Disney Digest: Planning

It’s been almost three months since our trip to Disney World, but I’m just now getting to a point where I can sit down and sift through all of our photos, and think about the lessons learned from the whole experience. All told, we had a great time, and it was something that was definitely special to Nora. She talks about it often, and mentions going back—which we’ll do, but probably not for at least a couple of years.

I’ve been thinking for a while about how to tackle these posts, the sharing of photos, etc. And I figured out a few different categories, or topics, that I want to focus on and I think it’ll make all of this a little easier to digest, and hopefully a little more informational than the typical “vacation recap” posts.

So, where to start? How about with the planning?

We weren’t originally planning to go to Disney until our youngest child was 3-4 years old. But last year, Nora really started to get into the Disney magic—in large part due to Frozen. She LOVES all of the princesses, LOVES Anna and Elsa. And I kept hearing from some parents and teachers that this magic can be short-lived. Like many other parts of a child’s development, it’s a phase. They’re into it, then they’re not anymore. And if I’m being honest, Nora is ALREADY not into them as much as she used to be. She still really likes them and it’s not that I don’t think she would have enjoyed herself if she was a bit older, but Michael and I started to talk about it and we decided we really wanted to embrace the stage she was in and take her at age 4. Because she still BELIEVES and it’s all wonderful. We ended up running into some unexpected challenges with fears, but it doesn’t change my position about taking her—it was our expectations that needed to be adjusted and managed.

Vivienne’s age made us nervous; don’t get me wrong. At the time of our trip, she was going to be 15 months old and we were definitely sweating a bit about that. And now that we’re on the other side of it, I’ll say that it wasn’t easy. There were challenging parts with Vivienne because she was old enough to want to walk around by herself, but too young to walk in any particular direction, hold our hands for an extended period of time, and generally just reason with. She spent A LOT of time in the stroller. A LOT, A LOT. And thankfully, she was mostly cool about that. There was a lot for her to look at. But age of your children at the time of your trip is obviously a huge consideration. We took a risk and it worked out, but I honestly don’t know if it would have if she had been ANY older than 15 months. The moment we got home, it seemed like her sense of independence suddenly exploded even more and I could not imagine trying to confine her to a stroller for such extended periods of time right now. It stresses me out just to think about it.

Once we decided we were going to do this whole Disney World thing, I turned to experts—friends who have been to Disney many, many times. We knew we wanted to do a trip in the fall (October or November) and my friend, Kim, informed me that we’d likely be there during Disney’s “free dining” promotion, which was a nice added perk. However, at the time we booked—which turned out to be late April 2014 for a November 2014 trip—the free dining promo had not yet been released/announced. Kim advised me to book it anyway, and that we could call on the day the dining promo was announced to have them update our reservation with the promotional discount.

Sure enough, in early May, Disney announced the free dining promotion for the fall, and I was able to call on that same day and update the reservation. It knocked just about $1,000 off of our original reservation costs, which is not insignificant. I plan to dedicate a whole post to dining details, so if you’re curious to know more about this whole thing, stay tuned for that soon. Disney also offers other types of promotions throughout the year, and they are generally the same year after year, so definitely look into it if you’re in the midst of your own planning. You can still book your trip ASAP, but just have the reservation adjusted as soon as the promotion is officially released.

So, we knew free dining was likely coming from the beginning of the planning process, but one of the more difficult decisions was where to stay. From what I’ve read and been told, I don’t think you can REALLY go wrong with any of the Disney resorts. But we liked the look and feel of the moderate resorts (they have value, moderate, and deluxe) over the value resorts, and we couldn’t justify the cost of the deluxe resorts for this trip. When it comes to hotels, we’ve never been tremendously picky—we like a clean, comfortable place to sleep, and that’s about all we ask for.

On this trip, we also wanted to make sure that transportation to the parks was convenient—which thanks to the Disney buses, it is, pretty much wherever you stay—and that the hotel had a decent pool. We were hopeful that even though the weather could go either way in November (swimming versus non-swimming temps), we might have a chance to spend a day or two “resting” away from the parks, enjoying the pool and hotel grounds. Kim recommended Coronado Springs, so after checking it out, we went for it.

The other thing to consider was length of stay. I knew that with small children, running a go-go-go type of vacation could be dangerous to all of our mental sanities. We decided that we’d go for a week—Sunday to Sunday due to work travel I had planned leading up to our vacation—but that we’d plan to only spend four days in the parks. On the “off” days, we’d stay by the pool, nap in the hotel, visit Downtown Disney, etc. You know, relax.

So at first, we planned to only buy 4-day park passes. I mentioned this plan to Kim and she gently suggested that we consider getting 6-day passes instead. The cost difference was pretty negligible all things considered—it was only $63 more TOTAL for all of us to get 6-day park passes instead of 4-day park passes. Kim’s reasoning was that this would give us the most flexibility. If there was a park we wanted to revisit, or if there was one that we wanted to go and spend just a few hours at on one of our “off” days, we would have the option. We got the regular (non-hopper) passes because we figured that it’s not that easy to “hop” parks, and we were unlikely to go through all of that effort with two small kids in tow. Once we were in a park for the day, we were okay sticking to that same park, so there was no reason for us to pay extra to hop.

This whole 4-day vs. 6-day park passes thing was probably the best advice that Kim gave me, because I don’t know what we would have done if we didn’t have those two extra days of passes. Long story short—more to come on this later–we had pretty dreadful weather (IT WAS COLD!! Really cold), so spending a day or two hanging out by the pool was not in the cards for us. We ended up going to the parks every.single.day (with the exception of our arrival and departure days) because honestly, what else were we going to do at Disney if not the pool?

Once we were booked, Disney made it pretty easy to keep track of all of the “next steps.” They sent a personalized booklet with a customized magnet for our fridge with all of the important dates on it—like when to start booking dining reservations, when to book FastPasses, when the final payment was due, etc.

That was another nice thing—you don’t have to pay for it all at once if you can’t or don’t want to! Book your vacation, put down a deposit (can be as little as a few hundred dollars) and then periodically sign into your My Disney Experience account and make payments toward the balance when you can. No minimum payments, no interest. Just pay as you can and/or want to. Also, it’s all 100% refundable up until 45 days before your trip, so if you’re planning really far out and then end up needing to cancel your trip for some reason, you’re not out any money (at least from Disney. Airfare is obviously a different story). You have to have the trip paid off in full with Disney at the 45-day mark, too.

Making dining (at 180 days out) and FastPass+ reservations (at 60 days out) was honestly kind of stressful for me, but I’ll get more into that in later posts.

We also opted to pay for the Memory Maker package. I think it was around $100. With it, you get unlimited photos from Disney photographers in the parks. Any time there is a photographer anywhere, you can have your photo taken and then you’ll get to download all of the digital files. We had our photos taken randomly in the parks, at character meet-and-greets, at some of the restaurants, etc. and it was worthwhile to have the package, we thought. The Memory Maker even includes the photos that are sometimes taken of you while you’re on some of the rides.

Picking the specific dates for our trip—we traveled November 16-23, as I mentioned, Sunday to Sunday—was actually mostly beyond our control. We had a lot of family plans and things going on in October, I had work travel at both the end of October and the second week of November, there was Halloween in there (which we wanted to be home for). So it pretty much left us with only the week before Thanksgiving as an option. However, if you have more flexibility in your dates, another thing you might want to consider is consulting a reliable Disney crowd calendar. The predicted crowds for our dates were low, which was nice. Once on our trips and in the parks, they still seemed relatively crowded to us, but we also don’t have much to compare it to. *shrug* It’s Disney. Crowds are part of the experience.

We ended up booking flights later in May, so less than a month after booking our trip, and about six months out from our travel dates. We did it early because we have limited direct flights to Orlando available to us from where we live, and we wanted to take advantage of them. Some of them were already sold out by the time we booked!

So, budget. I know a lot of people want to know about budget. A Disney vacation can range tremendously in price based on the resort level, length of stay, dining choices, spending money at the parks, etc. I debated about whether to share a cost breakdown here, since I don’t want it to come off the wrong way. But I hope that by breaking down the expenses we incurred on our vacation, it can help others in knowing what to expect to spend for a similar trip. Once we were on property, we paid for EVERYTHING with our Magic Bands (the bracelets Disney sends you that serve as your hotel room key, park passes, FastPasses, method of payment, etc.). On the day we checked out from our hotel, we received an email summary of every purchase we made, and the total amount spent (the balance was charged to our credit card, which they had on file). It made it easy to add up out-of-pocket expenses during the trip, which was interesting, since that’s not something we typically add up over the course of our vacations!

Anyway, here we go. Cost breakdown for a trip to Disney from New York in November 2014, staying at a moderate resort (Coronado Springs), 7 days and 7 nights total, 6 days spent in the parks. Two adults, one child (age 4), and one infant (whose trip was free due to her age):

$2,623 – Resort, park passes, Memory Maker, dining plan (which was free due to a fall Disney promotion)
$873 – Roundtrip airfare
$509 – Out-of-pocket expenses during the trip (lunch on first day, tips/gratuity for all table service meals (six of them), alcoholic drinks, souvenirs, games, etc.)
= $4,005 TOTAL

Is Disney the most economical vacation you can take? No. But I have to say—I thought that $4,000 was not bad for a 7-day Disney trip for a family of four. Granted, Vivienne was completely free (you don’t pay for children under 3), and she won’t be the next time we go, so there will be added expenses in the future. But this was for a moderate resort, so obviously you can save money if you go for one of the value resorts instead.

Leading up to the trip, I got a lot of questions from people about whether Nora knew about it or not. We actually never even thought about surprising her on the day of or anything like that. And although those surprises are really fun, the building anticipation as we got closer and closer was really fun, too! We even had a Mickey Mouse paper chain going on to countdown for the last few weeks. :)

I think that sums up the planning and thought process behind everything leading up to our trip. Next, I think I’ll tackle the travel itself. With the start of some actual trip PICTURES! More to come!