Five Tips for Saving Time for Walt Disney World Rookies

Planning your first trip to Disney World? Maybe you didn’t have a good experience on your first trip. Perhaps your expectations were too high. Here are a few tips to maximize your trip to Disney. Every year the parks and the surrounding area seem to be getting busier and busier and the opportunity to get all the stuff in the park is getting slimmer. Vacation minutes are limited and expensive so make the most out of them. 

1.    Know your stuff

This is a blanket statement but be sure to do as much research as you can beforehand. There is no shortage of Disney information for newbies out there so find as much as you can. Vacation minutes are so precious so know you have to book dining reservations. Know the best times to hit rides. What time does the park open and close? Do you have access to early park hours or late hours? Do you know about virtual queues? Do you know where you are? Do you know what type of food is where? Where are the refillable water bottle stations? What time are the fireworks? How early do I need to be there? What are the transportation options? The point is to look up Google as little as possible so you can live in the moment and have an enjoyable time. Have a concrete plan of a few nonnegotiable items that you must hit. If you try to “do it all” it will leave you disappointed. There are more than 20 miles of Disney to explore so this just isn’t possible.

2.    Know what you want

A great Segway into the next point is knowing what you want. As I said, there is so much Disney World to explore that it is practically impossible to experience all of it in one trip. I have been coming for years and I still haven’t done every experience Disney has to offer. Most are personal decisions because I don’t want to be spun around like a crazy person on Mission Space but there are other things I haven’t experienced. Think about the nonnegotiable experiences you and your travel party have. Don’t put everything as a nonnegotiable because I am telling you that it is impossible and being disappointed after spending thousands of dollars just isn’t a great feeling. If rides are your thing, then it is possible to do everything if you splurge for several lightning lanes or a VIP tour but as a normal guest, it is going to be extremely hard to do every ride in the park with the wait times the way they are in most parks. It's just the unfortunate reality of Disney at the moment. This doesn’t mean you can’t have an amazing time, just don’t have so many must-dos that it is impossible to hit all of them. Make those items your priority, roll with the punches, and wait an hour and a half for Rise of the Resistance if that’s what you want to do. 

3.    Skip the Table Service

As a local, this pains me to write because this has been the evolution of me and my family’s Disney love. Trying the restaurants at all the hotels and theme parks because we never did that growing up. It was always packing sandwich-type trips. Some Disney restaurants in parks and at hotels are incredibly themed and incredibly good. It is however very expensive and a large investment of time. Even though they have to turn that table over to get more money but even, so it is still a much larger time hog than its quick service counterpart or a packed lunch. If eating sit-down meals isn’t a priority of yours then wait in the hour line for a ride rather than wait an hour to eat. 

4.    Get up early, stay late

This is probably my favorite piece of advice I have ever learned. Disney is an incredibly detailed place, with background music, and small pieces of theming that can go unnoticed with the heavy amounts of crowds. When you go early in the morning most of the rush is to the most popular rides but if you go to the second, third, or fourth most popular rides, you can just walk on most of the time. A 60-minute line midday can turn into 30, 15, or maybe even a walk on an hour before the park closes or during extra magic hours. When I used to come vacation here, I remember the last night of the trip most of my travel party was tired from the go go go of Disney, but I was able to get a lot done in a short amount of time when I went later at night. I remember specifically one trip I was staying at Art of Animation during the skyliner days where I just hopped on a skyliner rode it to Epcot, got there 30 minutes to close, and got to walk on Frozen Ever After, an attraction I had never ridden before and had a huge wait a majority of the day. I just walked right on and immediately after, I watched the fireworks and then just hopped on the skyliner and back to my hotel. Gone for a little more than an hour. Another example, is when I got to Animal Kingdom 10 minutes before it closed and went to Flight of Passage. I was able to be the only person in my whole preshow room and only person in my row for the attraction. That was a fun experience and that ride probably had the longest wait consistently throughout the day. This is a really good strategy to hit some of the most popular attractions and have minimal waits. My way personally is to hit the most popular attraction later in the day. Like Flight of Passage, Ratatouille, Frozen Ever After, Peter Pan, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, and Rise of the Resistance. Do all of these later in the day. At the start of the day hit the lesser most popular attractions. Expedition Everest, Kilimanjaro safaris, Test Track, Soarin, Space Mountain, Tower of Terror, Rockin Roller Coaster. Zig when the others Zag. 

5.    Take a Break. RELAX

Remind yourself that this is a vacation. Sometimes it’s hard to take a step back after paying so much money but you’re paying all that money to ENJOY yourself. If you push yourself from open to close going to ride to ride to ride to ride, switching parks, most families will burn out, especially with younger kids. This Florida sun will humble you quickly as dehydration is a big concern here. Stay hydrated, take plenty of a/c breaks, and don’t try to rush everywhere. This will end up making you be able to complete LESS! A common strategy is to wake up early for park opening, stay a few hours before the crowds and when the sun sets in, leave the park. Enjoy the hotel. You paid a lot of money for that place so definitely take advantage of the amenities offered. TAKE A NAP! Go to the pool, eat some food, drink a beer. After you recharge, you go back to the park of your choice and spend the evening there with less crowds, less sun, and less wait times. Also, the night experience of a theme park is completely different, Disney does a wonderful job lighting these parks up and making them look very good at night so definitely take this strategy. You can’t enjoy your time if you are extremely hot and exhausted. You might see this as a time waster but trust me, it’s not. It allows you to enhance your Disney experience. 

There you have it, those are my top five time-saving strategies for your trip at Disney World. 

This place is crowded pretty much all year long and with the cost to come you better have a great experience. These tips should help that.