By the co-author of The easy Guide to Your Walt Disney World Visit 2020, the best-reviewed Disney World guidebook series ever.

Available on Amazon here.

(As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases.)





Category — w. Most Recent Stuff

Disney World Crowds in 2012

by Dave

December   January    February   March   April   May   June   July

2012 CROWDS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

In the image below you’ll find Walt Disney World 2012 crowd forecasts. (Click it to enlarge it; when open, click it again.)

(For the 2013 Crowd Calendar, click here)

Crowd levels are ranked by week from 1-11 in the following way:

1: Lowest of the year

2: Lower

3: Low

5: Moderate-minus

6: Moderate

7: Moderate-plus

9: High

10: Higher

11: Highest

HOW TO INTERPRET THE 2012 DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR

The “low crowd” weeks–those rated 1-3–represent the only crowd levels a family visiting for the first time, and unsure if it will ever return, should consider.

However, lower crowds, especially lowest crowds, do not always mean a better week. The lowest weeks are low for a reason–typically because they are in the hurricane or the ride closure seasons. See this for recommended 2012 weeks for first time visitors, and for the 2012 Week Picker, see this.

The “moderate crowd” weeks–those rated 5-7–have crowd levels I would not recommend to first time visitors. However, I’d go during such weeks myself with no hesitation, and think these levels are OK for returning visitors who don’t need to see everything and already know how to work Walt Disney World.

The “high crowd” weeks–those rated 9-11–should be avoided by everyone. They aren’t, which is why they are so high.

You may have noted that there’s no level 4 or 8. There’s a reason for that.

MY DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR GOES UP TO 11

My analytics only let me distinguish 9 groups–the lowest through the highest crowd levels noted above.

Since the influence of the Unofficial Guide and TouringPlans.com has led almost all Disney World crowd calendars to top out at 10, this presented a problem of needing to skip a number. The skipped number is hard to place among 9.

However, I’ve always thought that the really nastiest weeks of the year deserved an 11 for emphasis. So I assigned 11 to “highest.” That let me skip two numbers, the ones that separate the moderate crowd levels from those higher and lower.

A NOTE ON DISNEY WORLD CROWD FORECAST ACCURACY

This site’s forecasting approach has stood the test of time.  But nobody’s perfect, and it can’t hurt you to look at other Disney World crowd calendars—such as TouringPlans.com –far and away the best daily crowd calendar on the web.

(TouringPlans.com charges a trivially small fee. Buy Testa and Sehlinger’s book and get a discount on TouringPlans.com.)

I particularly suggest checking other forecasts for 2012 Spring Break–late February, March and early April–visits, as crowds in this period are the hardest to forecast.

MORE ON WHEN TO GO TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

June 29, 2011   55 Comments

Welcome to Magical Blogorail Teal!

by Dave

THE MAGICAL BLOGORAIL

Welcome to those of you joining me from The World of Deej, and also to those of you just hopping aboard!

I am the 2nd stop on our Magical Blogorail.

This week, members of Magical Blogorail Teal are introducing ourselves, our blogs, and what inspired us to start a Disney blog!

(For what’s a Magical Blogorail, click here.)

To those of you visiting this site for the first time, welcome. To those of you who have been here before, welcome back.

ABOUT ME, THIS SITE, AND ITS INSPIRATION

I’ve been running this site for more than three years now. It focuses on fast and easy-to-access advice for first time visitors to Walt Disney World, especially those who don’t know whether or not they’ll ever return.

See the home page for more on what I mean by that! But come right back…

So what inspired me to start writing?

Believe it or not, I got to this site by starting to write a series of detective novels, sometime in 2004. This seemed too hard, so I thought to begin with writing a non-fiction book, and work my way up to fiction. So I kicked off looking around for a subject.

In March 2005 I went with a group of people from a client (I’m a management consultant focusing on strategy) to a convention in Orlando, and convinced most of them to join me one late afternoon at the Magic Kingdom (you may have heard us discussing health data interoperability strategy on Peter Pan).

We got to talking about first visits to Walt Disney World, and I heard some appalling stories about just miserable first visits.

So that became my subject. There’s lots of good stuff for first time visitors in the great Disney World guidebooks and websites out there, but none of these was focused solely on first time visitors.

While I began working on this topic, for a different client I was researching usability and design issues. One of the thoughts I ran across—I wish I could remember the exact quotation—was “figure out what problem your users are trying to solve, and solve it for them.”

That led to an insight that re-shaped my approach and transformed my target from a book to a website.

What are the problems first time visitors to Walt Disney World are trying to solve?

The problems are when to go, how long to stay, where to stay, what to budget, what to do when, etc…

So I set as my goal giving an exact answer to each of these key questions all on just one page. That became my home page, and was why the subtitle of the site became The Walt Disney World Instruction Manual—as I saw myself writing an instruction manual, not an encyclopedia.

And also why it became a website instead of a book…as it’s hard to publish a one-page book!

I knew of course that not everyone would be able to go the week I said or stay where I suggested. So to be helpful to those who couldn’t follow the exact instructions, I developed the next level of content as “Next Best Options.”

A first time visitor, but can’t go the week I recommend? The site gives the list of the weeks of the year ranked in order. Can’t stay where I recommend? It recommends the Disney resorts ranked in order…etc. (See the left side navigation for all this, or head back to the home page.)

Over the next couple of years, I collected and analyzed the data, synthesized it into recommendations, and actually opened the site in WordPress in early 2008.

Response since has been gratifying.

I can tell by my comments that a lot of first time visitors are making their way to the site, and getting value out of it.

But, surprisingly, I can tell from my repeat visitor statistics that a lot of experienced Disney World visitors and plain old Disney fans are enjoying the site as well. (Either that or I am so confusing I take multiple visits to understand!)

But still no detective novels…

So that’s my story, and thanks for joining me today!

THE MAGICAL BLOGORAIL CONTINUES

Your next stop on the Magical Blogorail Teal Loop is The DisneyFAITHful.

Here is the map of our Magical Blogorail should you happen to make a stop along the way and want to reboard:

1st Stop ~ The World of Deej
2nd Stop ~ yourfirstvisit.net
3rd Stop ~ The DisneyFAITHful
4th Stop ~The Many Adventures of a Disney-Lovin’ Spectrum Mom
Final Stop ~ Capturing Magical Moments

June 28, 2011   No Comments

So What’s A Magical Blogorail?

by Dave

Tomorrow I’ll be publishing my first post as a member of Magical Blogorail Teal.

The Magical Blogorail was developed by Beth Doda. It’s essentially a “blog hop”–a group of Disney sites writing once a month or so about a common theme.

There are multiple groups within it, each named after a monorail color. Our group, publishing for the first time tomorrow, is Magical Blogorail Teal.

Other sites in Magical Blogorail Teal are

There’s a bunch of other Magical Blogorail color groups–Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, Orange and Black, all well worth checking out.

But Magical Blogorail Teal is clearly the best…or, more accurately, the newest…

June 27, 2011   No Comments

The Revised Best Weeks of 2012 at Walt Disney World are Out!

by Dave

VERSION 2 OF THE BEST WEEKS TO VISIT DISNEY WORLD IN 2012 IS OUT

I’ve just updated my list of 2012 Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World, Ranked in Order.

The update reflects

  • Disney’s release a week or so ago of final 2012 prices
  • My final analysis of 2011/2012 school break calendars (the last of which became available this week) and
  • The impact of those school calendars on my draft 2012 crowd calendar (which I’ll release later next week)

I’ve also been a little less of a knucklehead in some elements of the logic.

For example, a group of weeks with similar crowd levels (and similar in other key characteristics) but with different prices are now ranked in price order…

The result of the update is that many weeks shift a bit, a few shift a lot, and there’s a new number one week!

There’s more here on what moved and why, but for the moment let me just thank Carl at Dad’s Guide to WDW, who has been recommending one logic change for years!

Click here for the revised 2012 weeks in order.

June 25, 2011   No Comments

Disney World’s 2012 Prices include Different Prices for Different Value Resorts

by Dave

DISNEY’S 2012 PRICE SEASONS

Walt Disney World released its 2012 price seasons last week–for details on these 2102 Disney World resort hotel prices, click here.

Besides the usual flow of the seasons, several new or interesting things emerge:

  • Disney resort hotel prices overall are up 2%-9%
  • Value resorts, which used to be all the same price, are now in three different price bands
  • The Value 2 price season–the late summer time when prices drop substantially–starts a couple of weeks earlier than in recent practice.

DISNEY WORLD RESORT HOTEL PRICE INCREASES

[Read more →]

June 20, 2011   2 Comments

Review: Disney’s Contemporary Resort, p3

by Dave

This is the third page of this review. For the first page click here, and for the second, click here.

THE THEMING OF DISNEY’S CONTEMPORARY RESORT

Disney’s Contemporary Resort opened in October 1971, and its last–very nice–renovation was completed in 2007. It is officially described on Walt Disney World’s website as

“…an ultra-modern Disney Deluxe Resort, made up of a towering A-frame high-rise building—the iconic Contemporary Tower—and complemented by one garden wing annex. This lakeside Resort is the only hotel in Walt Disney World Resort to have the Walt Disney World Monorail System pass through the main lobby.”

The Contemporary Resort was designed collaboratively by the US Steel Corporation, Disney, and the under-rated Welton Becket, friend and neighbor of Walt Disney. (This same group also designed the Polynesian.)

Becket is under-rated not as an architect, but rather because, in a sense, he created Imagineering.

According to John Hench, when Disney was looking for help is designing Disneyland, “Becket said [to Walt Disney] ‘You’ve got to use your own people. We can’t help you. We don’t have any kind of a background for this. Just use your own guys.'”

As a result, Walt Disney started bringing artists and craftspeople over from his and other studios to work on the park, and Imagineering was born.

(Quoted in Jeff Kurtti’s Walt Disney’s Imagineering Legends and the Genesis of the Disney Theme Park.)

The original concepts for the Contemporary were that it was to be a high rise, and that the monorail was to run through it.

This led to the internal atrium, and to the length of the building, which was designed to shelter two monorail trains on each track in case of hurricanes.

(Hurricane doors are at either end of the atrium, where the monorail tracks enter.)

At some point the total number of rooms were defined–I’ve seen no source on why the particular number was picked–and the design result was the long, monolithic, and dull facade that we’ve known ever since.

Although the building has no kid appeal other than the monorail itself, a family that stayed only there, and never saw one of the value resorts, or the Polynesian, Wilderness Lodge, or Animal Kingdom Lodge, could be forgiven for thinking they were staying in the perfect Walt Disney World hotel!

It has two of Disney World’s signature restaurants.

On the rooftop is the California Grill, almost as iconic as the Contemporary itself.

Joe Fowler notes (quoted in Didier Ghez’s section of Chad Emerson’s Four Decades of Magic: Celebrating the First Forty Years of Disney World) that Walt Disney asked to see how Disney World would look from the California Grill (then with a different name) location.

“So we got the biggest damned utility crane in Florida…and they hoisted us straight up to where the lounge at the top of the Contemporary would be…he was so enthusiastic: ‘Oh Joe look at this! This is going to be great!'”

Walt was right…not just about Disney World, but also the view from what would later become the California Grill.

At the monorail level is Chef Mickey’s, one of the most-loved character meals at all of Walt Disney World.

The Wave, on the ground floor level, is another sit-down restaurant with its fans.

The main dining options are completed by the Contempo Cafe, the Contemporary’s great counter-service option.

Other dining options are easily accessible via the monorail to the Grand Floridian and Polynesian, and boats to Fort Wilderness Resort and the Wilderness Lodge.

The Contemporary has a fine, though uninteresting, pool, accompanied with a pool snack bar and a pool bar–though these (especially the bar!) closed too early on my May visit.

In addition to the main pool, there’s also a smaller circular pool more attended by adults, and a great kid water play area.

There’s also a large lovely beach–but, as at all other Disney resort beaches, no swimming is allowed (see the top of the page for a photo of the beach).

My annoying sister and I, in the 70s, came to this beach every year to work on our tans in between visits to the Magic Kingdom and to my grandparents on my dad’s side. (Happy Father’s Day, pop!)

The convenience of the Contemporary is hard to beat…being able to walk to and from the Magic Kingdom is quite a luxury.

All in, though, the comparative lack of kid appeal puts it fourth among the deluxe resorts for first-time visitors.  It is well worth a visit by returning visitors!

While the Contemporary served as Disney World’s flagship resort until the Grand Floridian opened in 1988, such was not Disney’s original intention.

In its pre-opening master plan, the never-built Venetian Resort (to be built between the Contemporary and the TTC) was to become the resort’s flagship hotel.

Also planned but never built were the Asian Resort, planned for the current site of the Grand Floridian, and the Persian Resort, to have been built on Bay Lake, between the Contemporary and Tomorrowland.

The Venetian site was revisited in the 90s for the Mediterranean Resort, but the site was found to be too expensive to build on at that time.

Another planned early resort was Buffalo Junction, to have been built between Fort Wilderness Resort and the Wilderness Lodge. Rumors emerged last year of this site as a potential Disney Vacation Club resort location.

Disney World’s master planning is influenced (though not shaped, it’s a long story, see this, though there are some lies in it…) by the Reedy Creek Improvement District’s long term plan.

The latest version, a 2020 plan released in 2008, includes all of these spots as potentially buildable.

Land suitable for further development is marked on the map in red; marginally suitable land is in light yellow-green. (Unsuitable land is in dark green.)

So maybe we’ll see more Magic Kingdom deluxe resorts one of these days…

 

PAGES:  First | 1 |  2 |  3 | Last

MORE ON WHERE TO STAY AT DISNEY WORLD

June 20, 2011   No Comments

← Previous EntriesNext Entries →