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THE BEST OF DISNEY WORLD GUIDEBOOKS FOR 2015

There’s all kinds of great material about Disney World on the web (especially on this site 🙂 ) but many will prefer to supplement, or even replace, websites with guidebooks about Walt Disney World.

Affordable luxuries, guidebooks let you circle key concepts, fold over pages to insure you return to them, make notes on the inside covers. Kindle versions let you search them incredibly efficiently. Some guidebooks (like mine!) even are backed by a website and give you the Kindle version for free if you buy the paperback, so that you have the best of both worlds!!

Moreover, any great guidebook will almost assuredly be better organized, better edited, and shorter than an equally good website, just given the nature of the two publishing environments.

The core tests of guidebooks are the quality of their material on when to go, where to stay, and how to manage your days.

• When you go drives everything from waits to prices to weather, and is the most important issue.
• Where you stay is the biggest variable in your budgeting, as hotel rooms are available for from less than $100 to four figures, and is traditionally the weakest part of guidebooks, as it is so expensive and time consuming to keep up.
• How to spend your days is partly a question of picking the right parks on the right days, and partly a question of having great plans for that day–which now also means the optimal use of FastPass+

There’s really only five guidebooks worth considering, of which I recommend three*:

RECOMMENDED WALT DISNEY WORLD GUIDEBOOKS

Dave Shute and Josh Humphrey’s The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2015.  

Our book is the shortest, most up-to-date, and most reliable guidebook out there.  (It’s also the best-reviewed Disney World guidebook series on Amazon in history.) Combining my unmatched experience with the resorts with Josh’s world-beating expertise on how to manage your days, it’s also the first guidebook to be written from scratch for FastPass+.

Weaknesses include that it only covers Walt Disney World and has no color pictures (there’s thousands on our sites, of course).

For more on The easy Guide, see this.

Bob Sehlinger and Len Testa’s The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World 2015.

The Unofficial Guide is the most comprehensive guidebook for an Orlando visit available, with material on not just Disney World but also many other Orlando hotels and attractions.

Weaknesses include enormous length, tiny type, and no color pictures. Its Disney resort material gets better every year, but there’s still more errors/outdated info than I’d like to see.

Julie and Mike Neal’s The Complete Walt Disney World 2015.

The greatest virtue of the Complete Guide is its wonderful color pictures. Midway between The easy Guide and The Unofficial Guide in length, and with a distinctive voice and perspective, it’s an especially good second choice for people buying one or the other of these books.

The main weakness of the Complete Guide is some inaccurate/out of date/misleading resort info.  The type is tiny, and some of the perspective expressed verges on the idiosyncratic. There’s no website backing it up.

WHICH DISNEY WORLD GUIDEBOOK FOR YOU?

The easy Guide is the best choice for first-timers, and for returning visitors whose main concern is picking a new hotel or using FastPass+…and for those with eyestrain.

The Unofficial Guide is the best choice for those who want to stay outside of Disney World, or visit parks, shopping or restaurants outside of Disney World… and for those who need an upper body workout.

The Complete Guide is the best choice for those who, unwilling to look at photos on the web, must have color photos in their guidebook…and for those off the grid.

*The other two are Birnbaum’s, no better than the Complete Guide, and Passporter’s, whose 2015 edition is not yet out, but whose 2014 edition had too much out-of-date or inaccurate stuff for me to recommend it.)

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