Review: The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011

By Dave Shute

THE 2011 EDITION OF THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

The crew behind a lot of landmark resources for Walt Disney World travel–including among others TouringPlans.com, Lines, the famous crowd calendar, and The Color Companion to Walt Disney World–released in late August the latest edition of their venerable tome, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011.

More details will follow in the review below, but here’s the short version: first time family visitors tempted to buy a guidebook should choose The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011.

THE BASICS OF THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011 is the latest in a series of unofficial Walt Disney World guidebooks that goes back to when there were only two theme parks there–the Magic Kingdom and Epcot.

The book–known in the Disney community as TUG for short–is revised as needed every year, and typically republished in late August.

Many years, in addition to revisions driven by theme park, hotel, and other changes (for example, great new material this year on The Wizarding World of Harry Potter), the crew at TUG will also provide a whole new section based on the findings of their latest research–hotel check-in efficiency, lighting, etc.

I can’t see that such a new section has been added this year–I may just have missed it–but such absence is utterly understandable, given that the body of work of this crew has expanded quite a bit in the last twelve months, with the development and release of  Lines, with a major new revision to their crowd calendar, and with the crafting of their new and welcome The Color Companion to Walt Disney World.

Len Testa and Bob Sehlinger are the authors of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011 (and it’s nice to see Len drop the “with” and pick up an “and”).

They are assisted in their work both here and in their other books and web offerings by a whole crew of paid and volunteer staff, and guest contributors, of which I admire most (besides Len and Bob) the work of Fred Hazelton, Henry Work, and Jim Hill.

THE 2011 EDITION OF THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

This year’s edition plops down at 854 pages, including introductory matter, nineteen sections on topics ranging from “Accommodations” to “Shopping in and out of Walt Disney World,” and 75 pages of end matter, including 30 pages of indexes.

These numbers hint at the great advantage of The Unofficial Guide compared to other guidebooks–its wide scope and depth of treatment.  The dining section alone is almost a hundred pages long, and the accommodations section almost 200.  You simply can’t find this level of depth and range in any other guidebook.

On the other hand, this depth and range also creates findability problems for newcomers to the issue of planning a Disney World vacation. The table of contents is quite detailed (though less so than in recent years), and the multiple and lengthy indexes also help.

Yet, for first time visitors, who do not necessarily know which questions to ask, and in what order to ask them, these guideposts may not help enough.  First time visitors will find almost all of their issues addressed somewhere in The Unofficial Guide, but they will need to read almost every page in the first 700 pages of the book to find out where.

The structure of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011 has out-lived its usefulness, and would benefit from a complete revision.

For example, after separate sections on the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, the next section combines Disney’s Hollywood Studios, both Universal Parks, and Sea World.

This may have made sense a generation ago, when Disney’s and Universal’s Studios opened within a short time, but has not made sense for at least a decade. This structure diminishes the findability of each of these topics.

Another example of a structural issue is the positioning of Fort Wilderness in the sub-section Walt Disney World Resort Hotel Profiles–it belongs in the Magic Kingdom Resorts sub-division,and  not where it is presented, after the Downtown Disney Area Resorts sub-division.

There’s a few more errors and typos than I believe reasonable (and I consider myself an expert on creating an unreasonable number of errors and typos…).  Just a couple of examples: Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort is not “within a 5-15 minute walk of the International Gateway (back-door) entrance to Epcot,” (p15); the average wait per 100 people in line ahead of you at It’s a Small World is not 11 minutes (p524), etc.

But overall, The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2011 remains a masterwork of its genre, and is the single most comprehensive, detailed, and consistently useful guidebook to Walt Disney World available.

Home Donate Sitemap FAQ Travel Agents

RELATED STUFF

• q. Reviews