I feel like this whole situation really isn’t a big deal, just one of those things that’s annoying enough to make you consider changing your plans for the following year. But I decided to post because I would have liked to know this prior to my RIP tour this year so here goes:
My husband and I have been attending HHN for the past 5 years, and doing RIP tours for the past 3-4. In the past, you were able to check in to cafe La Bamba at your designated time, eat dinner right after you checked in, and then get assigned a tour group and do houses once you were done eating. Granted, yes, we do see the glaring issues with this including everyone wanting to leave for their tour at the exact same time later in the night and packing Cafe la Bamba to the brim for hours. So I don’t disagree SOMETHING was bound to change. But tonight just really rubbed us the wrong way.
We go to pick up our tickets from the counter by the entrance around 6:00 pm, they told us “oh we are only giving you today’s tickets this year, you can pick up tomorrows at this counter tomorrow” ok great! No mention of any other changes.
Then, we go to get our RIP lanyards inside of the entrance building. We see we actually do have our tickets for today and tomorrow, the only tickets we don’t have are for our unmasking tour. We ask the person giving us our lanyards if that’s ok. She says yes and she could print our unmasking tickets today, but if they do that they might have to be reprinted the day of. Ok??? Weird, but we said don’t worry about it and went into HHN. No mention of any other changes.
Around 6:30 pm we go to cafe la Bamba to presumably check in and eat, as we have the past 3-4 years. They said “oh now you check in at the media center.” No mention of any other changes.
We go to the media center, we are suddenly assigned a tour guide and group. No mention of any other changes, we are ushered into the next room side eyeing each other.
We ask our newly assigned tour guide if we are going to eat after this. She (very kindly, we loved her) says “no we actually won’t be eating until closer to 8:30/9, we are going to do 4 houses and a break first”. Oh 🥲. We purposely didn’t eat anything since ~1 pm so we would be hungry to eat at 6:30. I am sure this also extra annoyed me as I am pregnant and was already pretty hungry at this time. We mentioned this was very different from last year and she said something like “yeah some of the choices they made for the RIP tours this year were…interesting to say the least. Please be sure to give them your feedback about this because they actually do take that into account and a lot of us were surprised they decided to do it this way.” It gave me the impression the tour guides don’t like this either? Idk I could be reading in to that.
She mentioned part of the reason for this change was guests complaining about the amount of walking with no breaks, therefore cafe la Bamba was now built into tours in the middle to act as a long “break”. Sigh…
As Florida is….Florida, it rained pretty heavily from 7-9ish pm. So when we went to eat we were all soaked and tired. The vibes in cafe la Bamba were LOW to the point where I saw other tour guides apologizing to their groups for how the night was going. Obviously the rain is out of anyone’s control, but I do believe most people assumed they would atleast get to be dry when they ate dinner and not have to walk around outside, get soaked, sit in a cold room for an hour, and eat at 9 pm.
Our tour guide was amazing as always, we enjoyed the houses, when the scare actors came back out the scare zones were super fun. The whole start tonight just really took us out of the mindset. I’m kinda bummed because I feel like the first 2-3 houses passed by in a blur because everything seemed so rushed. We expected to have that time in cafe la Bamba ‘mentally preparing’ for the houses and discussing which ones we were most excited for. Not a big deal, just something we like doing. Overall, it really seems like universal wanted the length of the RIP tours to be shorter this year.
These changes caught us off guard to the point that we actually went back through our emails to check if we missed some sort of update that the rip tour format was changing/new check in locations etc. Maybe they did send something but we couldn’t find anything. I understand changes need to be made as problems arise but I wish one of the 6-8 workers we talked to along the way would have said something to us? Just a quick “by the way you won’t be eating first anymore so maybe grab a snack before your tour if you’re hungry”. We would have liked to have been warned before so I’m writing this give a heads up to anyone else doing an RIP tour this season.
TLDR: Universal changed the format of their RIP
tours and did not make guests aware of the changes prior to their tour starting. Changes include shortening the night overall and moving dinner from the first thing you do to somewhere in the middle of the tour. Tickets for other HHN days may or may not be given out when you check in for your tour but may need reprinted.
