Anyone want to help me make pick our park reservations? This far out, they all available for every day.
I had initially been thinking I wouldn’t get park reservations for our Jan 2022 trip. My reasoning was (a) that I couldn’t get the 10-day ticket we want, and (b) We’ll postpone again if things aren’t back to basically normal.
But, now I see that we CAN get the 10-day ticket, and I can see them keeping the park reservations around even after things return to basically normal. The idea being that people with reservations won’t have to worry about capacity numbers. I am also telling myself it can’t hurt to have them and I can change them later. Still, the thought of picking parks this far out is stressing me out. I am a Disney noob with a Liner personality. This trip will be our one-and-done Disney trip. I told my 10-year-old DD my second trip will be to take her child.
We will be there for two weeks. We will drive in and arrive early in the morning on Saturday morning Jan 22. We will probably be staying in a house with a pool (I have plan B reservations. But the house is our Plan A) The plan is relax at the pool and get into vacation mode all-day Saturday. Sunday morning will be our first park day, and we should be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed then.
We will get the 10-day base tickets, so we’ll have 14 days to use them. We will be 51 then, so I’ll need rest days spaced out during the two weeks. But, then we’d also like our rest days to be when the parks are busiest.
My reason for going to Disney - I’ve wanted to go for 40 years. DH’s reason - they built a Star Wars area. DD’s reason - She is a kid. We also aren’t foodies so while we like a restaurant break, going out of our way for food is unappealing (so no park-hopping to EP in the evenings).
I’d like to do two days at EP, two days AK, two-three at MK and three-four at HS. I have a vague idea that I’d like us to do every park at least once during the first week so we’d have an idea of which we’ll want to repeat more often.
With Park Reservations, you don’t really have to worry so much about which days will be busier than others. If the parks are filling up, they are all the same busyness.
Also keep in mind that your park reservations are not set in stone. You can book them now, and keep tweaking them as you approach your trip. Generally, you’ll have a couple to a few months ahead before the reservations are filling up.
I really don’t think it matters that much at this point which parks to do on which days with regards to crowds. As long as capacity is reduced, the parks will be at or near capacity each day. Just plan around your other priorities (what you want to see most/first, rest days, etc.)
Don’t go to Epcot on Friday, Sat. or Sun. – the locals flood the place
Make Magic Kingdom your first stop - This is your first trip, it’s what you want to see first!
Make Saturday a rest day – It will always be the busiest day.
You have 10 days of tickets & 4 extra days. Go 2, maybe 3, days at a time and then take a rest. I like to put Epcot either before or after my rest days as it IME is more strolling around eating between the 3 – 4 “good” rides there. So I can go slower before my rest day or ease back into it after.
My suggestions:
1/23 – Sun. = Magic Kingdom (It should always be your first stop)
1/24 – Mon. = DHS
1/25 – Tue. = EP
1/26 – Wed. = Rest
1/27 – Thursday = Magic Kingdom (Typically Thursday is the slowest day at MK – That’s why I suggest it twice in week #1)
1/28 – Friday = AK
1/29 – Sat. = Rest
1/30 – Sunday = DHS (Since you want to do it at least 3 times, maybe 4, I need to squeeze one in here)
1/31 – Mon. = AK (People tend to go to MK & DHS on Monday since they typically arrive on Sunday & want to go to the most popular parks first)
2/1 – Tues = EP
2/2 – Wed = Rest
2/3 – Thursday = DHS
2/4 – Fri. = MK - This gets you a 3rd visit & a great last park to see again before you go
Darkmite2’s plan looks like a winner. If they go back to ADR’s at 180, I only have a couple of months to decide ADR’s. So, I’ll use this as the framework for our dining plans.
Plan A is offsite and Plan B is onsite. I already have reservations for both. If I don’t link the onsite reservations in the MDE when I make the park reservation, I’ll get park reservations from the offsite bucket, right?
That had been the first thing I picked. We are homeschoolers so we can go during schooltime. The low-ish rain was deciding factor over the other good choice of Sept. This trip already blossomed. Original plan was Jan 2021 for Disney. Then I wanted to add in a couple of days to the Land of Harry Potter. Then I saw how cheap their passes were. So we added in First week of Feb 2020 to Universal, and knowing the pass would still be active if we wanted to pop over during our Disney trip. We get plenty of vacation time. We ended up going to Universal three times and about four weeks total on that annual pass. The first week of Feb was an amazing time to be in Orlando. I’m not saying another Disney trip is impossible, but that is the assumption I am making in the planning.
I have been three times to WDW since the pandemic, with a total of 8 days in HS. My suggestion is to not go to HS on a weekend if you want to ride RoR. I think local residents try to get weekend virtual ques and if they get them they go to the park if not they dont. Literally the ques fills up within a second or two. I have never been able to get a weekend RoR virtual que, at least the 7:00 time. Everytime duirng a week day except when the Que system fails I was able to get a virtual que at the 7:00 window.
I second all of @darkmite2’s points! The only thing I would do differently is book HS on the second EP day, then switch it to EP when it gets closer if you’re sure that’s what you want, since HS passes run out sooner. That said, it probably won’t be an issue by January 2022, so might as well just book what he suggested.
I prefer your thinking about DHS - especially if they might want to go four times in a trip.
I didn’t “love” where I put the second DHS day either. I probably wouldn’t suggest a Sunday, but they want to do DHS the most. Also, I was trying to avoid back-to-back “same park” days. (i.e. - DHS on 2/1 Tuesday, Wed. = rest day , DHS again on 2/3 Thursday)
That wasn’t really an instructed criteria - just a personal preference.
Well, this will be a good framework. That is a good point about DHS and I’ll keep it in mind.
Things also might change if they bring dining plans back. My original pre-lockdown plans had a two-night hotel stay at POP with a dining plan. We were going to do DD’s essential dining of Aker. , DH’s main request of the German place and the Fantasmic dining at someplace. I will still working at where the remaining dining places would be.
Oooooh, you guys (and this thread) turned my mind to dining. Pre-lockdown, DD didn’t like Winnie the Pooh. I’d introduced the book during bedtime reading when she was maybe 3 and she said it “was boring”. There were precisely 3 books that she rejected (the others were the first Little House on the Prairie book, and Sarah, Plain and Tall), so I didn’t worry about it. About 6 months ago she discovered the Winnie the Pooh audiobook on my phone and she fell in love. She even talked me into relenting on my “No more plays for a year” to allow her to audition for Winnie the Pooh. So, she will go bonkers over Crystal Palace. Total Bonkers. I might even make it a surprise.
It is a long vacation, mainly because I have lots of vacation time. I get three weeks now, but four weeks really since sick time is rolled in. Since the work is basically programming, they encouraged us to WFH when we had the sniffles. That meant that I rarely have to use PTO for being sick and also that I rarely get sick.
When I first planned the now postponed trip and modeled different options, I realized that two weeks offsite with a base ticket was about the same cost as one week onsite with a hopper. That wouldn’t be true for people that are into dining in Disney.
What would be dreamy is if they gave us longer to use our park days, say 20 days to use a 10-day ticket. We could go Mon-Tues-Thurs-Fri until we’d used 10 days.
Yesterday I started to piddle with creating touring plans. Which of course meant adding the parks to my TP trip. Then I added all of your notes to my plan. This way in 6 months when I wonder a park is on a certain day, I’ll know.
I also noticed that the first three days are the parks that I’d planned on using a 2-night dining plan. So, assuming they add the dining plan back, those park days will be perfect. With one of the hopefully dining plan meals being Aker., I wanted us to do that early so that we know which Princesses we already have covered.
