Somehow, my You Can Make Me Grow Old But You Can’t Make Me Grow Up 40th birthday trip has grown to include some of the extended family! And I don’t mind a bit. But I am wondering if anyone has any experience or advice to share…
Here’s the scoop so far. We’re going to Walt Disney World in the early fall. There will be at least two, possibly three or four, families, plus one teenaged nephew who is coming on his own. (We know that we need to look into potential legal issues with taking the teenaged nephew out of the country without Mom or Dad, but figure those can be resolved.) This means a minimum of ten, up to possibly fourteen, people, including kids from 1 1/2 to 15 years old (two teenagers). We’re all going to stay at the same hotel, a “Value” class hotel on property, and register as a Grand Gathering to increase our chances of getting rooms close together.
Right now The Bag is making the rounds. The Bag is a tote bag containing some WDW guide books, plus the freebie planning kit DVD and reasonably new park maps picked up and sent to us by my parents in the States. Thanks, Mom and Dad! The one family that is coming with us for sure has already ordered their own copy of at least one guide book. Most of the crew has not been to WDW or hasn’t for ages, so The Bag is seeing a lot of use. (We were there in Jan 2005.)
I’m writing up a proposed itinerary and will put it on Google Docs when it’s ready, for everyone in the group to look at and comment on.
We plan to meet for one meal each day, but otherwise there is no way we will manage to keep the whole clan together and we’re not even going to try. I’ll be making the reservations for the meals as soon as possible - I notice that Disney has gone back to 90 days for their Advanced Dining Reservations, so we have some time for that.
Am I missing anything really obvious? Anything not really obvious?
When would you place the deadline for the Maybe people to switch to Definitely Yes or Definitely No?
How far in advance is the best time to order international plane tickets?
Am I completely off my nut? (Don’t answer that.)
One thing, and I’ll try to find out some specific details for you. A while back a friend of mine had proposed a similar vacation, but with using a place that is all short term (weekly) luxury home rentals. It had all of the amenities of a hotel, but with a group your size was actually cheaper and the accommodation would be nicer. The downside would be a need to rent cars (I think) and drive. But it would give you a chance to enjoy one meal a day together, and probably save you some money there, too. IIRC every home had made service, all amenities, it’s own pool, etc.
I agree with this. We recently had a family gathering in NYC for a week; we had 17 adults and 4 children there, IIRC. Thre was definitely no way to get everyone going in the same place at one time; we had a loose itinerary but did not stick to it exactly. Getting together for the one meal was a big plus, and worked very well.
Before the 90 days reservation time is up?
Of course, but that has nothing to do with this thread!
Here’s my Disney tip: Every night, put several small bottles of water in the freezer (our hotel had a mini-fridge with freezer). Take these to the park the next day for cold water to drink. Everything inside the park is freakishly expensive. If you have room to take them, things like a travel pack of Tylenol are helpful.
Check out the weather before hand. Florida can be quite warm in the early fall. I hope y’all have fun!
I did this for 3 families last spring, but it was only 10 of us total. It looks like you have everything nailed and well planned.
One suggestion is to try and do something special for the whole gang on the last night. If you can spring it and divide up the cost, head over to the Boardwalk one night and go on an Illuminations cruise. I’ve done this for the last two family trips and it was a hit each time, one of the highlights. The one I booked was the Illuminations Basic Cruise: Walt Disney World Specialty Fireworks Cruises Keep in mind that these book fairly quickly though.
The Safari celebration dinner also looks fun, and if you don’t want to go quite so extreme, consider the Hoop De Doo review. I held off on this for years because it seemed so corny, but it ended up being a great time for the kids and older folks especially.
Doesn’t Google Docs have a forms feature? Maybe you could make a form where people could submit their top 3 most important parks/restaurants/etc. If you are a completely insane planner, MousePlanet has a comprehensive database of trip reports (as well as any Disney information you might ever need.) I’m sure there are plenty of multi-family trips in there.
I popped in to suggest something like this - we did a big trip to Disney world in 2003 and rented a house. Actually 2 houses - we were meeting up with a group of friends from all over North America and one family from Australia. The houses went up to 5 bedrooms, and had pools in the backyard. We shared ours with 2 other families. I think we rented from these folks:
As noted, we were of course offsite, and this meant we all had to have rental cars or our own cars (some families had driven to Florida, we took the Auto Train), and drive to the parks. We wound up having only 1 meal out each day, cooked very simple meals at the house, breakfast at the house, and one day had an all-day pool party (that was the main “party” day; other days people went off and did their own thing). This was in Kissimmee, which is very close to the parks.
There’s something to be said for being onsite, of course - the buses to/from the parks run all the time and you don’t have to hassle with parking. And you can get the meal plan which can be a money-saver.
The other thing we had was a base “which park everyone PLANS to be in when” spreadsheet. There were a few attractions we had tagged as “see as a group” - sometimes that worked (we all got to watch the little kids on Dumbo), sometimes it didn’t (we got to Animal Kingdom earlier than everyone else and rode the safari, the other families got there two hours later). The spreadsheet also had cell numbers on it for everyone.
Don’t be surprised if when you make your dining plans they tell you they can’t seat you together - it always worked out that they did, but they won’t guarentee it.
Here it is, Ginn Reunion Resort. They have a lot of different accommodations and packages, including an on-site water park, useful if you want to take a day off from parks but don’t want the kids getting bored, plus golf, tennis, even an on-site spa.
When it became clear that the group was going to grow beyond one-hotel-room size, we talked together about the possibility of renting a vacation home. We decided against it, exactly because of the problem of needing rental cars. For our family, our kids are so far apart in age that we know we won’t be spending the whole day together every day, so we want to be able to just go back to the hotel when it suits rather than plan for when we have to meet up to drive back together. Also, we’d like to turn the two teenagers (our own and our nephew) loose from time to time, and again, that’s easier if the transportation is taken care of. For the other family, they simply do not want to deal with driving in a strange country on vacation. They feel it would be more relaxing to ride a shuttle bus.
The cost would have been a wash, possibly a little cheaper with renting the house, but the other factors spoke for an on-property hotel.