Category — p. News and Changes

Updated 8/1/2012 with new December arrival dates!

FALL 2012 FREE DINING AT WALT DISNEY WORLD OPENED TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

My friends at Destinations in Florida confirmed this morning that a free Disney World dining deal has opened to the general public for the fall of 2012.

Eligible arrival dates include:

• Sunday September 30 through Thursday October 4
• Friday October 19 through Thursday November 1
• Friday November 9 through Thursday November 15
• Friday November 23 through Thursday November 29
• Monday December 10 through Thursday December 20

These dates must be booked by September 29th, and include a three night stay minimum.

For more, see Disney’s Special Offer page here.

DISNEY WORLD 2013 PRICES RELEASED

As of this morning, almost all of 2013 is now priced and bookable on Walt Disney World’s web site.

Bookable dates go out 500 days, so later November and all of December 2013 is still not bookable.  By my math, any arrival date in the year will be available by August 18, 2012.

If you neglect your real job and do a lot of test reservations, you can also infer the 2013 price seasons.

Having done so, it seems the projections on this site were dead on with a few exceptions:

• The regular season at the deluxes does not run from the week after Easter through mid-July.  Instead, it ends May 30, and a new deluxe summer season–with slightly lower prices–runs from then til mid-July
• The fall season at the values and moderates starts a couple of weeks earlier than I had thought it would–on September 14th.
• December 2013 now has a third price season–“Peak”–from 12/13/2013 through 12/19/2013, making this week much more expensive than I’d thought it would be.

This site’s 2013 price seasons page is still labeled as “projected,” because while the “x% higher than the lowest of the year” stuff, is pretty close, there’s still a lot of detailed slogging to do…which will take a while…Also there seems to be some weirdness still in the Disney World 2013 prices (e.g. Caribbean Beach being $190 some nights, and $191 the next).

DISNEY WORLD ITINERARIES UPDATED TO INCLUDE NEW HOOP DEE DOO REVUE HOURS THAT BEGIN IN OCTOBER

The Hoop Dee Doo Revue is on every one of this site’s itineraries. Because its show times will change on October 1, 2012, I’ve spent the last coupla of weeks re-doing and re-posting the itinerary charts, To-Do Lists, and the relevant daily guidance.

This also gave me the chance to suppress some old links (2009 week rankings!), clean up some top and bottom of the page links, and take out–with a tear–Snow White and Kim Possible. [Read more →]

DISNEY WORLD 2013 PRICES TO COME OUT NEXT WEEK

Multiple sources, including crack commenters Brandon and Terri, have noted that Disney World will begin online booking for 2013 visits next week, on July 11.

This means that the full 2013 Disney World resort hotel price schedule will be out by then as well. (2013 Disney World ticket prices were announced in June, and will be good until Disney raises them, likely in the summer of 2013.)

THE 2013 VALUE SEASON AT DISNEY WORLD TO BEGIN JANUARY 6TH?

We won’t know for sure until Disney release the prices itself, but it looks like the value season for 2013 won’t begin until January 6.

You can currently book into January 2013 if your arrival date is in 2012, and the 2013 prices Disney shows when you try to book, as I write this, are sky high January 1st, drop like a rock the 2nd, then go up again for the 3rd, 4th and 5th, and then on January 6 drop to what looks like value season levels for the rest of the month, other than the Marathon and holiday weekends.

This may change next week–the 2nd looks especially odd–but is consistent with the thought that the week beginning 12/29/2012 will be much busier than I had earlier forecast.

WHERE ARE THE JANUARY 2013 ITINERARIES?

Usually by now I would have published suggested itineraries and To-Do Lists for January 2013, and published an overview of the month (like this one for December 2012).

However, Disney’s calendar for January 2013 is incomplete–it’s still missing Extra Magic Hours.  These affect the itineraries, so I won’t publish material for January until they are up. Josh at easyWDW.com suggested last week that the delay is because Disney World is sorting out how to schedule and price for the crowds the week of the 29th, and perhaps also for the Marathon.

If Josh is right–and he usually is–then the January schedules should be sorted out by the 11th as well, and I’ll get the updates out as soon as I can after the Extra Magic Hours are posted.

WALT DISNEY WORLD CROWDS THE WEEKS OF 12/15  AND 12/29/2102

I now have data from ~180 of the around ~200 school districts whose vacation calendars I track (more calendars than you’d think don’t come out until June or later), which is enough to say that

• Crowds will be lower at the end of the week beginning 12/15/2012 than I thought they would, and
• Crowds will be worse from January 2 2013 to January 6 2013 than I thought they would.

Specifically, many fewer districts than I had projected are taking off from 12/18 through 1/1, and are instead taking 12/22 though 1/6 off.  As a result, in 2012 crowds will be lower December 18, 19 and 20 than I’d been projecting, and they’ll be higher January 2 through January 6th 2013. [Read more →]

On Friday I moved this site from one host to another, and by doing so gained 100 times the CPU capacity and 40 times the memory.

This seems to have had the desired effect of eliminating the “500 errors” the site was generating, and also to have had the secondary effect of making it scary fast.

Click around a bit and let me know what you think!

UNDER THE HOOD OF yourfirstvisit.net [Read more →]