I took my tour 11/8/07. Our guides were Mandy and Landon. Very knowledgeable. The tour started 8:30am, before the park opened. We went to the Oasis, Africa, Asia, and Dinoland. Everythig was explained in detail. The themeing of the buildings, walk ways, and trees. The transitions between the areas, and being shown many hidden mickeys. You would be amazed at all the thought that goes behind every little detail. I must say it is a different experience depending on which guide you have. My brother took the tour and they spent more time learning about Expedition Everest and Congo rapids. We spent more time looking and learnig about the animals. You also get a great pin.
Wild by Design is once of those types of tours that strives to be the very best, but falls a bit short sometimes. We've only done this tour once. And because of a few things that happened on our tour, we should probebly do it again to see if it has improved, plus because of some issues with the guide, the experiance could probebly be better. Let me elaborate... The tour was an "on stage" tour that basically points out the architecture and building choices Disney made while creating DAK. We were given radio headsets, and the guide had a mic. This allowed us to wonder off a bit and still be able to hear her, plus with the added bonus that other guests couldn't try to tag along with your tour for free or interupt you paid experiance. I would hope that Disney uses these devices at other on stage tours were the general public is around you during the tour. The tour was basically a triva type tour, not unlike the Treasures tour at Epcot. And is a fine tour to do once so you can learn some of the reasonings behind the choices the Imagineers made building DAK. Now were our experiance goes a bit off was that our guide was not feeling well that morning. About half way through the tour you take a little breakfast break, and when the break was over, we had a different guide. This just kind of made the tour strange in that we had been with one guide, an got to know her, then she was gone and someone new was there like nothing happened. Just a bit akward. On a second note, why does Disney stick in food breaks on the shorter tours. Yea, on Backstage Magic (and all day experiance) you break for lunch. But this ones is not that long. They did the same thing on Undiscovered FutureWorld too. I paid for a tour, not a contenental breakfast. And while the cinomon rolls we had were great, I much rather would have spent the 20 min or so getting and seeing things. I can eat afterwards.