It’s 2026, so I’m officially starting to plan for our June/July trip to Florida, including for a specific set of dates for our family’s first trip to Universal Orlando Resort (yay!)
Who: me (47), DH (44), DD (11) and DD (9) When: 30 June - 4 July Why: we’ll be visiting my mom in Florida and now that the kids are getting older and taller (and with everyone raving about Epic) we decided that this would be the year where we do Universal instead of WDW Where: I’ve booked 4 nights at Cabana Bay, and 1 overlapping night at Royal Pacific Resort on 1 July for the 2-day UXP that comes with it
We’re planning to spend 2 days in IOA/USF, and 1 day at Epic, with the possibility of another half park day on arrival or departure day (I still need to see how flights will work out for that).
We’d like to do a bit of everything, though all things Wizarding World will be the top priority (all four of us are big fans of the HP books and movies). My youngest is also obsessed with Minions. The kids like thrill rides, while I am there for theming and magic rather than thrills and I occasionally get motion sick on coaster/drops. I’m hoping with a bit of Meclizine I can survive at least one ride on Velocicoaster before I start sitting things out? I will also definitely skip the Doomfall thing, I already struggle with TOT, so this one definitely does not look like fun to me.
We live abroad and will spend around three weeks in the US before coming to Universal - two weeks visiting National Parks (Yellowstone, Grand Teton and Arches plus maybe Rocky Mountain or Canyonlands depending on flight connections), and one week with my mom in central Florida (she lives near Vero Beach).
I decided to take advantage of the recent Black Friday deals on Attraction Tickets to purchase:
14-day UOR tickets (way more than we need, but with the 20% Black Friday deal it came out to about the same as buying 4-day/4-park hopper tickets from Universal, and I wanted the option of free changes/full refund in case our plans change).
1-day Express Pass for Epic Universe
Everything I’ve booked to date is refundable in case our dates end up changing a little.
I’m eagerly reading UOR trip reports and have added UOR to my TP subscriptions. I hope to start making some detailed trip plans soon to share for feedback. But for now I’m just excited to have the first set of bookings in hand and a trip countdown!
Ugh, I tried to get ejected from this ride before it started. I refused to put my phone up- pretended like I didn’t hear them. Finally on of the kids TOOK. IT. and they started the ride. So much for getting bounced.
All of this makes me excited! I have a trip booked for April but I feel like a newbie! It’s been a very long time since we went to USO. I’m trying to soak up all the info when I can.
The minions ride has one of my favorite queue decorations. It starts like a mounted animal head. But the biggest animal has a smaller animal dangling from its mouth and so on. I think at the end is a cat holding a mouse holding cheese. Maybe it fits me.
No. I did price out a few 2+2 night split stays, but we will have lots of luggage and limited time so the idea of leaving the parks to ride share around with our luggage felt tiring. Then a Liner on another thread pointed out that if we want Express Pass it would still be more cost efficient for 4 people to just get a night at a Signature Hotel, even if we wouldn’t use it. They were right: RPR is $460 for the night I need, so that’s $57.50 per person per day for unlimited Express Pass (since it’s valid both check in and check out days).
Since we need to stop by RPR in the morning before park open to pick up our room key/UXP anyway, I’m toying with the idea of bringing a small backpack to leave with bell services in the morning and then actually using the room for one night for a quick taste of RPR and easy IOA rope drop the next morning. But we’ll keep the Cabana Bay room with all of our stuff and head back there for the final two nights.
lol!
Yay for the April trip! I guess with Epic opening, everyone is going back to newbie status - which I think is really fun. A whole new PARK (or in my case three!) to discover from scratch!
YAY! Epic is wonderful. We are big HP fans too and all 3 of the HP themed areas are so immersive and wonderful. You do need a park to park ticket to do the Hogwars Express, so hopefully those attraction tickets are (I think they are reading your post, but not 100% sure).
If you have any Mario fans that land is like literally stepping into the game too. And Berk for How to Train Your Dragon is incredible. Universal is knocking it out of the park with it all!
I would definitely take a look at interactive wands for the HP areas. You can share one wand if you’d like (each of our kids has a wand, but on this last trip we didn’t want to pack all of them because we wanted to conserve space and we wanted to try the newest version of it, so we bought one for everyone to share - and it’s technically DH’s wand because he got the Wand of Power wand years and years and years ago before they were interactive, but we lost it somewhere when we moved and it hasn’t surfaced in any boxes in the basement or garage that we’ve checked, so this was our excuse to get him this new interactive one).
All this to say, a wand can be shared and passed between everyone to try out the spells, if you’re wanting to dedicate time to them. They are so fun! And you can use early entry time to do them with much less crowds/waits. You can also use time after the park closes and before the lands are swept. That isn’t as quiet of a time, so you may have to wait in short lines for popular spells/effects, but at least it’s outside of park time when you can’t be lining up for anything else otherwise.
And for Minions, we thought Villain Con was a blast! Just make sure to get everyone setup on the app and sync the gun to the app to get your scores. And be sure to plan at least one snack or meal at the Minion Cafe. It was easy to eat at, so fun and the food was very decent (and you can get Minion tater tots!!!). And the decor everywhere was so fun.
Anyway, any other questions you have, ask away! Our family has always loved Disney but this last trip to Universal we realized we may be favoring Universal, at least for Orlando trips. They’ve really matched Disney level immersion, and this was the first time I was there that I didn’t once think about how it wasn’t quite up to par with Disney.