Guests visiting Disney’s Hollywood Studios now have an easier way to ride the popular Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance attraction – but there are a few caveats. This week, Disney began testing a Single Rider line for Rise of the Resistance, and we made it out to Disney’s Hollywood Studios to get more information about the offering and give you a look at the process.
Rise of the Resistance Single Rider Line
As part of a limited-time test, guests can take advantage of a Single Rider line at Rise of the Resistance. We have reached out to Disney for more information about the test, but they have not responded. We’ll update you if they do. According to Cast Members at the attraction, the test is scheduled to run for a week or two before a longer-term decision is made about whether the Single Rider line will continue to be offered or not.
We’ve seen Disney test a Single Rider line before over in EPCOT at the Soarin’ Around the World attraction two summers ago. That test was, presumably, not fruitful as the Single Rider line is not currently offered and the test ended some time ago.
A similar test is now underway for Rise of the Resistance, but there are some significant caveats that have us wondering why the test even began in the first place. The first caveat is that the Single Rider line is not always guaranteed to be a shorter wait. When we visited this morning, the posted wait time for the traditional standby queue was 90 minutes during our first ride, and 85 minutes for our second ride. We waited a total of 14 minutes and 30 minutes, respectively, to be sorted with another group.
Another caveat is that you will, very likely, not be able to ride with anyone else in your group who decides to also join the Single Rider line. As you’d imagine, the Single Rider line is utilized to backfill groups from the traditional standby line to try and achieve a higher guest throughput for the attraction. We noticed that Cast Members would really, really try to find a party of two from the traditional standby line before considering taking two guests from the Single Rider line. Don’t enter the Single Rider line with the hope of riding with someone you know.
The biggest caveat, and the reason we left it for last, is that you will skip major pre-show experiences and you will enter unthemed, immersion-breaking areas. Rise of the Resistance was not built with Single Riders in mind and this test takes guests down backstage hallways. As an aside, we don’t necessarily consider the backstage hallways to be backstage during this test. Presumably, Disney doesn’t consider it to be backstage either, because there were no written or verbal restrictions on video or photos.
With the Single Rider line, you will skip the Rey pre-show ready room, and you will skip the I-TS (Intersystem Transport Ship) experience. These are both pretty critical moments for guests who have never experienced the attraction before, and we would highly suggest that you don’t use Single Rider unless you’ve already experienced the full queue/pre-show experience.
In fact, we’re surprised that this Single Rider test is happening at all given the order of operations that Disney World has taught their Cast Members. I’m not going to clutch pearls over this because I was able to ride Rise of the Resistance twice in less than an hour, and that’s pretty awesome, but “show” does come before “efficiency” with the old Four Keys guest service system.
With all of that out of the way, it’s time to actually show you what the Single Rider experience looks like!
All Single Riders will check in near the main entrance to the Rise of the Resistance attraction. A Cast Member will be holding a Single Rider sign if it is offered. After a briefing from the Cast Member that very clearly states that the Single Rider experience is truncated and skips key moments of the pre-show experience, a second Cast Member walks you (or a group) over to the exit pathway to the ride where you will enter a queue that is typically reserved for Cast Members.
A walk down the queue eventually takes you to the IT-S courtyard, where you enter from behind Poe’s X-Wing. You then walk across the courtyard, bypassing the group of guests who are part of the traditional queue and walk to a door that will take you to the First Order Star Destroyer.
A walk down a completely unthemed hallway (that was originally intended to be backstage) now takes Single Rider guests straight onto the Star Destroyer. Yes, this breaks immersion for a ride that is considered a masterpiece for Walt Disney Imagineering, but who cares when you get to bypass a 90-minute line, right? Again, if you’re experiencing Rise of the Resistance for the first time, do yourself a favor by using the traditional standby line and taking in the full experience.
In the Star Destroyer hangar, you’ll wait until a Cast Member instructs you to walk to the opposite side of the room and enter the queue on the left side of the next hallway, which is now reserved for Single Riders. Before the Single Rider test, Disney used either side of the queue to sort even-numbered or odd-numbered parties, presumably to increase efficiency and throughput for the attraction.
If we’re reading between the lines, either that sorting didn’t work well enough (prompting the Single Rider test), or Disney simply wants to run Single Rider operations to see which is more efficient.
As you’d expect, the traditional standby queue moves much quicker than the Single Rider line at this point in the queue, but Single Riders have skipped some 95% of the wait, so it’s a good tradeoff. At the front of the line, Cast Members prioritize the traditional standy queue and pull from the Single Rider line when needed to fill out a full prisoner transport group.
Here’s a video of the full Single Rider line experience up to the Star Destroyer queue!
VIDEO (or watch on YouTube)
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!
