Quicksilver Van Service - WDW to UOR

#1

Has anyone used Quicksilver Tours to book a van from a WDW to UOR? We will be starting and ending our trip at WDW resorts and are considering options for travel to UOR for a few days in the middle. We will be staying at Hard Rock Hotel for those 3 nights.

We will have 3 adults and 4 kids, 2 needing a car seat per Florida law. Our options:

  • Rent a car for the entire stay (we would bring our own car seats)
  • DME to/from WDW from airport and one of the following:
    • Uber to UOR (will need 2 Ubers with 1 car seat each)
    • Quicksilver private van service to UOR (they provide car seats at no charge)
    • Other shuttle service (Mears sounds like a nightmare - too many stops, etc.)
    • Rent a car just for the 3 days at UOR (seems like a hassle)

The benefit of renting a car is freedom. The downside is the cost and having to worry about bringing or renting car seats (and having to bring change for tolls! :angry:).

Uber is great but hard with such a large party and so many kids.

Quicksilver sounds great in theory but I haven’t seen a lot of reviews. The ones I’ve seen are positive.

Any thoughts / recommendations?

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#3

As an update to this, I decided to order the Quicksilver van service from WDW to UOR and not rent a car. We will use DME between MCO / WDW.

For Quicksilver, I ordered one front-facing car seat and two booster seats, which is the maximum they allow you to pre-book. It was easy to process through their website (link below) and they called me right back to confirm the details. I’ll report how it goes when we’re there in May/June!

https://www.quicksilver-tours.com/

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Help deciding on DME or Lyft/Uber
#4

I’m sorry I wouldn’t be able to help even if I saw this earlier. I prefer Uber usually on my UOR days, but never had to deal with the car seat.

Question. The party(s) needing car seats won’t be bringing them on the plane? I may be just doing selective memories, but I remember flying somewhere with my car seat and my stroller, both of which I used on the trip, in the parks.

It sounds like so far so good with Quicksilver though! Excited to read your thoughts on them later.

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#5

I have brought my car seat before on the plane, and it was such a hassle! So heavy and not enough hands when you get to the airport. We always had to do a relay across the airport, like in the riddle with the fox, the chicken, and the grain.

So we decided to just rent what we needed this time if we had a rental car. The situation with Quicksilver will fix that for us.

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#6

Oh! Thanks for this, @Jeff_AZ! We are contemplating taking the train down in May and was looking for a car service…

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#7

I bookmarked it as well. I love that they’ll allow for a grocery stop, and it’s free if you book the round trip.

@Jeff_AZ Jeff, do better than Randall and make sure you get your ad fees upfront!

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#8

I’m totally not trying to be contrary and I’m glad you found a solution! Especially since you really just need the seats for one day. I just wanted to provide some perspective for other parents who might be reading this and dreading the misery of flying with kids. We have two kids and have flown fairly extensively with them and every time have done it with a car seat and a stroller for each kid. We always rent a car at WDW anyway. It’s most certainly not the good old days of flying with just a carry-on, but it’s very doable for us.

First, all of those items (even pack n plays!) fly for free. We have a large, padded travel stroller bag that is a life saver and can fit a lot of kid stuff beyond just the stroller. We have a set of light weight car seats that we just use for flying. I like having the kids in the seats on the plane too because they just get used to travelling that way, the same as car trips. If you don’t fly frequently, there are still very cheap ones out there (probably cheaper than renting). I have a car-seat backpack that one can go in and then we bring bungee cords to hook one onto our suitcase. We also have a roller case for one car seat that is better if you just have one small kid. We have never had to do a relay and I don’t really think that I pack particularly light. We are planning (god willing) to go to France this summer with 2 kids, 2 car seats, 2 strollers and maybe a change of clothes. :crazy_face:

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#9

I think with 2 kids it is doable. And if you have more kids it depends on how helpful the other kids are compared to how much of your attention they require!

I’m glad you are able to make it work. We have done it in the past and it’s not as bad as I made it seem. Still, it does take some logistical planning. Two adults can only carry so much, and you have to factor in if the children can walk or will need to be carried (including if they fall asleep!). Lastly, it helps if the airport you fly out of allows curbside check-in so you don’t have to haul all your checked baggage by hand to the terminal.

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#10

Great point! My kids are not super close in age so I never really needed to carry two. We just got a Trunki suitcase that I’m dying to try that my older one can hopefully pull or the younger one can sit on! And god I miss the airport check-in at the Disney resorts!

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#11

@OBNurseNH This is the one he was looking at.

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#12

Hey wanted to let you know that MOST rental cars have their vehicles registered with state toll systems. You can ask when making a reservation, but right now, due to covid, FL is snapping pictures of car tags for contactless tolling. The charge will go to the car tag, to rental company and then be billed to your card on file with rental company. Usually the rental company tacks on a service charge.

I have a SunPass and have randomly received pictures of my car driving through toll roads. They send the pic with a bill via snail mail. They can find you :crazy_face:

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#13

This is the way it always should be! Manual tolls are ridiculous. This is not the 1950s for crying out loud. :rofl:

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#14

True!

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#15

I think it depends on the airport layout too. I took my oldest to visit family when he was about 9 months. It was awful. I had to drag a car seat, luggage, and carry-on through customs and check-in before I got to baggage drop off. Had my son strapped to my chest. Luckily he was in a good mood. It could have been so much worse. We still have 2 in car seats. I am very much interested in your report on Quicksilver. It sounds like a great solution.

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#16

Update:

We used Quicksilver Tours to transport our crew of 8 from Animal Kingdom Lodge to Hard Rock Hotel and back to Beach Club for only $132 (plus tip). We received a phone call about 7pm the night before each pickup. The driver arrived a few minutes before our scheduled time. He had booster chairs and a car seat as requested in my reservation (I had to install them when he arrived, which I didn’t mind doing to make sure it was in the right spot and installed properly).

The driver was safe, friendly, and prompt. We had the same driver for both legs of our trip, which we were told they try to accommodate.

For trips from MCO, a trip to the grocery store is included, but we did not take advantage of this service since our trip did not originate from MCO.

Overall, we had a great experience and I can’t recommend this service enough! The value is great - the van was a 10-seater so we had a couple of empty seats and plenty of leg room. This was at least as economical as Uber since we would have needed two, and in some cases is actually cheaper. (Uber would not have worked for us due to the number of booster chairs and car seats needed.)

Covid Note: On our first trip, there was plexiglass behind the driver’s seat, but it had been removed for our second trip. We wore our masks, but the driver never mentioned anything about masks being required or not required.

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What will replace DME?
#17

We used Quicksilver a couple of years ago from MCO to Universal. Great experience. Would definitely use again.

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