FASTPASS® is an innovation from The Walt Disney Company to allow guests to skip past long lines at its theme parks. At an attraction featuring FASTPASS, a guest can use his park admission pass to obtain a FASTPASS ticket with a return time later that day (an hour-long window) printed on it. If the guest comes back to the attraction at his or her return time, he will get to wait in a shorter line and be on the attraction within ten minutes, or often much more quickly.
FASTPASS tickets are dispensed by machines outside each attraction which uses them. A guest inserts his park pass, and then his pass is returned to him while his a FASTPASS ticket is printed. At first, a guest could only hold a single FASTPASS at a time; if he tried to insert his park pass into another FASTPASS dispenser before the time shown on his previous FASTPASS, the dispenser would instead give him a ticket with a message printed on it telling him that he had to wait. Since the initial rollout of FASTPASS the rules have been relaxed a bit, and now additional FASTPASSes can be had sooner after one another, but still only one per ride per park pass.
A bug in the first implementation of FASTPASS allowed guests to get a pass for anything with a magnetic stripe that they inserted into the dispenser, even credit cards or passes for other parks. This has been corrected.
Epcot's Mission: SPACE was the first attraction built with FASTPASS in mind, and a specific queue area for it. Earlier attractions were given FASTPASS by rerouting the queue area to allow a shorter line near the boarding area.
FASTPASS is only used on the most popular park attractions, such as Test Track and Tower of Terror. Smaller attractions do not need FASTPASS.
Universal Studios copied the idea of FASTPASS; their implementation is named "Express Pass."
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