Michael Jackson’s 3-D epcot masterpiece was Captain EO. Truly the best experience by Eastman Kodak.
Long gone. But the current 3-D shows at WDW are even more immersive. Check out It’s Tough To Be a Bug.
As an Orlando Resident, I’d reccomend keeping an eye on the weather trends. This winter has been weird, with record high temps for us, suddenly plunging into the 30’s overnight. While the extremes may not bother you, beware they play bloody hell on your body. Nothing sucks worse than Disney with a sinus headache from running the heater in your hotel room, after sweating like a pig all day. Seriously. It happens. Just this week in fact.
Stay in Kissimmee. Nice hotels, and cheap. If you want to make it easy on you and are willig to fork over a little more to achieve it , stay on property, eat the cost of the hotel, but go offsite for meals and such.
If you are going to eat there and stay on prem and do the restaurants at Disney/EPCOT, I’ve been told that the Disney Dining Plan is the most bang for the buck.
Also, as many/all of the restaurants book up, planning the trip can mean making reservations beforehand. OK, there’s less spontaneity at knowing 8 months beforehand that Monday is the ‘character breakfast’, catch as catch can lunch, and Le Cellier for dinner, Tuesday is breakfast at the resort, catch as catch can lunch, and dinner at Chefs de France. Still, it beats traveling X thousand miles and putting your nose against the glass to wonder if the cheese soup is as good as they say because they’re fully booked*.
*Look, there are as many opinions as there are different T-shirts going through the turnstiles first thing in the morning. I’m not offering this up as right vs wrong; just as what works for me/mine.
I wasn’t a fan of the dining plan for a long time, but the last two times we went to WDW we used it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and became a convert. An adult dining plan option cost $39/day, and you can easily spend that on one nice meal per day at WDW. However, I’m about to jump back off the bandwagon, for two reasons:
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To get the maximum benefit out of the dining plan, you HAVE to eat at a nice sit-down restaurant every day. Otherwise, you’re wasting money. It’s not always easy to schedule meals well in advance, and it’s lunacy to try to get into a sit-down restaurant at Disney, even in the slowest periods, with just 24 hours’ notice.
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Gratuities were included in the dining plan cost until this year. Now, you have to tip your server in addition to the cost of the dining plan. That takes away a chunk of the savings for me.
Finally, if you’re really looking to cut costs and still go to WDW, the dining plan isn’t a good option, because to use it you have to be staying in a Disney hotel. There are much cheaper lodging options in the Orlando/Kissimmee area than Disney hotels.
Yep. If you are going cheap, the dining plan isn’t great. It used to be great if you had a moderate budget and wanted to spend the TIME to sit down EVERY DAY for a meal.
Remember that at Disney time = money. You want to minimize the amount of time you spending doing things you could do other places, but slow down enough to enjoy yourself. For some people (Brainiac4 and myself) the second part of that means sitting down EVERY DAY for two hours worth of lunch and dinner. But if you don’t need that time, it isn’t a good way to spend your time - and on a budget, there are cheaper ways to get downtime (almost all the parks have shows where you can park you butt for forty minutes or an hour in seats.)
Someday, I plan to stay 100% awake for the entirety of The American Adventure. Someday.
It wont be 90 mins and it wont be simple shaking them off. But you can get tickets to several different attractions by going to one every other day.
Building on this, nearly every hotel in the Orlando area seems to have a fridge in the room, either included in the cost or available for a small extra fee. If you can bring along some foods for a simple cold breakfast, like cereal bars and fruit, and then buy milk and juice when you get there, you can save a lot of money, time, and hassle each morning. Ditto simple snacks. Disney has guards searching guests’ bags when they enter the parks, but they are looking for weapons and alcohol, not food. As long as you can carry it by hand (no wagons or pull-along coolers) and don’t bring alcohol or glass containers, they won’t do anything about bringing snacks or even a reasonable picnic lunch into the parks.
Tickets: Other than putting up with time-share sales pitches, there’s no legal way to get free or deeply discounted Disney World tickets. However, if you look on the fansites, you’ll see ads from legal ticket discounters. The discount per ticket isn’t large, but it adds up if you’ve got a big group. Make sure you don’t buy ticket features you’re not going to use. The Water Park option, for instance, only makes sense if you’re going to go to the so-called minor parks at least twice, and on a short trip you probably won’t have that sort of time.
If you’ve got kids, lay out the rules about snacks and souvenirs before you leave home!
It’s even better than they say. I could drink it by the gallon.
…Didn’t Disney kill this after the first incident of his alleged child molestation charges?
Your advice is probably the best we’ve heard, and an excellent compromise. We recall Kissimmee having an abundance of competitively cheap hotels, and we hear Lake Buena Vista is the area for a little nicer choices off-Disney. But, we wonder if we’ll be stuck in WDW traffic everyday as we wish to go the 1st week in June. It might be worth a little extra to sleep on Disney, but eat bigger meals off-Disney (other than one splurge for a treat).
I know people shy away from June, but my wife and I honeymooned on Disney during this time (12 years ago), and the crowds weren’t too bad. We rode/saw everything we wanted to ride/see. A few rides were closed for maintenance, but c’est la vie! (Plus, we’re not a BIG rollercoaster family, so this helps.) This will be our first trip back to WDW, but now we have a 9 year old girl and a 2.5 year old boy. So, we’ll need a strategy to maximize their experience.
Q: Could the crowds have gotten exponentially worse in 12 years?
You have NO idea. I would strongly urge you to sign up at touringplans.com (it’s only eight bucks for a year’s subscription) and follow their advice/suggestions on touring the parks. It’ll save you a ton of time and line-waiting.
Will do!