Planning Disney: Park Touring

Once you figure out when you're going and where you're staying, you're going to want to figure out what your park days will look like. At 180 days out from your trip (roughly 6 months) you can start making dining reservations, so you need to have a good idea of what park you are going to on which day. There are several bloggers who chart the best days to visit each park. My plan to was to follow their guidelines so we could be at the park with the lowest predicted crowd that day. That basically means you avoid whichever park is having magic hours that day. Our order ended up being Epcot, Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and Hollywood Studios. Originally I had HS and Epcot switched, but I came across conflicting crowd calendars and switched our days around. In future trips, I will most likely plan for two full days at MK, so I would tack another one onto the end of the trip, probably regardless of what the crowds looked like that day. I really enjoyed starting with Epcot. We all loved it and had so much fun! I think if we had gone to Magic Kingdom first, Epcot wouldn't have seemed quite as great, even though they are completely different. We had park hopper tickets meaning we could go back and forth between multiple parks. If you don't have the park hopper ticket, you can only enter one park per day. Of course park hopper tickets are more expensive, but since we were only getting one full day at MK, and since I knew we would probably only spend a half day at AK and HS, I wanted the option to go back to MK on those days. {Epcot is generally considered a half day park for kids our kids' ages, but I didn't want to park hop on our first day there- I wanted their first experience of MK to start with the welcome show and rope drop. And while Epcot might be a half day park for young kids, we had no problem spending the whole day there and loved it.}

Once you have your dining reservations all set, you can start figuring out what your park days will look like. Shannon at www.wdwprepschool.com has good examples of park touring as does www.easywdw.com. I looked at both. I also liked the crowd calendars on www.kennythepirate.com. I spent a lot of time looking at the maps beforehand because I really wanted to be efficient and not waste time zigzagging across the park, but we ended up doing that some anyway, and it was fine! I actually typed out very detailed touring plans, complete with Disney font! :), and when we got to Epcot, I realized I forgot to even print them off my computer at home! Story of my life. Luckily between the maps I had printed {they have plenty at the parks too!} and the Disney app, I could roughly remember our plan. I do think it's important to have a good plan in place, but you also have to be flexible considering you're dealing with little children and unknown factors like weather, etc. If anyone wants a copy of my touring plans, I'll be happy to email them to you.

When you are 60 days out from your trip {if you are staying at a Disney Resort, or 30 days if you are staying off property}, you can make your Fast Pass selections. You can 3 Fast Passes per person per day. Once you have used up your initial 3 Fast Passes at a park, you can go to a Fast Pass kiosk at that park and get another one. Once you have used that 4th one, you can get one more, and so on. Your Fast Passes will be set for a specific time with a one hour window, like 10:20-11:20am. You can be 5 minutes early or 15 minutes late for your Fast Pass and still use it. Once you have your Fast Passes set, you can plan the rest of your day around them. 

If you are park hopping like we did, all 3 Fast Passes have to be used at the same park. You cannot get 1 at Animal Kingdom and then use the other 2 at Magic Kingdom. Now if you start at Animal Kingdom and use all 3, then when you get to Magic Kingdom, you can go to a kiosk and pick up another Fast Pass there. Clear as mud? :)