How to Use the Tools at TouringPlans.com

TouringPlans.com has many tools to go along with our multiple decades of experience. They are designed to be used by all of our subscribers to help plan their vacations. Below is an overview of our tools as well as a series of videos that help explain how to use them.

Crowd Calendar

Our Crowd Calendar tells you how busy a park is expected to be. TouringPlans offers Crowd Calendars for Walt Disney World (Florida), the Disneyland Resort (California), and the Universal Orlando Resort.

Each Crowd Calendar measures each day for the next year on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most crowded. Every day contains a few numbers: one for the overall resort and then a number for each park at that resort. Those 1-10 numbers project how long the waits are expected to be for select attractions, with 1 being the lowest expected wait time, although that can still be significant for the busiest rides.

USING THE CROWD CALENDAR TO PLAN YOUR TRIP The best use of our Crowd Calendar is in the initial planning phases of your vacation. If you have flexible date options for your trip, looking at the Crowd Calendar's resort level for any given date is the best way to help narrow down your choices. Once you have decided when to go, you can then use the individual park crowd numbers to decide which park to visit on which day.

Below is a video explaining how to use the Crowd Calendar to help you choose when to visit Walt Disney World. The same steps can be applied to any of our properties' Crowd Calendars.

Touring Plans

We love our Touring Plans so much we named the company after them! A Touring Plan is a step-by-step guide through the theme parks we cover. Touring Plans are available for Walt Disney World (Florida), the Disneyland Resort (California), and the Universal Orlando Resort.

USING A TOURING PLAN We have hundreds of pre-made Touring Plans available that you can use via our mobile app, Lines, view on your phone, or print out and bring along. All of our Plans are regularly tested and can save you hours in line versus going in without a plan. They are designed for whatever you need, be it a one-day, one-park plan, a half-day plan, or a two-day plan.

The real advantage with TouringPlans, however, is our Personalized Plans. With a Personalized Plan you can input the date you will be at the park, the times you will be there, and what rides and shows you want to do. You can even tell the plan where you are eating and when you want to take a break. Then, our supercomputers tell you the most efficient order to do all of the rides. If you use our Lines mobile app, you can even re-optimize the plan as you go to get the up-to-the-minute wait time information.

Below are a few videos that explain how to use our Personalized Touring Plans. The first one is a quick overview of creating a Personalized Touring Plan. Walt Disney World is used as the example, but the process is the same for all parks.

Part 2 of creating a Touring Plan addresses many common questions about Touring Plans and takes a little bit of a deeper look.

Creating a Touring Plan for park hopping can be a little confusing but is very easy when you know how to do it. The below video explains exactly how it works.

The below video uses the new version of our mobile app, Lines 2.0 (currently only available on iOS), to create a Touring Plan.

Reservation Finder

Dining reservations at Walt Disney World can be tricky to get sometimes. Luckily we have developed a way to help with that too. The TouringPlans Reservation Finder will send you an email or text message if it finds an available reservation with your criteria, and even sends you a link to easily reserve. This feature is only available for Disney World at this time.

The below video explains how to create a reservation request in the Reservation Finder.

Room Requests and Hotel Maps

As your trip to Disney World gets closer, TouringPlans can help you find the best room at any of Walt Disney World's many hotel resorts. We have full maps of all of the Disney-owned and operated hotels and subscribers to TouringPlans can use those maps to find a great room. You can then select the room you want and TouringPlans will contact Disney on your behalf to ask for that room. The actual room you get is subject to availability and this feature is only available at Walt Disney World at this time.

The below video explains the entire process of requesting a Disney hotel room.