Review: The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2012
By Dave Shute
THE 2012 EDITION OF THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD
The crew behind many landmark resources for Walt Disney World–including TouringPlans.com, Lines, the famous crowd calendar, and The Color Companion to Walt Disney World–released in late August the 2012 edition of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World.
Details follow 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 2012.
(Disclosure: As noted here, since summer 2011 I’ve had a business relationship with TouringPlans.com.)
THE BASICS OF THE 2012 EDITION OF THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD
The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2012 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 and updated every year, and typically republished in late August.
New this year is a nicely-done rewrite on The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and some cool and surprising data on how far in advance you need (or don’t need) to make reservations at Disney World table service restaurants. There’s also thoughts on the Fantasyland expansion, fun new tidbits from Jim Hill, and the usual updates to hotel, restaurant, and ride rankings and ratings.
Len Testa and Bob Sehlinger are the authors of The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2012. They are assisted in their books and web offerings by a whole crew of paid and volunteer staff, and guest contributors, of which I admire particularly (besides Len and Bob) the work of Fred Hazelton, Henry Work, Tom Bricker, and Jim Hill.
THE 2012 EDITION OF THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD
This year’s edition, at 854 pages, is no longer than last year’s–which may be a first–and in fact has a few more pages of end matter and appendices and thus a few less pages of regular content.
It contains an introduction, nineteen sections ranging from “Accommodations” to “Shopping in and out of Walt Disney World,” and more than 80 pages of end matter, including almost 40 pages of indexes.
These numbers hint at the great advantage of The Unofficial Guide compared to other guidebooks–its scope and depth of treatment. The dining section is almost a hundred pages long, and the accommodations section almost 200. You simply can’t find this depth and range in any other guidebook.
On the other hand, this quantity of material creates findability problems for any reader, and especially for those new to 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.
Even more helpful with findability, the Unofficial Guide is now available in a Kindle edition.
This means that park veterans (…or website authors, see the image…) trying to find a specific topic can use Kindle’s search function.
Yet, for first time visitors, who do not necessarily know even what 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.
(That’s one of the reasons why this site has the information architecture that it does–see the home page for what I mean.)
For two reasons, first time visitors should not buy the Kindle edition–or should get both it and the hard copy. First, they will find the charts, tables, and graphics that are scattered through the book invaluable, and these don’t show as well in Kindles. Second, they also will need to underline a lot…and I’ve never found Kindle’s highlighting and bookmarking functions to be adequate to this kind of detailed marking and note-taking.
CHANGES TO THE UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO WALT DISNEY WORLD
There’s a few things I’d really like to see out of the Unofficial Guide team one of these years.
First is restructuring the Universal Studios/Sea World/Universal Orlando material, which is all glopped into one section.
This may have made sense a generation ago, when both Disney’s and Universal’s studio parks opened within a short time and could be considered direct competitors of and substitutes for one another, but has not made sense for at least a decade. This structure diminishes the findability of each of these topics.
Second–and related–is sharply editing the “history” in this section, in the Animal Kingdom section, and in the Disney resort hotels section.
Disney World entities that existed at the time of the first edition have little in the way of history and competitive purpose. Those that came later–and especially the Hollywood Studios material–have accreted history in TUG that is imbalanced in its detail compared to other sections, and because of tenses and such brings the past a little too present. E.g. on 623, “Fantasmic provides a whole new dimension to nighttime at DHS.” Yeah, a new dimension circa 1998…
Third is deleting comments on bus service that are more than a couple of years old. The bus system changes a lot, and some of the comments reflect old problems.
Fourth is deploying the Lines user community to build the data for a constantly updated re-look at the whole transport time section. TUG has great material right now on typical and worst-case travel times. However, given the constant flux of approaches to buses, this could be enhanced even more by using Lines to collect data on door to door travel times and converting it to frequently updated probability distributions. (Yes I’m showing my geekiness again.)
Last, the book really needs a copy editor who is also an expert on Walt Disney World. (Maybe this could be crowd-sourced?)
Known errors and things that just change because Disney changes them are tracked here. However, there’s still a few more errors and typos than I believe reasonable (and frequent readers of this site understand that I am an expert on creating an unreasonable number of errors and typos…).
POSSIBLE TYPOS AND ERRORS IN THE 2012 UNOFFICIAL GUIDE
This review continues here.
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