The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit

By Dave Shute

THE BEST-REVIEWED DISNEY WORLD GUIDE BOOK SERIES PUBLISHES 2016 EDITION

The 2016 edition of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, published by Theme Park Press, came out at the end of September, and we’ve already published a minor update—on Wednesday—incorporating changes like the increase in theme park parking fees to $20. (Details on the update are here.)

The latest entry in the best-reviewed Disney World guide book series ever (94% of its almost 200 reviews on Amazon have 5 stars; reviews of the 2014 edition are here, 2015 here, and 2016 here), the 2016 easy Guide is the most accurate and up-to-date Disney World guide book ever published. It’s also the shortest major guide book, has the largest print of any major guide book, and is, by far, the easiest one to use.

And it’s co-written by the world’s leading expert on touring the parks—my co-author, Josh Humphrey of easyWDW—and the world’s leading expert on the Disney World hotels—me.

Everything is updated for 2016—

• All new material on when to go, in Chapter 4
• Chapter 5 offers updated resort reviews—now including Shades of Green, the Swan and Dolphin, and the Four Seasons, plus more detail on camping at Fort Wilderness, and key info on renovations at the Polynesian and the Wilderness Lodge
• Chapter 6 has fully reconfigured material on how to tour the parks, based on updates to Josh’s famous Cheat Sheets, including previews of the new Star Wars Season of the Force and Star Wars Launch Bay at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, the new Frozen Ever After and Frozen Meet and Greet at Epcot, and the new Rivers of Light evening show at Disney’s Animal Kingdom.
• Chapter 7 includes updated dining material including reviews or previews of new or soon to open venues such as the Skipper Canteen in the Magic Kingdom and The BOATHOUSE in Disney Springs

Co-author Josh has an even more detailed overview here of just what you can expect to find in The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2016.

It’s available as a paperback and Kindle book on Amazon here. Those who buy the paperback version can also get a free version of the Kindle edition through Amazon’s MatchBook program.

WHY BUY A GUIDEBOOK AT ALL?

With tens of thousands of pages of Disney World websites, blogs, and community forums out there, perhaps you don’t really need a book, too.

But you deserve one.

First, the material out there for free is only as reliable as its authors. Most of these authors have much more limited Disney World experience than would at first seem—typically, the website writers at best have been on most of the rides, dined at some of the restaurants, and stayed at a few of the hotels. As a result, they either ignore vast sets of possible choices, or, even worse, just copy other people’s work about what they have not themselves experienced. Since the work they copy may also have been copied, this becomes like a game of telephone, where bad information propagates into really bad advice.

I’ll get more into this later, but there is no better guide in the world to all the parks than Josh, no better guide in the world to all the hotels than me, and no two people in the world that can bring you more complementary experience and sound judgment to all the other choices of a Disney World visit—when to go, where to eat, how old and tall your kids should be, how to set up and navigate My Disney Experience and FastPass+–than the two of us.

Fine, you say—just read our sites! But here’s the thing. A book is shorter. It’s better organized—a book has just one flow of topics, whereas a website, by definition, is a network of topics, and the findability of the next key bit of info on a website is partly a factor of luck and where you enter it. There’s nothing like being able to flip among a book’s pages to directly compare short, consistent, and highly relevant treatments of the attractions, the restaurants, and the hotels to help you make the choices you have to make.

I can’t really do better than what Josh said on this topic

“Overall, and if I do say so myself, “The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit” is essential reading for anybody planning a trip, whether you’ve read every word Dave and I have ever written or not. You can’t beat the organization, layout, and easily-consumable advice found in the book. Spend a few dollars on the book and save a lot of time, money, and frustration on your next Walt Disney World visit.”

WHY THIS GUIDEBOOK?

There a lot of reasons why our book is the best choice for first time visitors to Disney World—and, because of the completeness of its coverage and the expertise of its authors, for returning visitors too.

But first, let me highlight two other books that will in fact be better for some visitors:

• Military families should start with Steve Bell’s Walt Disney World for Military Families 2016, and
• Those who are staying outside of Disney World, and/or who are devoting substantial time to the non-Disney SeaWorld or Universal Orlando theme parks should use The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2016.

(Frankly you should buy these and our book too—getting several complementary guide books is still gonna cost less than 1% of your total visit costs…)

Everyone else should buy our book.

There’s a reason why Josh is now the most influential (and copied) Disney World writer out there…

…and there’s a reason why I’m in the acknowledgements of three major Disney World guidebooks.

(I should be in the acknowledgments of a fourth, based on emails from its co-author like this:

…but the co-authors of it don’t have seem to have enough room.)

Josh is in the parks multiple times a week, and is the best guide you can find today on how to manage a park visit—from when to go, to which park to visit each day, to how to arrange your visit over the course of the day.

Between us, Josh and I have dined in every Disney World dining venue that we write about, most many times.

No one has more deep and relevant experience with the Disney World hotels. By the end of 2015, I will have stayed in 120 different Disney World-owned hotel rooms—including

• 25 value resort rooms—including all the standard rooms and all four types of family suites
• 31 moderate rooms and cabins (including all the special variants like five person rooms, Royal Rooms, Pirate Rooms, etc.)
• 29 deluxe rooms
• 31 Disney Vacation Club Studios, One Bedroom Villas, and Two Bedroom Villas (no Grand Villas or Bungalows, sadly…but those aren’t relevant to most first-time visitors)
• 4 Campsites at Fort Wilderness (my soon-to-be four stays in the Cabins at Fort Wilderness are counted above among the moderates).

I’ve also stayed in dozens of non-Disney owned rooms at Shades of Green, the Swan and Dolphin, the Hilton, the Four Seasons, the Universal resorts and many others.

As a result, The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2016 is the most accurate, and the most up-to-date, Disney World guide book ever published.

Here’s an example of how it’s different.

One otherwise very good guide book is not as good as it should be on the Disney World resorts. For example, for Fort Wilderness, it asserts that “Tent/Pop-Up campsites provide water, electricity and cable TV…Full Hook-Up Campsites have all the previous amenities…Preferred Hook-Up campsites…add sewer connections.”

Well, above is a photo of a sewer connection at a Full Hook-Up campsite in Loop 1600. Sewer connections at Fort Wilderness are in all campsite types except Tent/Pop-Up sites—not just Preferred and Premium sites.

Later on the same page, the “other” guide book asserts that “access…from Fort Wilderness…to Epcot [is] by bus, with a transfer at the Transportation and Ticket Center to the Epcot monorail.”

This is another error—Epcot is served from Fort Wilderness by bus. The bus from Fort Wilderness to Epcot is above, and the bus from Epcot to Fort Wilderness is below.

Other resort hotel issues with this guidebook include missing 5 person Caribbean Beach rooms in its floor plans, and getting the description of Alligator Bayou rooms wrong on the same page (the trundle bed has been gone for a while, replaced with a Murphy bed).

Nobody’s perfect, and I’m sure we have errors too. But our book is based on personal, recent, deep, complete, direct experience with Disney World, and thus has many fewer errors.

Moreover, as news emerges we publish updated versions of the book every three months or so (see this for the first update), so that it continues to be the most accurate and up-to-date Disney World guidebook available.

Another distinctive advantage of The easy Guide is how short it is. By design, it is the shortest Disney World guide book available. We have 297 pages of material, which is almost two thirds fewer than some alternative guide books. We focus on including just the essential information for most visitors, and no more.

Our shorter guide book also has a bigger font size, also making it easier to read. In the image above, The easy Guide is on the left, and an alternative is to the right.

Finally, the overall structure of our book also makes it very easy to use. Chapter One is inspired by the home page of this website in that it gives all of our core recommendations in one easy to find spot. Follow the guidance in Chapter One, and add the touring plans and FastPass+ bookings advised in Chapter 6, and you will have a great visit!

The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2016 is available as a paperback and Kindle book on Amazon here.

Follow yourfirstvisit.net on Facebook or Google+ or Twitter or Pinterest!!

RELATED STUFF

• p. News and Changes
• The easy Guide
• w. Most Recent Stuff