This. I agree. Nobody minds spending the money 'cause WDW is a lot of fun, but for the cost, my comparable vacations can include Europe or extended vacations elsewhere. A 7 day PH ticket is about $70 per day, give or take. This is JUST the daily ‘entertainment’ portion of the trip. So, for my family of 4 we are spending about $280 per day, just on the entertainment. While there are some vacations (such as @rizzog’s mentioned ski trip) that cost that much in entertainment, I have spent many days gleefully browsing through priceless works of art in European museums for a small percentage of that…
Point is… it is expensive, but value is a, well, value judgment. So, we all like the kinds of vacations we like, and we do those things. ANd that makes it “worth” it. And luckily, this group of folks are smart enough to join Touringplans and NOT have to be in the heat and the crowds!
Oh I agree completely! The fewer people that know our tips and tricks, the better for us.
What I was trying to get across was referring to all the people that sub their noses at WDW.
It’s not Disneys fault that these people don’t care to visit. It’s their own fault they don’t educate themselves better before coming to this decision.
I’m not sure I agree with this, fully. I understand your point, but a vacation is supposed to be a vacation. An escape. Who really wants to hyper plan a vacation when they just want to have a good time? Disney is supposed to be the happiest place on earth, so why would the uninitiated THINK they need to educate themselves, etc? Again, I compare Disney to other amusement parks. I just don’t have to hyper plan for other places like I do at Disney. I can just show up and have fun. YES, I may end up standing in lines more than I need to if I don’t have a plan, but it doesn’t matter as much. With Disney, it is so much more involved. So I can’t blame the person GOING to Disney for not knowing that. I can’t really blame Disney, either. It just…is.
When I first read the title, I thought this was about surprising family with a Disney trip (and maybe it was at the start), but it appears as if the discussion has turned into hiding our love of Disney in the shadows.
I will talk to anybody at great length about my planning. I have the Unofficial Guides (one for Disney, one for Universal) on my desk at the school I teach, so I’m not keeping a secret from anyone. Many people don’t bother asking, though, since I can talk their ear off and will explain how, by following the tips in the Unofficial Guide, we hardly ever wait in long lines, and the math and research behind it. Most people don’t want to hear that. They want to either go on a trip with little planning, or they already “know” that Disney trips are miserable because of the crowded parks and don’t want to be told they are wrong because it is THEY who are doing something wrong, not Disney.
This is true.
When I used to take my family to Disneyland in the 80s and 90s, we just showed up, grabbed a ‘guide map’ and enjoyed the park. No planning, no stress, 100% FUN.
Unfortunately this is not the case any more and I always warn friends planning to visit, “Make plans”. If you want a carefree holiday then you should visit somewhere else. All the people on this form know that Disney is the happiest place on earth. It just takes a little planning.
I just wish that my boss would have let me known about his trip to WDW. I would of helped him have an enjoyable holiday. It is not his fault, but now he will never go back. So sad.
As I like to say, people don’t know what they don’t know!
Why would anyone think to ask if they didn’t know they SHOULD ask?
It has been a motto of mine ever since high school, when I, in a debate about gun control, referred to a “point two two caliber pistol”. I didn’t know that when you see “.22 caliber” you were supposed to say “twenty-two caliber”. The teacher dinged me on that. When I said I didn’t know, she said I should have asked. It always bothered me because why would I even THINK I should ask if I never thought I was saying anything wrong?
Ever since then, I try to take the same view of others. When people make mistakes, etc., they don’t know that they don’t know.
Unfortunately, in the case of Disney, it can be an expensive problem to not know that you don’t know!
Some of us husbands have wives who don’t share our love of Disney. It isn’t a one way street. Don’t get me wrong, my wife doesn’t hate it, and she will go and have a good time with us. She just doesn’t want to go back nearly as often as I do, and would rather go somewhere else. Why should you want to go somewhere else? I don’t understand.
That’s my situation exactly. Wife enjoys Disney, but not to the same extent. I do all the planning which I enjoy. Also, she’s not big on RDing the parks, so I set our FPs to after lunch so she can join us after sleeping in. It works out.
We tend to keep our Disney plans fairly private. We don’t tell DD until close to travel time and don’t want anyone to accidentally spill the news in front of her. Or to decide that it would be good time for them to go too. We also get other relatives who pump us for details and then lecture us that most people just can’t afford to go or to stay on property. I don’t discuss my budget, ask for advice or comment on their spending choices but I bite my tongue when this happens. If it makes them feel better about themselves and their choices by putting down my choices that’s their issue, not mine.
Actually, I have another problem. Both my wife and I love Disney. But my wife has what she affectionately refers to as her “Disney husband”. It is this man she went to school with in high school who takes Disney trips with his wife/kids at least once a year…sometimes twice. Since she is friends with him on Facebook, she sees all the photos of every trip he takes and she becomes jealous and suddenly wishes she was married to HIM instead of ME because she wants to go to Disney every year as well.
Of course, she comes to her senses eventually and realizes that I’m far more dashing than he is. But Disney jealousy is definitely a real phenomenon.
This is exactly why I got the way that I did in my love for Disney. I had been a few times, then my then fiancee and I went in 2003. It had been a really long time since I had been and we had a lot of fun. We went back for a long weekend in 2005 as Florida residents and it wasn’t as fun because it wasn’t “new” to us. We hadn’t been back and I was determined to take our kids when they were somewhat young. So when they were 6, we took them. Since it had been so long, I figured there would be a lot of things I didn’t know about (like character meals, BBB, etc) and wanted my kids to be able to experience all of it. We had so much fun because I planned it all down to the last detail. I didn’t want to miss something because I didn’t know.
One of our friends was jsut there and they had never been. I told them a universal, immutable truth. If you go, you should know where you are going on at least the next 3 or 4 rides, at a minimum. If you go on a ride and wait to get off before you decide what to ride next, you’ll argue and waste time. You’ll essentially be watching other people go on rides and having fun. Get a plan. You don’t necessarily have to stick to it 100%, but it really helps and you can do many more things than you could if you don’t have a plan.
I think that’s an apples to oranges comparison. WDW is more than an amusement park, so comparing the admission costs between the two is a strawman argument. Does your friend consider a Yugo the same as a Porsche? They are both cars - right? So why would anybody buy a Porsche when they could buy 10 Yugos!
If you read biographies about Walt Disney, you know that it was his disappointment with amusement parks that drove him to develop Disneyland, which was a completely new concept.
I only consider Universal parks as an equivalent to Disney’s and their prices are comparable.
I am sure you already know this, but Youtube that. You won’t win. I know it’s hard to tell, but I was sarcastic. Not many people alive can beat Gaston.
I don’t disagree. But the point was about price point and the fact that a trip to WDW will be expensive no matter what.
In your car example, it is more like saying you can buy a Porche, or get a Mustang instead. Both are really fun to drive, but one costs SIGNIFICANTLY less. Maybe not exactly the same experience, but a whole lot more people can afford that Mustang than the Porche.
Yeah, I got the sarcasm. I was being sarcastic in return!
And since both of us felt the need to explain our use of sarcasm, it suggests less than perfection in our implementation of sarcasm. (he says sarcastically)
On another board I post on, whenever someone says something sarcastic, it’s pretty much a rule that you have to put sarcastericks next to it. Kind of like this:
I wouldn’t just beat Gaston in a pushup contest, I would dominate him.**
It works because sarcasm is sometimes hard to understand in written text.
Exactly