I’ve bought a ticket to USJ in 2 weeks as a single rider during weekday, I’m planning to arrive there early, should I still get the express pass as a single rider? If I do which one should I get because there are a lot of choices.
And how does express ticket works? Especially the time-designated one? Will it automatically assigned when I ordered the ticket, or should I still manually choose the time when I arrived at the park just like everyone else?
Is it possible to do most of these in one day without express pass? Here’s the rides that seems interesting to me:
* Super Nintendo World
* Mario Kart
* Yoshi’s Adventure
* Buy the Mario Kart popcorn bucket
* I’m planning to arrive early around 7AM then rush to the area, although I still feel like it’s a bit risky in case I depart a bit late since I’m usually not a morning person or there’s something I don’t know I should do that delay my entrance to the park
* Should I get the power band?
* Anything else I can do?
* Harry Potter
* Hippogriff and/or Forbidden Journey
* Should I do both if both of them are crowded? If not which one is better?
* Jujutsu Kaisen
* 4D ride
* Buy the popcorn bucket
* Hollywood Horror Night
* I’ve never heard about this, but from what I’ve read that there will be a zombie parade at night
* Are all of the attraction listed on the web (Biohazard, Sadako, Chucky, Universal Monsters) haunted houses?
* Are they crowded? Can I enter all of them at one day? If not which one should I try?
* Spider-Man
* Hollywood Dream – The Ride: Backdrop
* JAWS
I want to enjoy my visit here and feel it’s worthwhile, but if it’s possible to do these without express pass as a single rider, I don’t want to feel like I wasted money on it.
So should I get the express pass? And from those rides, is there any recommended order I should do to make most of my time there?
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2 comments
Hello! I just went to universal on Sunday with 2 other people so will just give you our experience. We aren’t great planners and hoped we could get express passes there, but they were sold out, but thankfully we didn’t really need it! (So apologies can’t answer about that)
We went to the park just after 7, it was busy and they let us in at 7.23am, once we got in the park and scanned our tickets we went straight onto the app and we’re able to get the timed entry to Mario for the first slot. We did buy the power up bands which were quite cool but I don’t think they are a necessity. We queued for the Mario kart ride in single rider queue for about 30 minutes so it was pretty quick. We then went to the toad restaurant, this was the longest queue for us all day but still got in after about 45 minutes.
The forbidden journey ride was really good, again we only waited for around 30 minutes for that one. The hippogriff ride was quite a slow ride, so we gave that a miss.
All of the horror stuff gets busier at night when the families leave and more people arrive, during the day the queues were 5-10 minutes for the mazes, in the evening we waited about 20 minutes maybe, it wasn’t bad at all. Jaws didn’t open until the evening and we queued for about 30 minutes. There are zombie parades and also scare actors walking around once it gets dark which was pretty fun. The other queues fluctuated but the Hollywood backdrop was the biggest queue all day, we went on it last in the evening and it was amazing, well worth the wait!
Definitely download the universal app before you get there so you can try to get into mario straight away once you’ve scanned your entry tickets.
You do not need to book express (?) for single riders, it is essentially a side line to fill up seats with odd numbers if families or couples would like to sit together. I have gone with my friends to USJ and queued at the solo rider lines anyways, because we do not care to sit together during a ride and this saves us so much time.
The park will typically allow people in about 1 hour prior to opening time. 7am sounds good, but there might be a crowd already there. You should download the USJ app in advance, and once you get into the parks, immediately get the timed entries for the places which offer it.
You will want to order it based on your timed entry for Nintendo world.eg; you entered the park and got into a draw, you got timed entry for 4pm (congrats)-> do whichever is nearest to you at that point and has a queue of less than 30mins or of higher priority in your list.
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For Harry potter, I like the forbidden journey which was a 4D ride, meanwhile FoH is more of a roller coster outdoors. You can do both if the wait times are not too long.
Jujutsu kaisen is open until Nov 5th but I have no idea when you are doing the trip so you might want to look at that to plan.
The horror night happens throughout the park, so you do not need to be queueing for it. I highly recommend adding in a few halloween attractions such as Chucky or Biohazard one (timed entry). Both really made my trip to USJ.