While visiting Disney World, it can seem nearly impossible to experience all the rides and attractions within a week-long visit or less.

Walt Disney World

Lines for several fan-favorite attractions can quite literally be HOURS long, and Disney’s skip-the-line service, Genie+, doesn’t always fit everybody’s budget. We typically recommend rope dropping each of the Disney World parks to hit those super popular attractions early in the day. Rope dropping is when you show up to the parks as soon as they’re open in order to be among the first people on a ride or attraction. This “hack” allows you a shorter wait in most cases, so that you aren’t spending your whole day waiting in line. While we totally recommend this trick for people visiting three of the Disney World parks, there’s one park that makes us feel a little hesitant when recommending the rope drop strategy.

Disney’s Animal Kingdom is a fairly small park, as far as rides are concerned. Compared to the other Disney parks, Animal Kingdom has the fewest amount of rides, and out of these, there are really only one or two attractions that post higher waits throughout the day.

Disney’s Animal Kingdom

At the other Disney World parks, there’s typically gonna be a pretty busy attraction in each land of the park. This means that at rope drop, crowds will usually disperse so that wait times at each of those big ticket attractions will remain relatively low.

Rope drop in Adventureland

However, at Animal Kingdom, rope drop crowds typically head to one ride and one ride only: Avatar: Flight of Passage. Yep, this ride is going to be busy from park open to park close, and not even rope drop can help you with this issue. This is one of the only rides that we would absolutely recommend snagging a Lightning Lane for, unless you want to wait for two hours or more.

The most popular ride in the park as far as wait times go

Unless you’re a pretty speedy power walker or you just get super lucky, rope drop might not help you in this case. So. Our advice to you? Have a slow start on the morning of your Animal Kingdom visit. At 7AM, snag a Lightning Lane for Flight of Passage. Take your time getting ready, and then make your way into the park a while after rope drop. Most of the other wait times will still probably be low at this point. 

Long waits forevaaaa at Flight of Passage

Or, if you want to be in the park at rope drop, you could always rope drop Starbucks! wink 😉 Or, knock out ALL of the Animal Kingdom rides while you wait for your Flight of Passage return time. There are so many ways to go about it — just DON’T rope drop Flight of Passage expecting a lower wait. 

Flight of Passage

We’ll continue to keep you updated with more Disney news, reviews, and advice, so make sure to follow along for more! 

Looking for more to do in Disney’s Animal Kingdom? Click here for the SNACKS!

Which park do you always make sure to rope drop? Let us know in the comments!