The 10 Character Meets at Disney World, Ranked by Wait

Meeting Anna and Elsa at Royal Sommerhus averages 33.7 minutes. The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror averages 32.7. Toy Story Mania! averages 33.3. A photograph with two princesses in a Norwegian cottage costs more of your day than either of them.

Character meets get planned like snacks — something you fit in when you happen to walk past. The numbers say they behave like headliners: long averages, sharp hourly swings, and a couple of specific hours where the cost collapses. Here is every character meet across the four Walt Disney World parks, ranked.

All 10 Disney World character meets, ranked by average wait

#	Character meet	Park	Avg wait (min)	Best hour	Worst hour
1	Meet Anna and Elsa at Royal Sommerhus	EPCOT	33.7	4pm (25.3)	9am (54.6)
2	Meet Disney Stars at Red Carpet Dreams	Hollywood Studios	28.8	9am (18.8)	6pm (34.5)
3	Meet Favorite Disney Pals at Adventurers Outpost	Animal Kingdom	25.1	8am (14.3)	6pm (40.3)
4	Princess Fairytale Hall	Magic Kingdom	23.7	9am (13.3)	6pm (32.1)
5	Meet Princess Tiana and a Visiting Princess	Magic Kingdom	20.6	9am (11.1)	6pm (28.6)
6	Meet Ariel at Her Grotto	Magic Kingdom	20.0	9am (12.6)	6pm (24.6)
7	Meet Beloved Disney Pals at Mickey & Friends	EPCOT	18.8	2pm (14.1)	7pm (25.7)
8	Meet Mickey at Town Square Theater	Magic Kingdom	17.6	8am (6.9)	11am (24.7)
9	Meet Olaf at Celebrity Spotlight	Hollywood Studios	15.7	9am (9.8)	11am (19.8)
10	Meet Edna Mode at the Edna Mode Experience	Hollywood Studios	13.8	12pm (13.5)	10am (14.0)

Add all ten averages together and a complete character-meet tour of Walt Disney World costs 217.8 minutes of queueing — three hours and thirty-eight minutes, spread across four parks, before you ride anything.

Timing is worth more here than anywhere else

Now do the same sum twice more. Add up what all ten cost if you hit each one at its best hour, then at its worst:

• All ten at their best hour: 139.7 minutes
• All ten at their worst hour: 298.9 minutes

298.9 − 139.7 = 159.2 minutes. Two hours and thirty-nine minutes, purely from when you show up. Same lines, same characters, same photos.

No comparable group of attractions rewards timing this heavily, and the reason is structural. A ride's queue drains at a fixed rate all day. A character meet has a set of scheduled appearances with breaks between them, and the line reforms from scratch each time — which makes the difference between arriving early in a block and arriving late in one much larger than it would be for a coaster.

The four meets that cost more than a headliner

Four character meets out-average rides most guests would plan a morning around:

• Meet Anna and Elsa at Royal Sommerhus (33.7) beats Toy Story Mania! (33.3), Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway (32.8), The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror (32.7), Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (27.2) and Space Mountain (25.0).
• Meet Disney Stars at Red Carpet Dreams (28.8) beats Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run (22.2) by 6.6 minutes — inside the same park.
• Meet Favorite Disney Pals at Adventurers Outpost (25.1) beats Kilimanjaro Safaris (21.5) by 3.6 minutes and Expedition Everest (18.3) by 6.8. At Animal Kingdom, hugging Mickey and Minnie costs more than the safari and more than the mountain.
• Princess Fairytale Hall (23.7) beats The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh (23.3), Haunted Mansion (18.8) and Pirates of the Caribbean (11.2) — three of Magic Kingdom's best-known rides, all cheaper than one princess line.

If your plan says "rides in the morning, characters in the afternoon," that plan has the priciest queues in the wrong half of the day. This is the same pattern we found in why family rides often have longer lines than thrill rides.

Two golden hours, and one trap

Six of the ten bottom out at 8am or 9am. That is the single most useful line in this article: get character meets done first, not last.

Magic Kingdom's three princess lines share an hour exactly. Princess Fairytale Hall, Meet Princess Tiana and a Visiting Princess, and Meet Ariel at Her Grotto all hit their floor at 9am and their ceiling at 6pm.

• At 9am: 13.3 + 11.1 + 12.6 = 37.0 minutes for all three.
• At 6pm: 32.1 + 28.6 + 24.6 = 85.3 minutes for the same three.

85.3 − 37.0 = 48.3 minutes, from one hour of the morning versus one hour of the evening. One 9am block clears all three princess lines for barely more than half an hour of standing.

Meet Mickey at Town Square Theater swings hardest of all. It runs 6.9 minutes at 8am and 24.7 at 11am — 17.8 minutes more, or a 258% increase, and it happens inside three hours. It's the first character meet you pass walking into Magic Kingdom, and it is nearly free for exactly one hour.

Now the trap: Anna and Elsa run backwards. Their worst hour is 9am (54.6 minutes) and their best is 4pm (25.3). Every other princess line in Disney World is cheapest first thing; this one is at its most expensive first thing, by 29.3 minutes. Bring the standard rope-drop instinct to Royal Sommerhus and you'll pay double.

Meet Favorite Disney Pals at Adventurers Outpost is the other big swing: 14.3 at 8am against 40.3 at 6pm, a 182% jump and 26 minutes of difference.

The one meet where timing doesn't matter

Meet Edna Mode at the Edna Mode Experience runs 13.5 minutes at its best hour and 14.0 at its worst. That is a spread of half a minute across the entire day — the only character meet in Walt Disney World you can genuinely do whenever you happen to be near Pixar Plaza. Meet Olaf at Celebrity Spotlight is the runner-up for flexibility, though its 9.8-to-19.8 range is still a doubling.

A character-meet plan for each park

1. Magic Kingdom. Meet Mickey at Town Square Theater at 8am on your way in (6.9 minutes), then the three princess lines together at 9am (37.0 minutes for all three). Protect the 6pm hour for dinner instead — it is the worst hour for all three princess meets at once.
2. EPCOT. Do not open your day at Royal Sommerhus. Go at 4pm (25.3 minutes) and use 9am for something else entirely. Meet Beloved Disney Pals at Mickey & Friends is best at 2pm (14.1), so a mid-afternoon World Celebration and Norway pairing works well.
3. Hollywood Studios. Red Carpet Dreams and Meet Olaf both bottom out at 9am (18.8 and 9.8). That is 28.6 minutes for both, against 34.5 for Red Carpet Dreams alone at 6pm. Edna Mode fits anywhere.
4. Animal Kingdom. Adventurers Outpost at 8am costs 14.3 minutes. The same line at 6pm costs 40.3. There is no reason to leave this one for later in the day.

Frequently asked questions

Which character meet has the longest wait at Disney World? Meet Anna and Elsa at Royal Sommerhus, at 33.7 minutes on average — longer than Tower of Terror or Toy Story Mania!

Is there one hour that works for character meets everywhere? 9am comes closest: it is the best hour for five of the ten. 8am is the best hour for two more. Between them they cover seven of the ten.

Should I rope-drop Anna and Elsa? No. 9am is their single worst hour (54.6 minutes) and 4pm is their best (25.3). They are the exception to every other timing rule on this list.

Are character meets worth skipping to save time? If you skip all ten you save 217.8 minutes at average waits. If you simply schedule them well, you save 159.2 of those minutes and still meet everyone.

The bottom line

Character meets are not filler. Four of them out-average genuine headliner rides, the full set costs three and a half hours at average waits, and getting the hours right is worth two hours and thirty-nine minutes. Do them at 8am and 9am, with Royal Sommerhus as the deliberate exception at 4pm, and the whole category stops eating your day.

For where these lines sit within a full day, see the Magic Kingdom touring plan and the Fantasyland guide. Travelling with small children who care more about characters than coasters? Start with which Disney park is best for little kids.

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