Walt Disney World With Kids (Fodor's, 2012) - Fodor's [43]
For families with kids, it’s especially important to avoid the exhaustion that comes with just trying to get there. If you’re staying off-site, it can easily take two hours from the time you leave your hotel until you board your first ride, which is enough to shatter the equanimity of even the most well-behaved kid. Your children have been waiting for this vacation a long time, and now they’ve been flying and driving for a long time. You owe it to them to get into the parks quickly.
Insider’s Secret
Come early! If you follow only one tip in the whole book, make it this one. Although in recent years the mornings have become more crowded than they used to be, you’ll still find far shorter waits for big-deal rides than you will in the afternoon.
Every Disney World guidebook on the market tells people to come early, so it’s no shock that in the 23 years since I’ve written this book’s first edition, the mornings have become more crowded. However, the good news for you is that most people visiting Disney World still arrive between 10 and 11 AM, many of them proudly announcing that this is their vacation and they’ll sleep in if they want. (These same people seem to take a strange inverse pride in bragging about how long they stood in line and how little they saw.) Arriving early is like exercising regularly: everyone knows you should do it, but most people don’t. So an early start is still the best way to ride major attractions with little or no wait time.
On the evening you arrive, check with your hotel to see what time the park you’ll be visiting the next day opens. (All on-site and most off-site hotels display this information prominently.) If you learn, for example, that the Magic Kingdom is scheduled to open at 9 AM, be at the gate by 8:30. At least part of the park is usually open early and you can be at the end of Main Street awaiting the rope drop while the other 50,000 poor saps are still crawling along I-4.
Insider’s Secret
What if everyone comes early? They won’t.
If you’re indeed allowed to enter the first section of the park early, use your time wisely. Take care of any business—get maps and entertainment schedules, rent strollers, take a potty break—before the main park opens. If you haven’t had breakfast, there’s always a kiosk where you can grab juice and muffins. The characters are usually on hand to greet kids, which is a fun way to start the day. But be sure to be at the ropes about 10 minutes before the stated opening times.
Time-Saving Tip
To maximize your time in the parks, either eat breakfast at your hotel or buy fast food while you’re waiting for the rope drop. There’s always at least one sit-down place to get breakfast in each park, but you don’t want to waste the relatively uncrowded morning hours in a restaurant.
Because people were practically stampeding after the rope drop, Disney is now controlling how fast you can enter the main body of the park. Once the whole park opens, proceed quickly but calmly (they’ll nab you if you run) to the first ride you’d like to board. Sometimes the Fastpass system doesn’t start working until 20 or 30 minutes after the park opens, so it’s definitely better to ride your top-priority attraction first and get your Fastpass second.
Plan to see the most popular attractions either early in the day, late at night, or during a time when a big event siphons off other potential riders (such as the afternoon parade in the Magic Kingdom).
Time-Saving Tip
The single-most important thing you can do to make your Disney visit go more smoothly? Use Fastpass for the most-popular attractions.
Eat at “off” times. Some families eat lightly at breakfast, have an early lunch around 11 AM and supper at 5 PM. Others eat a huge breakfast and then a late lunch around 3 PM and have a final meal back at their hotels after the parks close. If you tour late and you’re really bushed, all on-site hotels and many off-site hotels have in-room pizza delivery service.
Kids usually want to revisit their favorite attractions and