Help me plan time at Universal Studios!

[Anonymous]

Also: is it possible to buy access to the park an hour early or does that only come with staying at one of the on-site hotels?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:So is there any point in buying the Express pass if the only interest is Harry Potter rides?

Yes. Because you'll get bored with the Harry Potter rides. There's only five of them, and one of them is Hogwarts Express, which takes you between parks. You'll probably want to do the rest of the park(s) as well.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Also: is it possible to buy access to the park an hour early or does that only come with staying at one of the on-site hotels?

IMHO, the early access isn't worth it. Everyone makes a beeline to HP anyway, so you end up waiting in line. Took us an hour even to GET INTO Diagon Alley last summer -- there were THOUSANDS of people with early passes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I'm taking DD who is 11 on Monday and we have the 3-day Park-to-Park, staying onsite at Cabana Bay and already have reservations for the Three Broomsticks and Leaky Cauldron breakfasts. We have the HP early admission passes. We also got passes to the American Express Lounge - is that worth using?

We get there early in the day on Monday and want to make the most of the remainder of that day since it a non-park day for us. Are there spas at CityWalk, and what are not-miss places there to spend the afternoon? Any suggestions for dinner? We'd like one nice one the first night before gearing up for early for the parks. This is a rare trip for DD and me alone, without DH and DS. We are both Harry Potter nerds. TIA.

Isn't Three Broomsticks counter service? I didn't know you could make reservations.

We are going next month and staying at Royal Pacific.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You want to get the park to park tickets for sure, don't just do one park per day because it is easy to jump back and forth on the train plus you want to be able to ride the train and you can't if you only do one park a day tickets (they check before you enter the turnstiles).

If the goal is HP then you want to have the on-site HP express pass that will allow you to bump to the front of the line and maybe even do it early. But if you are going during the week at a down time, you may not need express passes. It's one thing to wait 25 minutes up to 45 minutes for a ride (I think that is normal and doable) but if the wait is 60 plus minutes then you need them. When we went last week, we never had to wait more than 40 minutes for HP but Minions has the long wait consistently. I am an earlier poster and I want to stress checking out the crowd predictions for when you are going to see if it is worth it and having a plan as to what to ride first. Get there first thing at opening, do Minions (if that interests you) then do HP. If you can get to HP area before 10, you will be fine. In US, for HP I would do the ride first and then look around and take pictures and buy the wand and grab a snack. Then I'd check out what is going on in IOA as for timing of HP on that side. If the waits aren't long, I'd take the train over. If the waits are long, I'd stay in US and make HP in IOA my first stop the next day.

My dd has the interactive wand. Is it worth it -- H*** no! But was it cute and kept us busy trying to do the spells -- absolutely. It's just now that we home, it is pointless but if we ever go again, we'd take it back and use. I will say that the HP part of the parks are crazy crowded and there is no way you can do all of the spells or even half. We only did 5 per park and the lines for that were 4 or 5 deep, plus it takes awhile to make them actually work.

How long were the waits to do the wand interactions?

I am planning to get the wand for my 6yo but afraid it will just be more lines and make our trip worse.

[Anonymous]

Help! Now I can only buy park-to-park tickets online that allow entry into each park once per day! Did i read it wrong before? I thought I could buy park-to-park tickets that allowed access to each multiple times per day. Agh.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Help! Now I can only buy park-to-park tickets online that allow entry into each park once per day! Did i read it wrong before? I thought I could buy park-to-park tickets that allowed access to each multiple times per day. Agh.

Where are you reading this? I'm pretty sure Universal offers same-day readmission on all tickets. Otherwise CityWalk wouldn't make money.

[Anonymous]

Just got back from Universal Studios Florida. We bought front of the line passes. For HP, we all did single rider and walked on the rides.