YIKES. Massive Crowds Hit New Disney's Animal Kingdom Attraction

We’ve been waiting for this day for months, and it’s finally here — a new experience has finally opened in Disney’s Animal Kingdom!

Today, Bluey’s Wild World officially opens in the park! Located at Conservation Station, this is a fantastic spot for families to go to meet Bluey and Bingo, meet some animals local to Australia, and more! We have to warn you, though — the crowds? They’re not to be messed with!

Bluey’s Wild World requires a Virtual Queue reservation to experience, which opens at 7 AM (a park reservation is required) and 10 AM (you have to be in the park for the second drop), and we were curious to see if that was going to mitigate crowds. It certainly seemed to at the very front of the entrance to the Wildlife Express, but that also could have something to do with the fact that our group was called about ten minutes before park open, and once the gates opened, we headed straight there.

To get to Bluey’s Wild World, you’ll want to head over to the Africa section of the park and take the Wildlife Express, which is a train to take you over to this other section of the park. This is the only way to make your way over to this area, so if there’s a long line, there’s no way around it! You DO need a Virtual Queue reservation to hop on the train at all, so yes, if you want to experience this part of the park, you’ll have to snag a VQ at 7 AM or 10 AM. You won’t scan your park ticket to show your Virtual Queue at the train station, that will come later, BUT Cast Members do need to see that you’ve got a Virtual Queue reservation on your phone, so have that pulled up! Thankfully, our train wasn’t packed, but we learned quickly that that changed just minutes after we got on.

Prior to this retheme and addition, it wasn’t common to see a long line for the train. Many people didn’t even know this area of the park existed, so if you wanted to get away from the crowds, Rafiki’s Planet Watch was a good place to go. Now, though? It’s certainly WAY busier than it was before, so we wouldn’t call this spot a “quiet” area anymore. In fact, it may be one of the busiest areas of the park!

Finally arriving at Bluey’s Wild World, we immediately noticed that the Virtual Queue system seemed to be working well so far. The longest people were waiting outside the building was about the length of one show, which is about 14 minutes. When you’re at the doors of the Conservation Station getting ready to go into the show, this is where you’ll need to scan your park ticket to show your Virtual Queue reservation, so that’s when your Virtual Queue will officially be considered redeemed — keep that in mind when planning when to head over to the show! However, when we stepped out of our show and saw how long the line had gotten, we realized that it’s possible we just got lucky being so early in the day.

Scan your park ticket to confirm your Virtual Queue

Once you’re inside the building, you’re held on one side of the room, sort of behind the show space while a show is going on. We got there about 5 minutes before the show before ours ended, and then they took about 5 minutes to cycle people out of the show space and cycle new people in before starting the show again. Again, we learned soon after though that this began causing issues in the group after us as more and more people began to show up — they were waiting MUCH longer than we did.

There’s only about 100 people watching each show, and in our first show experience, kids were encouraged to come to the front to sit, so they can really be involved in playing the four games (Magic Asparagus, Copycat Charades, Mom & Dad, and Keepy Uppy) and say hello to Bluey and Bingo. If you want to be closer to Bluey, you’ll want to stay on the right side of the show, and if you want to be closer to Bingo, you’ll want to be on the left.

However, we then saw a change in how the show runs in front of our eyes! After our first reporter went in, our second reporter was in the show just after them, and they noticed that Cast Members had tape on the ground and asked everybody to stand behind the tape. Then, once the game started they invited all of the kids forward.

We spoke to someone in line who told us it took them about an hour to get from the train to seeing the actual show! Not to mention, when you’re held inside as the show(s) before you are going on, you can hear them, meaning that by the time you actually get to see the show itself, you’ve potentially already heard it 2-3 times.It’s clear that this is still a work in progress and Cast Members are figuring out what works best, so the first few days of this experience may be a little rough while they sort everything out!

As of right now, this offering is to be around indefinitely, so while we expect to see crowds potentially get less intense as the addition becomes less new, we all know how popular Bluey is with families and kids of all ages, so let’s be real — this may be the most popular part of Animal Kingdom for quite some time!