Which Days at Which Park at Walt Disney World?

SCHEDULE OF WHICH DAYS TO VISIT WHICH PARKS

While working on a recent post about TouringPlans.com‘s updated daily calendar, I realized that while I had advice on which park to go to when here and here, and of course built in to the design of this site’s core itineraries, I hadn’t brought it together into one place.

So here we go!

HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHICH PARK TO VISIT WHEN

The itineraries on this site put first time family visitors to Walt Disney World into the parks on certain days based on the following principles, in order:

See Epcot first, and the Magic Kingdom last. The Magic Kingdom so well matches kids’ expectations that if you see it first, all other parks–and especially Epcot, which was designed to be as unlike it as possible–suffer by the comparison.

See the park closing events–Illuminations at Epcot, Wishes at the Magic Kingdom, and Fantasmic at Disney’s Hollywood Studios–on the nights that they don’t actually close the parks.

(To figure out when and at what times these shows are offered, and the Extra Magic Hours schedule, see this page on using Disney World’s online park calendars.)

Avoid parks with morning Extra Magic Hours. On mornings with Extra Magic Hours, guests staying at Walt Disney World resort hotels, and at a few others, can enter a park an hour earlier than other guests. The first hour of this is great, but by mid-morning the park is even more crowded than it would have been on a normal day.

Unless you plan is to quit the park mid-morning, the value of morning Extra Magic Hours is not worth the hour of lost sleep.

To the extent you can, avoid weekends, Mondays and holidays.  Weekends. Mondays, and holidays are almost always be busier than the other days around them.