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My first post here. Just wanted to share my experience of this years HHN. I really love this event, we save up and look forward to going to it every year. Been going to the event since hhn#25, only just really discovered this forum, it has some great information. We went last week (Wednesday, Thursday, Friday). Managed to get through all the houses and see the show on Wednesday and Thursday. Spent Friday enjoying the food and beer, and just chilling out in the scarezones. Really busy this year. We did not have express pass. My tip (as others have pointed out), is to get a map early, really spend time planning the night, and if you are able, get in the park before the event starts. Wednesday we went to the Simpsons stay and scare area, then hit the houses in that area. Very low wait times to begin with. The highlight for me was going through Trick R treat house on our own, no other people in the queue or in the house!. We had the scareactors full attention! Really well done house. Thursday, we started in Finnegans stay and scare area. We started with stranger things to get it over with whilst we were not tired. They pre-loaded the queue before the house (and park) officially opened, we still had about a 60 minute wait!! Great to get all the houses done in two nights without express. Was a great year. Only thing that let it down a bit for me was the scarezones being a little tame. They just felt like selfie/photo ops (especially the killer klown area). Very few scares. But to be fair, I have never seen the park as busy as it was this year. The houses were excellent though. Looking forward to HHN 29 now!

That's not an easy Q to answer. Some houses have merge points AT the house entrance (H4, TrT, SoE, DE, CG). Others have merge points that have a built in post-merge wait of 5-10 min (i.e. Stranger Things, Scary Tales, Slaughter, Poltergeist, Blumhouse), so there's that. Even if a house is a walk on, it's a 5 min walk through the whole queue and another 5 from the exit back. So a walk-on house can be 10 min of walking, not counting the house itself. My rule of thumb is that if you see a 5-10 min standby, don't even waste the Express. 5-10 min is probably a walk on. Sometimes 15 min is a walk on. There is nothing more pathetic than seeing two people in Express when the event opens and standby is a walk on. Those two people either don't realize they won't be able to Express a second time, or are too drunk to care. In general, Express is about 25%-30% of standby. But that is a big generality. I've done a (rare) walk-on using Express when line is clearly 90 min, and I've done a (fairly rare) 25 min Express when standby is 30. I will do standby if it's 20 min or less. Otherwise, Express. When I was younger 30 min was the threshold. Conversely, if I see a large wait (i.e. 100 min), I usually skip the house until it's 60 min because Express would be too long of a real wait for me. Waiting in an express line for 45 min can only piss a person off. So for you, maybe 30-75 min standby is a great time for Express. Up to you. You are paying $10+ for the privilege of skipping one line, for one house, one time, so make the most of it. It also depends on how the employee meters between Express and standby. I've seen them equally split and heavily weight in one way or the other. Affects the waits drastically.