Has anyone been to Disney World in the last year or two? We are going in in May. Trying to decide on meal plan, travel agent, no travel agent, book thru Disney, what is a must see (3 and 6 year olds), what is okay to miss, anything really.......
Some of this is dependent upon the length of your stay, budget, etc. We JUST did a two-day Disney/two-day Universal vacation and it wasn't enough time to do what we wanted. 3 & 3 would have been better. Anyway, here's my two pennies:
1. Book through Disney
2. Buy the meal plan. You have to book two nights at their resort to qualify for the meal plan, but it's worth it. You can buy one day of meals for each night you're in their resort. You get a full service sit down meal, one "quick" meal, a snack & an unlimited drink cup.
3. Do the sit-down meal at Ackershus (sp?) at Norway in Epcot for dinner with the Princesses. (That's what we did so I can speak for the breakfast thing)
4. You have to have a reservation for the Princess dining. Make it AS SOON AS YOU'RE ALLOWED. We eff'ed around and made ours last minute and they were booked solid three weeks before we were supposed to be there. We FINALLY got a reservation for just my wife and our two girls just TWO DAYS before our only night in the park. I had planned on taking our 2yo son and just going to eat someplace else. When we got there to check in for dinner, we asked the hostess if they had room for all five of us. She did us a solid and worked us in without the reservation for all five. I reciprocated with a nice tip that she was clearly surprised to get. The experience was worth it. My daughters are still young enough to be into the Princesses and they were amazed.
5. Get the Park Hopper
6. Get the Photo Pass
7. Get the bracelets (Sit down and set up your MyDisney account with your wife, then sit down with your kids and let them pick their character avatars and bracelet colors)
8. Download the app to at least one of your phones. You can log into your MyDisney account from there and it'll give you live wait times for rides and character meet-n-greets.
9. If you rent a car and drive to the park from the resort, do not pay for parking. The front desk will give you a parking pass for your dash if you ask for one.
10. If you take their transportation, it leaves on generous intervals and doesn't take long to get your from the resorts to the parks.
11. When you go to Magic Kingdom, get to the monorail or boat dock NLT 7:15 if you're going to do the morning welcome ceremony that they do. We jacked around and missed it.
12. When you do the Fast Pass thing, you have to reserve a ride and a time. It may seem like a pain in the neck, but do it. You won't regret it. You only get 3 Fast Passes per park, per day. (This is something Universal does WAY better than Disney)
13. If you can hang (and by you, I mean your kids and how they react to being up that late) the fireworks show at 10/10:30 is awesome.
14. The characters don't walk down the street and do meet-n-greets like they used to. The are either indoors or out, you have to find them, you get in line, and hopefully they don't have to take a break before you get up there because they WILL close the line and say sorry but X will be back in 20 minutes. The up side is that the maps are marked with the locations where they're going to be. You just have to get there and get in line.
15. Fly Allegiant. Non-stop from Tulsa to Orlando/Sanford is roughly 2-1/2 hours & $80 one-way. You pay for everything (checked bags, seat selection, etc., etc.) but it's still cheaper than multiple layovers or even non-stops with United, SW or the lot.
If you've got the time, Kennedy and the Apollo V & Atlantis exhibits are worth the price of admission if you're a space geek.
I hope that helps. Have a good time. Even as an adult who's not nuts for Disney, I had a great time myself and was in awe of quite a lot of what I saw. The best part for me was seeing my kids and wife have so much fun.
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