Welcome to our post about Epcot Extended Evening Hours a new perk available to certain guests at Walt Disney World resort that allows late-night access to select rides at Epcot on select nights. In this post we cover the basics—when, how long, what rides—of this perk, but we also discuss strategy for getting the most out of your experience and include an example of a successful night we spent at the park. Read on to learn all about Extended Evening Hours at Epcot.
Basics of Epcot Extended Evening Hours
We’ll start with the basics of the Epcot version of this perk. This post will focus mostly on Epcot-specific information. If you want a more general look at the Extended Evening Hours perk, we have a separate post here.
If you’d like to skip the basics and get to the strategy, click here.
What is Extended Evening Hours?
Extended Evening Hours is a new perk available to guests of Disney Deluxe Hotels, including DVC hotels and a very select group of partner hotels. It grants these guests access to a select park, on select nights, for extra time after the park has closed to other guests. Select attractions are available, and the perk typically lasts two hours.
When is Extended Evening Hours at Epcot?
The typical schedule is once a week, either a Monday or a Wednesday. It has varied a bit, so we recommend checking the official schedule here.
What rides are included in Extended Evening Hours at Epcot?
The current list is: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, Frozen Ever After, Gran Fiesta Tour, Mission: SPACE, Soarin’, Spaceship Earth, Test Track, and The Seas with Nemo & Friends.
Additionally, Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind is open but uses a vitual queue that guests with Extended Evening Hours access can join at 6PM.
You should confirm this list is current on the Disney page.
The major attractions missing from this list are Journey into Imagination with Figment and Living with the Land.
Is Extended Evening Hours worth the cost of a deluxe hotel?
Definitely not. It’s a factor in favor of staying at a deluxe hotel, but if you had other plans you won’t want to upgrade to a deluxe hotel just for this perk. A family of four could get Genie+ at Epcot—which would get them on most of the rides without long waits—for about $80-$100, way less than the cost of upgrading any multi-night stay to a deluxe hotel from any non-deluxe hotel.
As of this post, Extended Evening Hours aren’t yet available at all the parks. Even if they were, spending $80 per day on Genie+ is going to be better value than upgrading to a deluxe hotel to stay up extra late every night.
Can I skip Epcot if I do Extended Evening Hours?
Definitely not. Well, probably not. You won’t get anything near the full Epcot experience—the World Showcase, the shopping, the eating (and drinking), the festivals, during this event. This is pretty much only about getting on these rides. And don’t forget, this doesn’t even include every ride, or even the newest ride at the park.
General Epcot Extended Evening Hours Strategy
Update: This section has not been updated to account for Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind joining the event. Remy’s uses a traditional queue and will typically be the highest priority of the night. Guardians uses a virtual queue that eligible guests can join at 6PM.
Okay, let’s start with the attraction list, ranked by importance (as determined by me, but not necessarily how I rank these rides), with the approximate length of each ride in parentheses:
Frozen Ever After (5 minutes)
Test Track (5 minutes)
Soarin’ (5 minutes)
Spaceship Earth (14 minutes)
Mission: SPACE (5 minutes)
Gran Fiesta Tour (9 minutes)
The Seas with Nemo & Friends (5 minutes)
Beauty and The Beast Sing-Along (15 minutes)
Immediately I want to flag four of these. Beauty and The Beast Sing-Along is 15 minutes long and not located near anything else that’s part of the event. As such its an absolute timesuck for a two-hour event, and I just can’t advocate going there unless you have some exigent circumstance.
Soarin’ is of course a very popular ride, but it’s another timesuck. It can easily take 20 minutes to get in and out of there (on my example night things went much better). Do you need to avoid it? No. But if there’s 30 minutes left in your evening, know that if you go to Soarin’ next it’s maybe the last thing you’ll be doing tonight, even with little to no wait. Mission: SPACE can similarly take about 15 minutes, despite being a 4-minute attraction.
Finally, Spaceship Earth—though I love it with my whole heart—is really long and prone to the occasional one-to-two minute temporary stop. While I generally am nervous about leaving any ride to be the last one of the day (because it might break down and not reopen before close), it will usually make a ton of sense to save Spaceship Earth for the very end of the night. Ride time aside, it’s also located right at the front of the park.
The key two rides you’re here for are probably Frozen Ever After and Test Track. If you only care about those two rides, you can just start with one (whichever has a lower wait when you get to the area) and then go to the other. If you want to strategically plan them, here are our thoughts.
Try to start with Frozen Ever After. If you watch Harmonious from near the Norway pavilion, check the waits during and after the show. If Frozen is down to 15 minutes or less when it’s time to start your night, just head there.
Don’t overthink it. The geography of Epcot is not friendly right now because of ongoing construction. Walks between rides are already long, and the construction might add a few minutes. You’ll waste a lot of time in two hours if you start trying to jump back and forth between areas.
Be careful saving rides for late. As happens in our below example (not to us, thankfully), anytime you save a ride for late you run the risk of it breaking down and not reopening.
Finally, Genie+ and Lightning Lanes are not available during Extended Evening Hours. If you have Genie+ at Epcot or you want to purchase an individual Lightning Lane, you’ll be using those before the hours of this event.
My Night at Epcot Extended Evening Hours
On my most recent visit to Epcot for Extended Evening Hours the park closed at 10PM, with Extended Evening Hours from 10PM to 12AM. Harmonious, the Epcot nighttime spectacular, was showing at 9:45PM.
I assume if you’re visiting Epcot Extended Evening Hours you’re going to watch Harmonious as long as it is being shown before the time the park closes. If Harmonious plays at the same time the park closes, you might not want to spend 20 minutes of your 2-hour perk watching it unless it’s your only opportunity.
I watched Harmonious from the general vicinity of the Mexico pavilion. This placed me between the Frozen Ever After and Test Track, two rides I’d consider going to right after the show if their waits were short enough. I didn’t have any interest in waits over 15 minutes, but if you’re just here for those two rides, go ahead and wait as long as you’d like. The Epcot Starbucks is nearby, too, in case you need a boost for your late night.
I saw Frozen was at 5 minutes as Harmonious ended around 10:05PM. I knew that would increase quickly because so many families with Extended Evening Hours were going to stop there and only there (I’d bet 80% of people who use the perk only visit one or both of this and Test Track). I got there at 10:08PM and boarded at 10:15PM. When I exited, the posted wait was 35 minutes.
A few notes. First, there’s no special wristband you need (like with After Hours events). Instead, Cast Members scan your Magic Band (or whatever you have that is linked to your hotel reservation) to confirm your eligibility at the entrance to the attraction. This means you’ll sometimes see a line outside the attraction even though the wait inside will be relatively short.
Second, you can save rides for as late as you’d like, but things can go wrong. On this night, Frozen broke down with 28 minutes left in the night and never reopened. Saving Frozen Ever After for that part of the night is an otherwise fine strategy, but you risk something like this happening. I’m glad I visited it early.
From here, let’s first take a look at the route I took the rest of the night:
While I’ll comment in a bit that I wished I’d done things differently, this very natural route worked out quite well.
With Gran Fiesta Tour right next door to Frozen Ever After, I walked right onto that ride, finishing my first two rides by 10:30PM. On my way out I noticed the quick service restaurant in the Mexico pavilion was still open. It was the only restaurant I noticed open during the event, though a few small snack stands across Future World were open too.
I made a small strategic error next. I knew I wanted to ride Soarin’ and The Seas with Nemo and Friends, and I knew that if I started with The Seas, Soarin’s wait would probably bottom out. Doing those two next also gives the Test Track wait a little bit of time to drop.
But my brain took me straight to Mission: SPACE (which, granted, was much closer to my current location, so maybe the right decision anyway). By the time I realized it, it was too late to correct and go around Epcot’s ongoing construction to get to the other side of (former) Future World, so I just continued.
There was no line and the posted wait was 5 minutes, but I waited 11 minutes to board at 10:49PM, turning this into about a 15-minute experience, as mentioned above.
Having boxed myself in over here, I decided just to get in line for Test Track with its posted 20-minute wait. Going anywhere else and then coming back to Test Track would take just as long as any time I’d gain by waiting for a shorter wait. I wound up waiting 16 minutes, finishing up around 11:18PM.
I had just three rides left on my list—Soarin’, The Seas with Nemo and Friends, and Spaceship Earth. I made the trek over to Soarin’, getting in line at 11:27PM and boarding only 6 minutes later. It’s absolutely the fastest I’ve ever gotten on that ride, even with no line.
Exiting The Land pavilion at 11:44PM I decided to try and fit in The Seas with Nemo and Friends, which I knew would be a walk on. I boarded at 11:46PM and was on my way to Spaceship Earth by 11:52PM—plenty of time to spare. I boarded Spaceship Earth at 11:55PM, exiting the park at 12:12AM.
Conclusions
Here’s how the final schedule looked:
10PM Extended Evening Hours Begin
10:05 Harmonious ends
10:14 Frozen Ever After
10:25 Gran Fiesta Tour
10:49 Mission: SPACE
11:13 Test Track (posted 20 actual 16)
11:33 Soarin’
11:46 The Seas with Nemo
11:55 Spaceship Earth
12AM Extended Evening Hours End
In terms of rides, this visit couldn’t have gone better—I finished all seven pretty efficiently. I missed out on Beauty and the Beast Sing Along, which was never a part of my plans for the aforementioned reasons. And I didn’t get to spend any time in the World Showcase, which I would have liked to see because many readers asked what (if anything) is open there.
My understanding from talking to a few people is that basically nothing in the World Showcase is open during this perk, so I can’t say I’m upset to not have spent time walking over there. Again, the geography of this park just isn’t friendly for shoving things into two hours.
While I wound up taking a different approach than I’d planned, I think it might have been for the better. I got lucky to have Soarin’ done quickly, to be sure. Had I headed there earlier and had a longer wait (not because of a line, just from not being lucky with the timing of the loading of the ride), I probably would have needed to skip Mission: SPACE.
Test Track spent most of the night at a 20-minute wait. I waited 16, maybe toward the end of the night it was actually closer to 10. I think it’s probably okay to reason that if Test Track is 20 minutes or less, you should head to Mission: SPACE after Gran Fiesta Tour. If Test Track is 25 minutes or more, probably go do The Seas and Soarin’ first.
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