Category — p. News and Changes

I published this morning a new Disney World itinerary for lower-crowd weeks.

Called the 2016 FastPass+ Lower Crowd Itinerary, it’s appropriate –by which I mean “better” –for all the lower crowd weeks in 2016 from January through May than what I had been suggesting.

(Which weeks you can use it are indicated here.)

My itineraries are based among many things on the patterning of crowds at the parks. One driver of park crowding is Extra Magic Hours. Disney is experimenting with multiple EMH patterns in 2015, but has largely settled on the following pattern for 2016:

• Sunday: Morning HS
• Monday: Morning AK
• Tuesday: Evening Epcot
• Wednesday: Evening MK
• Thursday: Morning Epcot
• Friday: Morning MK, evening HS
• Saturday: Morning AK

There’s big changes here compared to the old patterns my itineraries have been based on, so I’ve been publishing a lot of “swap Sunday and Wednesday”—which helped a lot but didn’t really fix Fridays. Moreover, doing so put the Magic Kingdom earlier in a trip than I think is best.

Meanwhile, there’s some changes coming in 2016 that deserved note. Sometime, I expect, in the spring Rivers of Light will open at the Animal Kingdom, and Frozen Ever After at Epcot. Moreover, Soarin will be closing in January for a multi-month refurb.

So the new itinerary sends you to the right park on the right day and incorporates these other changes as well.  It’s here–the image overview is below.

If you’ve not made your dining reservations yet, it’s easy to convert to the new itinerary.

If you have made your dining reservations based on the old itinerary (following my “Swap Sunday and Wednesday” advice) then stick to the old itinerary…with one exception: follow the new itinerary’s FastPass+ suggestions (changed to your actual park days) if your dates put you in Disney World after Soarin closes and/or Rivers of Light and Frozen Ever After open.

I’m sorry abut the sudden changes.  I publish itineraries 6 months or so in advance so people can make their dining plans.  When Disney makes changes, I ride with them a bit–in case they are temporary.  But now that May is out, this EMH change is solid for five months…so it’s time for an itinerary that incorporates it.

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I don’t usually warn people off of bad stuff—life’s too short, so mostly I just ignore it.

For example, there’s a Disney Word guide book out there from a famous publisher that claims “Since Disney’s Animal Kingdom now opens at 8 a.m. almost every day, you can see the park in half a day.” Neither of these claims is true (except in the trivial sense that if you skip half of the Animal Kingdom, you can see it in half a day). Rather than warn people off, I just didn’t bother to review it.

Today I’m making an exception because the influential Orlando Sentinel published an article about a new website (from hotels.com) called Orlando.com.

I looked at the new website and was appalled.

Just a few issues I found on it:

From its material on Magic Kingdom park hours and the evening fireworks show Wishes:

“Magic Kingdom Park at Walt Disney World is open every day from 09:00 to midnight…The Wishes nighttime spectacular firework display also runs every evening at 22:00.”

The Magic Kingdom’s operating hours aren’t “from 09:00 to midnight,” but in fact vary substantially, especially in later September through mid-December.

It can be open as long as from 8a until 1a, or as briefly as 9a to 7p (even 6p one or two nights a year).

This week, its operating hours are as follows: 8a-12MN 10/10, 9a-11p 10/11, 9a-7p 10/12 and 10/13, 8a-11p 10/14, 9a-7p 10/15 and 10/16, 8a-12MN 10/17, and 9a-7p 10/18. Note that on not a single date this week is it open “from 09:00 to midnight.”

Wishes does not “run every evening at 22:00.” First, it’s not on every night of the year—it’s on just four nights between 10/10 and 10/18—and while commonly shown at 10p, is also shown some nights at 8p or 9p, and even more rarely 7p.

From its material on attractions at the Magic Kingdom:

“Check out the best attractions at each of these zones below:”

“Adventureland – inspired by the tropical jungles of Africa, Asia and South America, this is the place to delve into the deep, dark world of ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’, float down the river in the ‘Jungle Cruise’ simulator, or go wild in the long-standing ‘Enchanted Tiki Room’.”

“Fantasyland – this recently-expanded part of Magic Kingdom is inspired by the medieval fayres and carnival featured in Walt Disney’s movies. Top rides and attractions here including the more child-friendly ‘It’s a Small World, ‘Peter Pan’s Flight’, ‘Seven Dwarfs Mine Train’ and ‘Tangled’.”

Not sure that the Jungle Cruise is a simulator; not many would highlight the Tiki Room as either a “best attraction” or a place to “go wild”; and in Fantasyland, “Tangled” is a bathroom, not an attraction.

From its ticket price material on the Magic Kingdom (typos and grammar problems from the original):

“Do not that tickets are sold separately for Disney’s Magic Kingdom, with day-passes starting at around $100. You can then upgrade your ticket to the ‘Park Hopper Option’ which grants access to all four parks at an additional cost $64 per day.”

The park hopper upgrade is not priced “per day” but rather has a single one-time cost that varies by ticket length. A park hopper costs in total (after tax) about $68 for all ticket lengths longer than three days. It’s $53 if added to a one day MK ticket, $62 if added to another one day ticket, and $53 for two and three day tickets.

From its material on When to Go—oddly buried under “Weather”

“Peak Seasons:”

“There are two times every year when Orlando is really busy with tourists …[that] coincide with the school holidays – spring break in March and April and the summer vacation from June to September.”

“Low Seasons:”

“…[T]he tourist numbers (and, as a result, hotel prices) are at their lowest…during the winter months from November to March.”

In fact, the “winter” weeks that include Christmas and New Year’s Eve are the busiest and highest-priced periods of the year, and March other than the first week is both very crowded and expensive.

The site also has a number of “Top Ten Lists” which seem to be simply crowd-sourced with some questionable editorial matter then added.

For example, in its “Ten Best Restaurants” entry, it (not unreasonably) puts Victoria and Albert’s at #3, but begins its commentary with this odd text:

“Fine dining and Disney haven’t always gone hand-in-hand; the first restaurant you might associate with Mickey Mouse and co probably has a giant yellow ‘M’ towering above it or a certain Colonel Sanders plastered on a billboard outside. Victoria & Albert’s, however, flips this now out-of-date stereotype on its head, offering the polar opposite of the old-school Disney fast food joint.”

And then, most tellingly, comes Orlando.com’s proposition for the Number 4 Best Restaurant in Orlando: The Cheesecake Factory!

Enough said.

This website may be of some use, someday. But for sure it is not now. Ummm…get my book instead.

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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.

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2017 CROWDS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

The chart lower on the page shows my forecasts for 2017 crowds by week at Walt Disney World.

Dates in it are the beginning of the week, and the forecast covers the recommended Saturday-Sunday 9 day stays.

(For 2018 Disney World crowds, see this, and for 2019 crowds at Disney World, see this.) [Read more →]

I’ll post more about this later (you bet I will!) but I wanted to let everybody know that the 2016 edition of the best-reviewed Disney World guide book series, EVER, The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit, is now available on Amazon!

Click the link to learn more!

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DISNEY WORLD ROOM RATE DEAL ANNOUNCED

As expected, Disney World announced this morning two new deals for winter 2016—a room rate deal and a “Play, Stay, Dine, and Save” deal.

The savings from the Play Stay Dine and Save deal are pretty hard to quantify, but generally those looking at value or moderate resorts–especially in January and February–will do better with it than with the room rate deal.

Those staying in the more expensive deluxe and Disney Vacation Club rooms should run the numbers both ways.

A good travel agent (like Kelly B, contact her at 980-429-4499 or kellyb@destinationsinflorida.com) can help you sort this out.

The room rate deal is available for stays between 1/2/16 – 4/13/16, and needs to be booked by 12/23/15.

Value Resort Savings (Little Mermaid Rooms at Art of Animation are excluded)

• For stays January 2, 2016 – February 29, 2016: 15% off on weekdays except 10% at All-Star Movies, no discount on weekends
• For stays March 1, 2016 – April 13, 2016: 15% off, except 10% at All-Star Movies, including weekends

Moderate Resort Savings:

• For stays January 2, 2016 – February 29, 2016: 20% off on weekdays except 15% off at Port Orleans French Quarter, no discount on weekends
• For stays March 1, 2016 – April 13, 2016: 20% off except 15% off at Port Orleans French Quarter, including weekends

Deluxe Resort Savings 1/2 through April 13: 

• 15% off at Beach Club, Contemporary, Grand Floridian and Animal Kingdom Savanna View
• 25% off of the rest

DVC Savings 1/2 through April 13:

• Excluded: the Villas at the Grand Floridian, Bay Lake Tower, the Bungalows at Polynesian Bungalows & Villas
• 15% off: Beach Club Villas, the Villas at Wilderness Lodge,  and Animal Kingdom Jambo House Villas and Kidani Village villas
• 25% off: the rest

Moreover, recently it’s been pretty hard for people to actually find rooms in these Disney World deals, so it’ll work best for those with flexible dates and flexible targeted resort hotels.

You can find reviews of all the Disney World room options here. (I’ve stayed in them all…)

BOOKING THE DISNEY WORLD ROOM RATE DEAL

As noted above, Kelly B can book this deal for you. Contact her at 980-429-4499 or kellyb@destinationsinflorida.com.

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