Just got back from our trip this weekend, still processing it all, but wanted to drop this here because someone asked about the hotel entrance a bunch of pages back and I answered based on last year's experience, but now have this year to go off of.
If you are like me and just come down for the event, and don't have a day ticket most days, do NOT pay for Scream Early, your hotel key essentially functions as a full Stay and Scream this year!
We showed up our first two nights at 5:15-20pm at the hotel entrance, expecting to wait about 15-20 minutes to be let in with the rest of the park gate guests around 5:45, but they instead immediately let us into Hellblock. We ran through Hellblock and were dumped out into the park at 5:25 with the rest of the true Stay and Scream guests. We ended up getting three or four runs in before the rest of the park even opened, pretty comparable to true Stay and Scream, and for no extra money.
Confirming also, with the MAJOR caveat of "Don't be a jerk and abuse this", they only looked for one hotel key per group, and at that they literally only needed a flash of the key, no closer inspection of names, dates, etc.
Can't lie, it was nice to almost be required to enter the event through a house that would have otherwise been a skip for us, because instead of having to invest any of the rest of our night in seeing it, we kind of got it thrown in as a Pre-Order Bonus, haha. Would our gameplay (night) have been impacted at all had we not done it? No. Am I glad I now have a little paper poster of the game's box art (house run)? Mildly. Lol
