WDW trip planning - making park reservations
Once I’d decided I was going to Disneyworld and had organized my flights plus accommodation, the next step was to procure some of those park tickets I’d heard so much about. I was getting pretty excited about this trip, so now that the more familiar admin was taken care of, I could focus on the exciting, Disney-specific elements. This was something I was looking forward to, of course, but also strangely apprehensive.
A bit of context may help: as mentioned previously, I was a pretty confident WDW vacation planner and I also love the vacation planning part of any trip. At the very least I use Google Travel to record all the various elements but when things get a little more complex, I also use my own documents like spreadsheets and such. It really does depend on the trip but one of my more complicated trips was a two-week Caribbean cruise plus a stay in Texas before and after the cruise, during the latter part of the C19 pandemic. There were a lot of elements to keep track of, including various covid tests before and during travel, so I had a very long document detailing almost every day of the trip.
A quick visit to the Disneyworld UK site immediately offers me the 7-day ticket where you really get 14 days to visit the parks. It seemed a bit much, but this was the only option I could find on that site… so I fired up the VPN and checked the US WDW site for a comparison.
WOW. Suddenly those UK-only tickets looked very, very attractive. Not only did they come out much more reasonable than the US ones, these already included Memory Maker and other perks so it was a no-brainer. I would sadly be wasting the 7 “free days” but the cost was still overall a much better deal. Sorry, non-UK peeps.
I bought the ticket (and, incidentally, got about 7 different kinds of confirmation email, transaction email, email with invoice, email with forms…) and once I had this, I could make my park reservations.
I checked my dates on the calendar and everything looked good, but I wanted to nail this bit of admin before too late. I now had to choose: which park on which day? I thought it would be hard to choose but I made a somewhat random selection and proceeded to book the days. I had to first link my ticket which initially stumped me, as the page wanted my "annual pass reference" even though I'd clicked on the right button (several times!) I figured it out in the end, and I went on to make the reservations for each day.
A bit of context may help: as mentioned previously, I was a pretty confident WDW vacation planner and I also love the vacation planning part of any trip. At the very least I use Google Travel to record all the various elements but when things get a little more complex, I also use my own documents like spreadsheets and such. It really does depend on the trip but one of my more complicated trips was a two-week Caribbean cruise plus a stay in Texas before and after the cruise, during the latter part of the C19 pandemic. There were a lot of elements to keep track of, including various covid tests before and during travel, so I had a very long document detailing almost every day of the trip.
This particular trip actually started being planned a few years before anyone had even heard of covid, so as flights were cancelled and things were moved, this document came in very handy. But even before all of that, I really enjoyed putting it together. I liked having one place that I could refer to if I had a query on pretty much anything to do with my trip. All details were saved there and as it was saved on the cloud, I could access it from all my devices.
However, my previous Disney trips haven’t seen this level of planning, for some reason. On the last trip we took in 2016 I had of course booked flights and hotels, car hire and park tickets but I hadn’t gone as far as to decide which parks we’d do on every day, much less worried about making any advanced dinner reservations (ADRs) or was much bothered about trying to book FastPasses as soon as I was able.
Sure, I did try to get a few things nailed down but I just couldn’t figure out how others do it: how do they work out so much detail, so many months in advance? I can’t even make a meal plan for the next few days! My family also seemed cool with that approach, so we were super relaxed about it all. We all chose one thing we absolutely wanted to do and we’d make sure that it would happen - everything else would be a bonus.
We had a great time with this approach - we may not have ridden every single attraction but we didn’t really want to do that. I did secure a few FastPasses but we never got to go on Frozen Ever After but that didn’t really bother anyone. Some days we even decided what park to visit on the next day late in the evening before and that was fine, or we’d decide to spend some time in the pool or even split up and have some of us do one thing and the rest, another.
It seems to help that we know the parks well and having done some of the attractions many times while we were living there, it was fine to miss out if needed. Many, many years ago when my son was a baby, we flew to Orlando and didn’t even plan to visit any parks. Some friends gave us a free ticket to visit Epcot after 2 PM and we gladly took it, and mostly what we did was walk around World Showcase with the baby asleep in his stroller. It was a lovely visit. So yeah, we are not the typical park visitors, I guess.
This time though, things have surely changed. At the most basic level, I need to decide what parks I’ll be visiting, to make reservations and I’m only going for a week. So how many park days will I have? I was thinking that maybe I could save money and only buy the tickets I would use, so I started the research: how much are park tickets, anyway?
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However, my previous Disney trips haven’t seen this level of planning, for some reason. On the last trip we took in 2016 I had of course booked flights and hotels, car hire and park tickets but I hadn’t gone as far as to decide which parks we’d do on every day, much less worried about making any advanced dinner reservations (ADRs) or was much bothered about trying to book FastPasses as soon as I was able.
Sure, I did try to get a few things nailed down but I just couldn’t figure out how others do it: how do they work out so much detail, so many months in advance? I can’t even make a meal plan for the next few days! My family also seemed cool with that approach, so we were super relaxed about it all. We all chose one thing we absolutely wanted to do and we’d make sure that it would happen - everything else would be a bonus.
We had a great time with this approach - we may not have ridden every single attraction but we didn’t really want to do that. I did secure a few FastPasses but we never got to go on Frozen Ever After but that didn’t really bother anyone. Some days we even decided what park to visit on the next day late in the evening before and that was fine, or we’d decide to spend some time in the pool or even split up and have some of us do one thing and the rest, another.
It seems to help that we know the parks well and having done some of the attractions many times while we were living there, it was fine to miss out if needed. Many, many years ago when my son was a baby, we flew to Orlando and didn’t even plan to visit any parks. Some friends gave us a free ticket to visit Epcot after 2 PM and we gladly took it, and mostly what we did was walk around World Showcase with the baby asleep in his stroller. It was a lovely visit. So yeah, we are not the typical park visitors, I guess.
This time though, things have surely changed. At the most basic level, I need to decide what parks I’ll be visiting, to make reservations and I’m only going for a week. So how many park days will I have? I was thinking that maybe I could save money and only buy the tickets I would use, so I started the research: how much are park tickets, anyway?
A quick visit to the Disneyworld UK site immediately offers me the 7-day ticket where you really get 14 days to visit the parks. It seemed a bit much, but this was the only option I could find on that site… so I fired up the VPN and checked the US WDW site for a comparison.
WOW. Suddenly those UK-only tickets looked very, very attractive. Not only did they come out much more reasonable than the US ones, these already included Memory Maker and other perks so it was a no-brainer. I would sadly be wasting the 7 “free days” but the cost was still overall a much better deal. Sorry, non-UK peeps.
I bought the ticket (and, incidentally, got about 7 different kinds of confirmation email, transaction email, email with invoice, email with forms…) and once I had this, I could make my park reservations.
I checked my dates on the calendar and everything looked good, but I wanted to nail this bit of admin before too late. I now had to choose: which park on which day? I thought it would be hard to choose but I made a somewhat random selection and proceeded to book the days. I had to first link my ticket which initially stumped me, as the page wanted my "annual pass reference" even though I'd clicked on the right button (several times!) I figured it out in the end, and I went on to make the reservations for each day.
It was pretty easy and the confirmation emails I received were useful, so this bit was less painful than I thought it would be. Having said that, I’m writing this a few days later and already wondering if I should make some changes…
Also, I only made reservations for one person, with one ticket and for seven days. I would like to think that it is not much more complex for those doing this for several people over 14 days but of course, I can't test this.
So far, so good. The next bit I wanted to take care of was getting to grips with the app, My Disney Experience. I already have a WDW app on my phone (yup, since 2016 and ported across the two phones I’ve owned since!) but of course, haven’t used it much.
I’ll tell you how I got on with it next post!
I’ll tell you how I got on with it next post!
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