I can see the benefit of being able to book at least 1 "must do" attraction ahead of time. Something that you are absolutely positive you want to do and want to do it on a specific day. An ideal arrangement would allow you to flag a bunch of attractions as "must do" attractions and then have the app ping you based on location data when you are (1) on property and (2) in that specific park with possible FP+ times. Once all of them are gone for that day, it starts offering you slots for the next day. For those who don't appreciate notification overload, this would be awful. For me, I would love that it knows my top attractions and is continuously making me aware of their availability (with a party setting that you can configure, perhaps on a time setting specified in the app settings as well). Wouldn't it be awesome if you just finished dinner and it tells you that a slot is available for some ride that evening, that you thought you might not be able to go on that day? Book it and go!
Problem with any rule for FP is that it won't suit everyone. On the day booking is bad for late risers, advance booking is bad for those who like to be more spontaneous but resent the best FPs being gone by the time they get there.
A 50/50 split (or any other ratio) of FPs being available in advance and becoming available on the day could be a compromise. Some may still have problems such as not being able to book the ones they want in advance though. I guess you can't please everyone all the time!
Other potential thought: if a large number of FPs come online at the time of park opening and everyone logs in simultaneously will the computer system be able to take it? You just know it would only take one day of a systems overload before there was a complete meltdown by some guests at guest relations!
Disney World Visits:
1. May-June 1998 (3 weeks)
2. May-June 2001 (3 weeks)
3. October-November 2004 (2 weeks)
4. August-September 2010 (2 weeks)
5. August-September 2017 (2 weeks)
NOW APPROACHING: 6. May 2021
I think the better idea is to have a wishlist of attractions. You can book 1 ahead of time per day. More become available throughout that day as the unclaimed spots are opened to everyone and those who dump their reservations have those available to be claimed by others.
Ideally, since only 1 FP+ per day would be pre-booked, a really intelligent system would not generate FP+ slots if the queue waits never exceed some reasonable criteria. So, on a non-busy day for the park, or for particular attractions, there just aren't many FP+ slots because they are not actually needed. The same day FP+ can be used in the same way that some express lanes are managed in cities (the cost of entry goes up depending on the demand, so the number of FP+ options opens as demand increases).
What I envision would require some serious datamining by Disney to do right, and they probably laid off all of those people, but I personally think that would be awesome. On a day when regular standby is running efficiently, it actually screws things up to let hordes of unnecessary FP+ riders through.
