag one)! But ask yourself, if you didn’t click “Join Boarding Group” fast enough, what makes you think you could’ve beat at least 13,000 people in a physical race to the line?

So next time someone on Facebook, Twitter, or a Disney Parks discussion board demands that Disney “just open the line” or “make it FastPass only,” send them this article… Maybe it’ll change their mind!