The Walt Disney World Planning Series

I love to plan, and I’m not ashamed to say the idea of “winging” a trip of any length to anywhere makes me feel uneasy. Now, if you love to plan and you’re a Disney fan a trip to Walt Disney World is something that will likely greatly excite you. I mean a trip to any Disney Park is likely to excite a Disney fan, but there’s a little extra sprinkle of pixie dust if you’re a planning fan.

I’m very fortunate to have visited Walt Disney World (WDW) twice before with my family and I have an upcoming trip in September 2018! I thought a good little series for this blog would be some planning tips and advice. It should be noted that although our upcoming trip includes visits to both WDW and Universal this series will focus on WDW, but don’t worry I have future plans for a Universal advice blog post soon so don’t forget to look out for it!

Our Trip History

On our first trip to WDW (the pre Fastpass+ era)  we went to pretty much every single theme park – all the Disney and Universal parks, Sea World, Busch Gardens & Aquatica. I had done some research into the basics of everything but was sitting my A-Levels at the time and didn’t fully comprehend just how much there was to do in Orlando. We also only booked it maybe around 2/3 months before we went (we’d had a pretty rough year as a whole and I think even my mum felt the need for some Disney Magic). We focused mostly on the rides as that’s what our experience of theme parks was. We didn’t really meet many characters, eat in many of the sit down restaurants; in fact I don’t think we made it past Mexico in the World Showcase at Epcot! [I know, how “bad” of a Disney fan am I?]

Fast-forward a few years to our next Disney trip and we took a totally different approach. I had such an amazing time on our first holiday that I basically came straight home and started researching and saving in preparation for my next trip (we still didn’t book crazily early though, maybe just short of 6 months). This time around we decided we wanted to to a mixture of everything the parks had to offer. We split our time between the Disney Parks, Universal, the Kennedy Space Centre and shopping. The main difference is that we put so much emphasis into meeting characters, in fact we almost met every single character that permanently  meets in the parks – with the exception of Fairy Godmother, Evil Stepmother, Evil Stepsisters and the Disney Junior gang. The characters were so impressed by how many of their friends we had managed to meet – I have plans for a blog post all about the characters you can meet at WDW so if you’ve any questions pop them in the comments!

And so that brings us almost up to date and to the end of the first blog post in my planning series. We booked our most recent trip back in October with the free Disney Dining promotion, which gave us a countdown of over 300 days. Seems crazy but if you’re used to the Disney way of life you’ll know it’s nothing in the grand scheme of things!

Have you ever been to Walt Disney World? Or do you have a current countdown? Let me know in the comments and stay tuned for my next Disney Planning blog post to find out what we did first with our 300+ day countdown!