As I said Sunday, our Disney vacation is something we started working on more than a year ago, so this is all about planning tips. Bear with me. The trip details come later.
RESEARCH. If you are planning a trip to Walt Disney World (WDW) you need to do some research. The Internet is the best place for that. Of course, it’s always best to go straight to the source and visit the Walt Disney World Resort web site. It is loaded with information. EVERYTHING is listed here. You can order the vacation planning package from here as well which includes a DVD. I had two problems with this site: I felt it could be organized better, and even with broadband it loads slowly due to all the Flash animation. A lot of times our research turned to a third party site or two. AllEars.net is really good. It has lots of info, is well organized, is updated frequently, and loads quickly.
BOOKING. We booked our trip with Sabrina Freeland. For those of you who don’t know Brent’s wife, she is a stay home mom who home-schools her kids (there is a link to their blog site from ours). In her other life she is a travel agent for Gulliver’s Travel. We booked the trip a year ago.
LODGING. We are fortunate to have relatives who live just minutes from WDW, and we could have stayed with them. However, we decided to stay on property and booked five nights at the All Star Music Resort (we did stay with Jim and Dianna a couple of nights though). The nice thing about this was that we parked the van and left it. The Disney transportation (bus, monorail, boat) took us everywhere we needed to go.
Our room was a two bedroom, two bathroom suite with kitchenette. It was basically a nice clean place to sleep which was all we needed. We got up early, ate our breakfast, and headed to the bus stop...not to return until late that night.
MEALS. After looking at meal prices we opted to get Disney’s basic meal plan. I would say this was one of the best things we did. We were stuffed the whole week and came out better than if we had paid for food as we went along. This also saved us from having to pack lunches, though you are free to do so.
The rule about the meal plan is that you have to purchase it based on the number of days you stay in a Disney resort. We stayed five nights so we had to purchase five days of meals. Your room key doubles as your meal card and is good almost anywhere whether it’s a restaurant in an amusement park or at a resort (I’m not sure about restaurants at Downtown Disney). Our plan gave us one table service meal, one counter service (fast food) meal, and one snack each day. You can spend these however you want. Eating at a really ritzy restaurant will cost you two table service credits.
You can begin to make reservations for table service meals 180 days before your trip which you really need to do. We were not on top of this back in the spring (life was happening too fast) so our choice in times were limited somewhat, but we still enjoyed everywhere we ate.
PARK TICKETS. Pricing admission tickets for a Disney park will give you sticker shock. The per day amount gets better the more days you purchase. We got seven day passes. Then there’s all the add ons. Want water parks? Cha-ching. Park hopper option? Cha-ching. No expiration date on unused days? Cha-ching. Fries? Cha-ching.
We did spring for the park hopper option. If we had only planned to be there for four days we would not have done this. Changing parks is nice, but be warned that it will take a 45-60 minute chunk out of your day, not good if you don’t have a lot of time. Moving between the Magic Kingdom and Epcot is by far the easiest due to the monorail.
Our room keys tripled as our park tickets. For Vicki, Jenna, and I this was also tied to our finger print.
Your ticket can also be used to Fastpass rides where this option is available. Fastpassing a ride holds your place in line so you can go do something else while waiting (see the Fastpass article on Wikipedia if you want to know more about how this works). This was where doing Disney with the Cotters was really nice. We would walk into a park and Jim or Dianna would grab all the tickets and Fastpass a really hot ride while we went to do something else. I don’t think our boys ever really knew what was going on behind the scenes for them with Fastpasses.
MEMORIES OF YOUNGER DAYS. One day Jim, Vicki, and I were reminiscing one day about Opryland in Nashville and how much we miss it. I found this web site where you can go and relive your Opryland memories. Of course, back then visiting an amusement park was a one day event (and it seems like we had to BEG the adults to take us).
Joe
