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Credit: DisneyEPCOT just hosted the first of its After Hours – but Guests aren’t overly impressed with the outcome.
For select nights through August 24, 2023, EPCOT is set to continue the magic after its posted operating hours. Guests who purchase a ticket to the Park’s After Hours event will be able to experience “an evening of magic and thrills,” complete with selected free snacks, exclusive character meet and greets, and lower wait times for select attractions.
While EPCOT’s After Hours event technically starts at 10 p.m., Guests are free to enter the Park from 7 p.m. Once in, they can enjoy all EPCOT has to offer until 1 a.m.
But according to early reactions from the event’s first night, these offerings weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Midway through the event, a Guest took to Reddit to brand EPCOT After Hours “a disaster” thanks to long queues, broken rides, and confusion over the free snacks.
GOG is a 60 minute wait with one train down and Remys is down too. Lots of people are unhappy…
Edit: The snack stations were weird too. Water, popcorn and ice cream were all separated. And the water and ice cream stations weren’t lit and at first didn’t have any product out so you didn’t know what was what.
Overall I don’t think I saw anyone get rude on either side but the disappointment was just so thick in the air right out of the gate.
Test Track was also down for approximately an hour, and ran at low capacity once reopened. The same user also highlighted issues with a lack of Cast Members, which led to operation issues on Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind.
I have not seen a single cast member on GoG in the entire line. The three doors that open automatically didn’t even open and people just pushed them open. Nobody was there to make everyone stand inside the light ring either so we sat there for a bit until someone came on an intercom to yell at everyone.
Another user chimed in to share their own disappointing experience, adding that the Park’s Disability Access Service (better known as DAS) wasn’t working, which meant that Cast Members on Cosmic Rewind – which operated a standby queue for the first time in its history – were “letting DAS users straight through without a return time, further making the standby line a standstill. The wait time was almost double of that with a virtual queue.”
EPCOT After Hours is priced at $139 per person ($129 on select nights and $99 for Annual Passholders and Disney Vacation Club Members). Considering the high cost, these kinds of complications are frustrating – but sometimes unavoidable. Fingers crossed for a smoother experience on future nights.
