Now you’ve done it.
You’ve booked the park passes. You’ve got the flights set up. And you’re going to pull the ultimate surprise on Christmas and tell the whole family, “We’re going to Disney World” (copyright Walt Disney, Inc.).
We did a little planning, asked friends and Disney Vets a ton of questions, and I don’t think we did too bad for our first run. The kids loved it so much. They were a little heartbroken that we didn’t bring their baby sister (who was 2 at the time), so they are busy planning our next trip.
I found it fitting to do a retrospective of our trip so when the time comes to go again we, our planning isn’t fogged by the years and we can learn from our first trip.
As part of our retrospectives we made two lists, pluses and deltas. The pluses everything we loved, would do again or recommend to others. The deltas being the things we will change next time and/or recommend to others.
THINGS YOU HAVE TO DO:
• Plan, plan and plan some more – We had a general plan of which park we would go to each day and then each night we would list out which rides/attractions we were going to go to. We used the ‘PassPorter’s’ Disney travel book. They had a great itinerary for each park. One for if you were traveling with kids and another for just adults. We would use this as a guideline and make modifications based on what we wanted to make sure to see.
• Advice – Ask others. We got a lot of great information from friends/Disney veterans. We were lucky that our sources had kids who were similar in age to ours.
• PhotoPass – the park photogs are “hit and miss,” but they’re usually pretty good. And since most don’t want to lug around their SLR when they have little tikes with them, the photo quality is better than you’ll get with your phone.
• Park Hopper passes
• Fastpasses – A must. If there are rides you know you will want to go on multiple times one idea is to get a fastpass for the ride, get in line and ride the ride and then go back and ride it again.
• Stay on property – if you can swing it, stay on property. Here are a few benefits we found from staying on property:
o Shuttles/trams
o Magic hours – where the park is open early or later for guests staying on property. We benefitted from this a few times. One we were able to sign our son up for Jedi Training (Hollywood Studios), get fast passes to some of the very popular rides (rides which normally have 1 -3 hr. wait times) and walked on to other rides because the park was closed to other guests.
o Disney Magic Express – LOVED this! This service picks you up at the airport and brings you to your hotel. We didn’t have to worry about getting our bags when we arrived in Orlando. Instead the DME picked up our bags and brought them to our room. When we headed home we were able to check our bags at the DME curbside check-in right at the hotel and didn’t have to worry about checking them ourselves at the airport. This was a HUGE help when traveling with kids.
o Your room card doubles as a credit card. We didn’t have to carry around extra cards because we always knew we would be able to charge purchases back to our room if we needed/wanted to.
o Parking – we didn’t have the added expense or worry about parking
• Groceries – We had groceries delivered right to the hotel via Garden Grocer. We ordered things like, yogurt, cheese, lunch meat, Peanut butter, jelly, crackers, bread, trail mix and water. All things which could be used for a meal or a snack.
• Snacks – We brought snacks and water into the parks. This doubled as a money and a time saver.
• Backpack/cooler/water bottles – We brought a soft-sided cooler and ice packs with us in our backpack.
• Phone Apps – “Disney Magic” and “Disney Wait Times (both for iPhone) worked great for us
• Daily allowance/Budget – We set a daily allowance for what each child could spend. This helped reduce them asking for everything under the sun and made them really think about what they wanted to buy. We also had an overall daily budget. I have to say bringing snacks and water into the park helped us spend less than half of what we budgeted.
• Disney apparel – Buying Disney apparel and even souvenirs where a ton cheaper online. We bought the kids shirts, pjs and a few other Disney items before we even left and brought them with us.
• Stroller rental
• Shows – We loved all the shows we were able to catch. Originally we focused on hitting the nightly shows, which are must sees. My daughter and I took in a Beauty and the Beast show at Hollywood Studios that ended up being a great little break in our day and very entertaining.
• Jedi Training – If you have a Star Wars fan this is a must. Hollywood Studios offers training but you have to sign up. They offer a set number of show/training times. Here is one time where the Magic hours saved us. The park opened at 9:00am, Magic hours started at 8:00am, we were in line at 8:30ish and the soonest we could get our son in as the 2:00pm show. We also lucked out and got some great pictures of the training because of our pre-purchased PhotoPass.
• Epcot – Epcot was a great park to hit all the character spots for us. Given the ages of our children, 6 yr. & 4 yr., we had a much smaller laundry list of attractions to hit at Epcot. So taking advantage of seeing the characters here was great!
Things We LEARNED
• Stay longer – We only had 4 days. next time we will be going for no less than a week.
• Travel day – Do not try to squeeze in an entire park the first day/night you get there. Instead either go to the pool, Downtown Disney or try hitting one of the evening shows at one of the parks. Or go to the pool. Cuz the pool is good.
• Dinning Reservations – Make these at least 3 months in-advance, or more if you can. For us I’m going to find a few places we really want to go to, not necessarily every day/night, but at least the places we really want to make sure to go to.
• Multiple Days per Park – Make sure we have at least two days to go to the Magic Kingdom or the parks important to you.
• Sea World – Make sure there is time to go to Sea World
• Be flexible – Have some flexibility to change your schedule or make adjustments for weather/crowd size and other situations that might pop-up.
• Go to the castle – Believe it or not, we admired the castle from a far but never went right up to it.
• Transportation – Plan extra time for transportation, it always takes longer than we planned for.
• Rain gear – Bring rain gear
• Break – I, and many others I talk to, realized I/they should plan breaks mid-day to take naps and then head back to the park. The Red Haired Girl is a wake up and don’t-stop-until- you-drop kind of girl so I will need some help implementing this one.
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