Welcome back to Part Two of Walt Disney World vacation planning! Once you have chosen your travel dates and accommodations, and made things official with a resort reservation and theme park ticket purchase, it’s time to get into more of the nitty-gritty of planning and continue building upon these arrangements. The focus for this round will be:
- How will you get to the Walt Disney World Resort?
- Can you imagine where you’d like to spend each day of your vacation?
- Are there dining experiences and magical extras that you would like to reserve?
TRANSPORTATION
Once you’re ready to take a deep dive back into the world of planning, making travel arrangements will be the first order of business. You can literally travel by plane, train, or automobile to get to sunny Orlando, Florida. Packing our minivan to the gills and hitting the road worked best for us for a number of years when our kids were very young. Driving allowed us to save some money (roundtrip airfare for our family of 5 adds up quickly!) and gave us the added flexibility of getting around the Walt Disney World Resort on our own terms rather than always needing to rely on Disney transportation. Nowadays, however, we prefer to fly the friendly skies and take full advantage of our kids’ vacation time away from school and extracurricular activities. (There is nothing quite like hitting the ground running in Orlando after an easy 2-hour flight compared to our previous 18-hour road trip adventures from Northeastern Pennsylvania!) If you don’t plan to drive, be sure to book your airfare or train tickets, as well as a car rental or transfers to and from your hotel. The earlier you book your travel, the more likely you are to lock in the best pricing.
CREATE INITIAL DAILY PLANS
We’re about to get into the more detailed minutiae of each of your vacation days here and, I can’t lie, this part always makes me downright giddy! It is time to start fleshing out the structure of your days and, aside from actually being in Walt Disney World, there is no better feeling than imagining where and how you’ll want to spend your vacation time. I know you may be asking yourself, is all of this really necessary? I think it would be near impossible not to have a good time when visiting any of the Disney theme parks – being in the midst of everything the Imagineers have created will likely put an instant smile on your face if nothing else. But Disney World can get very busy depending on when you travel, and there is just so much to do and so many ways to go about tackling your must-experience list. So, my best advice is to prepare as much as you can ahead of time to make your trip as smooth and as enjoyable as possible.
You’ll begin by loosely mapping out your days. You will eventually create step-by-step touring plans for each day at the theme parks (Spoiler Alert: Guess what we’ll be up to in Part Three?!) – but for now you’ll simply focus on figuring out a rough daily plan. There are many ways to approach this, but what has worked best for me is to grab an 8×12 sheet of paper, turn it horizontally, and write our vacation dates evenly spaced across the top. I then lightly draw a line across the middle of the page so that I have space to sketch out what the first half of our days will look like and a separate area to outline our afternoons and evenings. Then, I pencil in our ideas for where we’d like to spend our time each day of the vacation. This is also a great time to consider the time of year you’ll be traveling and whether or not you’d like to take advantage of any special events that may be taking place, such as Disney After Hours or a holiday party. And, voila – you now have the basic framework of your vacation! Of course, there is always the possibility that your plans may change along the way, but you at least have a starting point to help guide you through your next task.
DINING AND ENCHANTED EXTRAS RESERVATIONS
Now it’s time for one of our favorite parts of the planning process – choosing restaurants and making dining reservations! We love food (especially Disney food!) and we particularly love daydreaming about what we want to eat again and try for the first time on our Disney vacations. There are so many fantastic dining opportunities at the Walt Disney World Resort, and many are very popular and tough to get into on a whim. No need to worry, however – dining reservations can be booked 60 days in advance at most table service restaurants so you’ll be able to secure a time to dine at all of your favorites well before your vacation begins. (If you’ve booked a stay at a Disney Resort hotel, you will be able to make all of your dining reservations for the entire length of your stay 60 days prior to your check-in date. This is a terrific perk for guests staying on Disney property.) About a month or two before this key milestone date, we start putting together a list of restaurants where we wish to dine and the dates where we think they’d fit best according to the daily plan we sketched out above. This ensures that we are prepared to try and schedule a time at our desired restaurants when our 60-day advanced dining reservation booking window opens. Of course, the best-laid plans often go awry, so I try to have a plan B (and sometimes C) of backup restaurants and dates to check in case the stars do not want to align.
Reservations for unique experiences and events open 60 days in advance as well. You could design your very own lightsaber at Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge or treat your child to a magical makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique; end your day at the Magic Kingdom with a lovely fireworks dessert party or go on a private behind-the-scenes tour of Kilimanjaro Safaris at Animal Kingdom. There are a whole host of ways to customize your Disney World vacation, and now is the time to decide if you’d like to add an Enchanted Extra to your plans.
AND BREATHE!
A round of applause and high fives all around – you have accomplished so much and are that much closer to your pixie-dusted vacation! Go ahead and hit the pause button on planning for a bit, and we’ll meet up again in Part Three!
