Disney World Ultimate Vacation Planning for Beginners – Made Easy! PART 1

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Basic Disney World Planning Advice with Common Questions Answered

A trip to Disney World in Orlando is the epitome of a family vacation that nearly all kids and parents dream of. It is indeed the most magical place on Earth and the ultimate memory-making location for families of all ages. In short, a family trip to Disney World is AMAZING…but we also know that it can be very overwhelming for beginners. There is such an immense amount of very detailed information on the web for every little facet of planning, that first-timers can get quickly bogged down and overwhelmed.

So if you are just getting started planning your first family vacation to Disney World, we’ve put together this 4-part blog series for all the Disney basics (with a few little-known tips mixed in) to get you started off on the right foot. With some experience under our belt we’ve figured this Disney thing out and want to share that basic knowledge with you!

I am by no means a Disney expert, but have learned a thing or two planning seven Disney trips. I’m also not a Disney travel agent, so I am coming at this sharing my very unbiased opinions.

I’ve broken this series into 4 parts:

• Part 1: Basic Disney World Planning Advice You Need to Know – Answering Typical Beginner Questions
• Part 2: Building Your Disney World Vacation Package
• Part 3: Planning Your Disney World Vacation Itinerary
• Part 4: Tips While on Your Disney World Vacation

This post may contain affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission, at no extra cost to you, if you make a purchase using a link. Please see my disclaimer for more details.

Our Own Disney Planning Experience

When Josh and I first started talking about taking our two oldest boys to Disney for the first time in 2016, I had NO idea how much there was to it. But all the information was so interesting to me and I wanted to plan the perfect trip, so I got in the weeds. Quite deep in the weeds, actually. Weeds that had lots and lots of little rabbit holes that consumed more of my time than I care to admit.

But here’s the thing: you don’t have to know everything about Disney to have a great trip. You can plan an amazing and memorable vacation with as little or as much detail as you want. So that’s what we’re here to do: give you all the “need to knows” and then you can research certain aspects further if you’d like. In this blog series I’ll also clue you in on some of my “cheats” that help us get the most bang for our buck when we “do Disney”.

And we’ve ended up doing Disney quite a few times. On our first trip we expected that we’d love watching our boys experience the magic of Disney World for the first time. But what I didn’t expect was that the two of us would also become addicted to the most magical place on Earth too. So much so that before we left our first trip, we had another one already booked for just three months later!

Fast forward five years from our first trip, and we are looking forward to our SEVENTH trip to Disney World later this year. And I’ve planned each trip in a lot of detail ON MY OWN. So let’s talk about that for a minute before we dig into the Disney planning overview…

Let me just go ahead and get this confession out there on the open web: I’m a control freak when it comes to vacation planning (especially Disney). I actually LOVE the planning part of a Disney trip – researching all the options, coming up with the perfect schedule, snagging hard-to-get dining reservations, but most of all imagining all the memories we will make as I work out the details.

But if you’re not a control freak like me, I would highly recommend getting yourself a Disney Planner. These people are the Disney experts and their services are completely FREE! Yes, you read that right. And no, there’s not a catch. Disney pays them a commission from your vacation cost without jacking up the price of your ultimate family vacation. And they take care of all the details for you, from booking your trip to snagging those dining reservations. Then you can just head to the parks with your kiddos and bask in all of their hard work.

If an expert planning your Disney vacation sounds amazing, let me introduce you to a Disney planner friend of mine! Meet Jessica.

But for the sake of this post, we are going to assume you’re like me and you want to plan your own great vacation. Hello, control freak friend. Welcome to my club. 🙂 Read on!

Basic Disney World Planning Advice You Need to Get Started

How do I start planning a trip to Disney World?

This is probably the biggest question once you’ve decided to plan a trip to Disney. There is so much information out there – where do you start?

The absolute BEST piece of advice I can give you when you are planning a Disney vacation is to purchase a subscription to touringplans.com. These people eat, sleep, and breathe Disney all day, every day. An annual subscription costs under $20, and you will have all sorts of planning information at your fingertips including:

• The best days to visit each park – expected crowd calendars for each park and overall Disney property.
• A checklist of what tasks you should accomplish before your trip – with due dates!
• Tons and tons of posts about any and every Disney World topic you can imagine. Resort reviews, dining information, attractions…you name it.
• An awesome dining reservation finder that will text or email you when those hard-to-find dining reservations you’ve been looking for open up so you can snag it first!
• Step-by-step personalized touring plans to minimize wait times and maximize experiences! This is HUGE, and my absolute favorite part. They provide you with pre-made templates that give expected wait times, walking distances between rides…everything! And then you can tweak them to fit your Disney vacation style, hit “optimize”, and it puts together the best order of rides for you! This is genius and I can’t imagine doing Disney without this time saver.
• A handy phone app to manage all of this information while you are having a ball on your trip.

Word of caution: this is one of those sites that can quickly pull you down into those Alice in Wonderland rabbit holes. So grab a subscription, follow my lead below for the basics, and once you have it down you can wander down into more specific topics that interest you back at the Touring Plans website.

How far in advance should I plan a Disney Trip?

During normal times my answer to this question is about 8 months out or so from your check-in date. Pre-COVID, dining reservations opened up 180 days (6 months) prior to the check-in date so guests really needed to have all of their (Donald) ducks in a row prior to the 180 day mark. That meant you really needed to have the resort reservation made and know when you would be in certain parks to be able to snag those hard-to-get dining reservations.

I will say that now that COVID has at least temporarily changed a lot at Disney World, you’d probably be ok planning the trip more like 3-4 months from your travel dates and still get all the great reservations. Dining reservations currently open up 60 days prior to check-in so that’s the point you need to have your plans for the trip at least preliminarily worked out.

Of course we never know when Disney may go back to pre-COVID timelines, so if you still have plenty of time before your trip you can definitely get started making plans as early as you want.

Lastly, with all that said: if you are already within the few months window and are still in the early planning stages of your trip, that’s ok! You can still have a great trip planning things out a little more last minute. Remember when I said we planned our second trip 3 months after our first? We had a GREAT time and were still able to snag some pretty awesome dining reservations…and that was traveling with 14 people! That Touring Plans dining reservation finder really helped us out! (More about that feature in the Dining section below.)

How many days do I need for Disney World?

We have done trips where Disney was our only vacation destination and other shorter trips we paired with a Florida beach vacation (psst – here’s our favorite Florida beach vacation!). So we have stayed at Disney anywhere from three to six nights.

For your first trip to Disney World, I would recommend a 5 or 6 night stay. That is about the right amount of time to see all the parks, do a little resort hopping to check out other themed hotels, and work in a rest day at the pool. Here’s a sample basic itinerary that has worked well for us:

Sample Itinerary:

Day 1 – Check-in at our resort, tour the grounds, swim, and dinner dining reservation at a resort.

Day 2 – Magic Kingdom

Day 3 – Animal Kingdom

Day 4 – Rest Day (swim, resort hop, shop at Disney Springs)

Day 5 – Hollywood Studios

Day 6 – Epcot majority of the day and Park Hop back to Magic Kingdom for last night

Day 7- Have a late dining reservation for breakfast at a resort and check-out

Fair warning: During your check-out day you will inevitably wish you booked a longer trip no matter how long you’ve been there. Trust me. Disney withdrawal is real and unforgiving. The WORST part is checking out and seeing all those families just checking into the resort. It’s brutal. But I digress…

How much will it cost to go to Disney World?

I hate cop out answers, but unfortunately I’m going to give you a cop out answer: It depends.

Costs of Disney vacations vary WIDELY depending on where you stay and what you do while you’re there.

For starters, there is a wide range of prices for resort hotels on the property. Disney breaks their resorts into value, moderate, deluxe, and villa categories and even then there is a wide variety in costs of various types of rooms within one particular resort. (More on resorts below.)

And then you choose your number of park days, decide whether you want to “park hop” (visit more than one park each day). And of course there is a wide variety of dining option costs and a lot of other optional add-on experiences as well.

See what I mean? You asked a really hard question 🙂

The best thing you can do is to visit the Disney World site and start building your package for your target dates. You can add and remove various items to see what your dream vacation will roughly cost. Typically, Disney has discounted offers the majority of the year, but if you are planning your trip early those offers may not be available yet. But building a package on their website should give you a “worst case” cost. If offers become available after you book, you can always call Disney to change your reservation to grab the discount.

Next Steps to Planning a Trip to Disney World

Now that we’ve answered the typical basic questions for Disney World, next step is to learn the basics for building a vacation package. We’ll cover resort hotels (and why you should stay on property!), the theme parks, and dining options.

Don’t stop now! Keep learning about planning your own AMAZING Disney vacation with one click below!

Share this with friends and family who are planning a trip to Disney World!

Have you been to Disney? Drop a comment below with your favorite planning tips!