Be Our Guest: A Day with TouringPlans

TouringPlans is a company that specializes in providing information to Walt Disney World visitors.  Their website touringplans.com is the number one online Disney community in the world.  Their guidebook, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, is one of the bestselling travel books in the world, with over four million copies sold.  TouringPlans also produces an app called Disney World Lines from TouringPlans.com.  This app provides both posted attraction wait times and actual attraction wait times.  The app also allows users to create an optimal tour through any of the four parks, choosing which attractions to visit.  The app will order the attractions to minimize the time spent walking and waiting in line.  It allows users to further customize their plan with breaks, pace and other preference settings.  Walt Disney World Lines is the highest rated Disney World app including My Disney Experience, the official Walt Disney World app.

Our "classroom" for the day.

Today we had the incredible opportunity to meet with three scientists from TouringPlans.  Len Testa is the president of TouringPlans and the co-author of several guidebooks, including The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World.  Len Testa was also accompanied by two statisticians from TouringPlans, Fred Hazelton and Steve Bloom.  They led us through the Magic Kingdom to the upstairs of Liberty Tree Tavern, where they talked to us about using math and science to optimize visits to Disney.  While we were sitting in the Tavern, a man eating nearby with his family noticed the company T-Shirts the TouringPlans representatives were wearing and said “Are you guys with TouringPlans?  You guys do a great job!”  At this point the group realized what an incredible opportunity we had indeed!

Len Testa is a computer scientist and talked to us about the algorithms used to created optimal touring plans.  Creating a touring plan is a version of the Time Dependent Traveling Salesman Problem (TDTSP), which we had previously studied in our learning modules.  TouringPlans’ version of the TDTSP seeks to find the shortest path connecting a group of attractions in which each is visited only once.  The time necessary to visit each attraction changes throughout the day.  The TDTSP is in a class of problems which take an exponentially long time to solve with a guarantee of optimality.  Len Testa explained some of the heuristics his algorithm uses to produce near optimal solutions in the short period of time permitted by the computer and mobile apps (generally about 15 seconds). Fred Hazelton explained how Touring Plans uses statistics to produce accurate estimations of wait times. We were surprised to learn that Disney often posts higher wait times than are actually expected in order to dissuade guests from different rides at different times of day.  TouringPlans uses data and regression analysis to provide more realistic wait time predictions.  TouringPlans also provides its users with an estimation of how crowded each park will be on each day of the year.  Steve Bloom explained how TouringPlans uses statistics to determine how many different variables influence crowd levels.

After the presentations, Len Testa and his friends surprised us by treating us to lunch with Beauty and the Beast at the new Be Our Guest restaurant.  The restaurant is inside the Beauty and the Beast Castle.  With the delicious food and the interesting company, a great time was had by all. 

Our "Grey Stuff" cupcake:
"Try the grey stuff; it's delicious!
Don't believe us? Ask the dishes!"

We concluded our afternoon with free time in the Magic Kingdom, with a new found suspicion of Disney’s posted wait times.  Learning more about Disney today got us all even more excited for our Keys to the Kingdom Tour tomorrow, but we have a feeling our new friends from TouringPlans were able to tell us more than any cast member could reveal.

Kate and Stella