If you’re a fan of visiting the Disney parks, you’ve likely come across a website called TouringPlans.com, a one-stop-shop for all of your Disney vacation planning needs. You might have created a Touring Plan to help navigate your way around the parks, used their crowd calculator to determine the least busy days to visit the parks, or even found the perfect hotel room using their Walt Disney World Resort Guide.
Last month, we were able to connect with Len Testa, President of TouringPlans.com, and co-author of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, The Unofficial Guide to Disneyland, and The Unofficial Guide to British Theme Parks, to learn more about how TouringPlans got its start, how a Touring Plan “works,” and to learn more about this vital Disney vacation planning guide.
With the amount of information we took in during our conversation with Len, we’ve decided to break the interview up into multiple parts. A portion of the interview will be released on each Tuesday in August. Part Three will focus on TouringPlans.com and Current Projects.
Part One (August 7): The Origins of TouringPlans
Part Two (August 14): How Does It Work?
Part Four (August 28): Industry Trends
Coaster101: How many staff does TouringPlans employ?
Len Testa: Seven full time and about a dozen part time. Full time, we’ve got me, obviously, two statisticians, Fred and Steve, a couple of programmers, Sarah and David, Guy Selga, our Disneyland Guy, Gerelyn, our fantastic customer support person. Part time, we’ve got a bunch of people: Brian McNichols who does our YouTube videos, a bunch of other people who work in the blog and website, and then interns and whatnot.
Coaster101.com: There’s a lot more to TouringPlans than just the individual touring plans or the Lines App. What do you feel is one or some of the more underrated features of TouringPlans.com?
Len Testa: I think everyone knows about the TouringPlans, the crowd calendar, and the wait times on our site. Have you seen our hotel room photos? It’s insane.
Back in the day, when I first became co-author of the unofficial guide, 2003-2010, Bob and I had this policy of always answering all of the email that we got from the unofficial guide. In 2010, which was the last full year I answered all of my own email, I got something like 16,000 emails, and if you break that down its something like 40-45ish emails a day. A lot of those emails were asking some variation of the following question? I’m staying at [Resort], Which Room Should I request? I want [characteristic A, B and C].
Bob and I were sitting at Pop Century one day discussing this and answering that many emails in a day was a full-time job, no matter how terse you are. So, we decided we had to figure something out. The idea was “why don’t we just take photos of the view you get from every room in Walt Disney World?” I threw that idea out to Bob and said, we’ll take pictures of all them, put them in a database, put them on the web, and let people figure it out. Bob thought it would be impossible, and thought it was insane. There’s 25,000 hotel rooms on Disney Property, some of them have multiple windows, you’re probably looking at 30,000 photos. We call over our staff photographer Richard Macko, who was taking landscape photos of Pop Century at the time, and I told him, “tomorrow, I want you stand in front of each window of Pop Century in one building and tell me how long it’s going to take to take photos in front of every window at Pop Century.” It took him about an hour. The hard part wasn’t taking the photos, it was renaming the files to the room numbers. If you do the math, you could literally do a photo of every room on property in like a month. So, I told Richard to get into every hotel room he could – the Values and the Moderates are easy, because they’re all exterior windows. For the deluxes, I’ll say we got some cooperation from Disney, and I’ll leave it at that. But of the 25,000 hotel rooms, we ended up with 30,003 photos to start with.
Then what we did was build custom maps for our website. They show you where every room of every floor is located at every resort. Disney also gave us a spreadsheet that said, this is the room number, this is our view category for it, these are the kind of beds that are in the room, and if there are ADA compliant features in the room, here’s what they are – roll in shower, bath bars, teletype, we had that. It took a couple months to do the photos, it took the better part of a year to get the maps and the database updated. We launched it in 2015, and people “got” what we were trying to do right away. It’s one of our most used features on the website. We later added a feature that if you told us a room that you liked and gave us your reservation number, we would fax Disney your room request 5 days before you showed up, asking for that particular room, and we know if the particular rooms around it are like it, so if you asked for a room that was unavailable, we also included 5 other rooms that would be similar.
The success rate is somewhere around 60%, and when it doesn’t work, it’s usually for one of two reasons. One is someone is already in the room that you want. Disney’s average occupancy is around 85%, so there’s an 85% chance that someone is already in your room. The other reason is, to be blunt, people are asking for upgrades that they didn’t pay for, and that’s very difficult for Disney to do. People who book a standard garden view at the Contemporary, please upgrade me to Magic Kingdom view or Club Level. It may happen, but it’s difficult. You can’t prevent people from doing that, but that’s the feedback we got from Disney: “I hate to say no this” but the computer system doesn’t just let them do it.
The other funny thing is that within our little community, we seeded the photo database with 30,000 photos, and we asked our users, “hey, when you check in, can you take a picture of the view you get from the room and send it to us?” That’s how we’re filling in the gaps. For the vast majority of rooms right now, we’ve got at least one photo. The funny thing is our users started finding rooms that were really good value. A room at the Contemporary that wasn’t labeled theme park view, but is theme park view, and they started sharing the rooms among themselves. How we found about it was that there are some rooms in the Contemporary where we’ve got 1 or 2 photos. There are other rooms in the contemporary where we have like 39 photos, and we were wondering how that happened. “We have 39 photos for this room, but only 2 for the rooms on either side of it. What is going on here?” So, we started asking around, and apparently on our discussion boards, there’s a thread on best rooms in The Contemporary, and people will say “here’s the room number to ask for.”
This is the thing I like, and I say this without any traces of modesty, whatsoever. We’ve invented a lot of things in the Disney community. Bob invented the Touring Plan, I think we invented the crowd calendar. I like to consider ourselves the “thought leaders” in Disney Vacation Planning. We try to solve problems that other people haven’t yet considered as problems. And we take that role seriously. I’ve heard from people who have said “I had a bad day at work, I’ve logged onto the site just to look at pictures of Animal Kingdom Lodge just to make myself feel better.”
Another one of the things I tell people is about the Least Expensive Ticket Calculator we have on our website. Back in the day, Bob was telling me “Families go to Walt Disney World, and they don’t know what kind of ticket to buy.” This was back in the day when Magic Your Way first came out, and you had the base ticket, the hopper ticket, and then you could add on different options. We looked at it and said, the average family’s got a dozen or two dozen different ticket options to consider, plus there are all these third-party options out there who sell discounted tickets. If you’re trying to get the best deal for what you want to do, we figured you would have to literally sit down with a spreadsheet and a pencil and a calculator to figure out what you would want to do. It would take you a few hours. Bob originally said “can you summarize what to do to find the least expensive tickets to buy in 3-5 bullet points?” Do this, and if that doesn’t work, do this, and so on.
So, I spent a week on it, and I told Bob, the answer is no. There’s no way you can do this and go through all these combinations, so we wrote some software to do it. It’s an example of operations research in this thing called a knapsack problem. It’s a lot like the television show “Supermarket Sweep,” where they give you a minute with a shopping cart to run through the store and get as many high-value items as you can. How do I fit as many valuable things in my backpack or knapsack as possible? Buying the least expensive combination of tickets is the same problem. We wrote this program, and we solved it. We have this feature on the website, where you tell me how many adults are going, how many kids are going, and how many days you want to visit the parks. Whether you’re going to park hop or visit the water parks, etc. It’s basically a search engine. It goes out and finds all of the vendors plus tickets, who has the least expensive combination of tickets for exactly what you want for your trip. We provide that for free. We don’t get affiliate commission, we don’t charge people, it’s part of the public good that we do for the Disney Community. That’s one of the most popular features of our site, and we’ve saved people millions of dollars over the years. I know that we sell 3-6 million worth of tickets a month through that, and it’s pretty insane.
Coaster101.com: What are you currently working on? Are there plans to add more parks, Disney or otherwise, in the future?
Len Testa: We’re actually working on something completely different in healthcare, and I’ll tell you how it started. Back in 2015, I got an email from one of our TouringPlans users. He is an endocrinologist and treats patients with diabetes. He wrote to me and said “This thing you’re doing with the Touringplans software, where you’re evaluating millions and millions of different combinations of Touring Plans to figure out which is best, can you do the same thing for Diabetes?” The problem is that a patient walks into his office, newly diagnosed with Type II diabetes, and he’s got like 60 different medications he can choose from to treat this patient. He’d typically give the patient 1 to 5 of them, depending on how severe their diabetes is. There are six million different ways in which you can prescribe 1-5 out of 60 medications. He asked me if I could write software to do it.
My “Sunday project” in 2015 was that. He basically taught me how he treats patients with diabetes, walking through the decision process, and I wrote a prototype in code, and we got it to a point where it was working fairly well. We took it to a conference, won their poster competition at this endocrinology conference, and based on that we started a clinical trial of the software in 2016 in Kentucky that recently ended, but we got great results on it. We were able to reduce people’s A1C levels by 1.5% in 90 days, which is very good. We’ve been working on that software actively since 2016. We cleared our FDA approval process last year, and we’ve been doing some really interesting things lately, so we’re testing that out a lot.
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