As crowds continue to escalate across the Disney’s Orlando theme parks, you should consider developing a Disney World trip itinerary as part of your Disney World vacation planning. It can help you spend less time in line and have a more enjoyable vacation. Fortunately, we’re here to help, with the strategies and tips you need to plan your days and have a great Disney World vacation. We are also providing a Disney World itinerary template to help get you started.
Why Do I Need a Disney World Itinerary?
Over the last several years, peak wait times at popular Disney World attractions have reached over 2 hours even during moderately traveled seasons. While enhanced queues, as well as the My Disney Experience app, has made it possible for Disney World guests to make the most of time spent waiting for rides, high crowds and long waits continue to be a top experience detractor for park guests.
However, with a properly designed Disney World itinerary, you can avoid much of the waiting in line and spend more time experiencing the magic.
To help, we’re providing a copy of the Disney World itinerary template that we use to plan our trips. It hasn’t failed us yet, so download a copy for yourself, and let’s get started planning your days.
Step 1 Understanding the Disney World Itinerary Template
Each of Disney’s Orlando theme parks has a myriad of attractions. Some, like shows and parades, operate on a time schedule, while others, such as rides, are offered continuously throughout the day. With so much to see and do, it’s important to understand which of these attractions you’ll want to experience.
This is where the first several pages of your Disney World itinerary template come in handy, giving you a place to document the attractions you’ll want to visit. This is an important step for later as well, providing you with a check list to ensure that you haven’t missed scheduling any of your favorites.
It’s also important to note the symbols included by each ride. These will give you clues as to when and how to schedule each. For example, Space Mountain includes a 1+ symbol. This means it’s a headliner attraction with typically high wait times. Take a moment to also look at Carousel of Progress. This ride has no symbols beside it, indicating that waits are usually very low for this ride, so you can enjoy this experience at any time. These are all tips that will come in handy when planning your itinerary below.
Next, Select Your Lightning Lane Options
One way to fit everything into a single day in the parks is to use the new Disney Lightning Lane Multipass service. Multipass allows you to skip the regular queue on many popular attractions, so it’s important to understand how the Multipass system works. After all, it stands to reason that you will spend less time waiting in line throughout the day if you use your Lightning Lane reservations for rides with the longest wait times.
Guests of a Walt Disney World resort are able to make up to 3 Multipass reservations beginning 7 days prior to arrival for the length of their vacation. That means, starting 7 days before your Disney vacation begins, you’ll log into the My Disney Experience app, sign into your account and select 3 attractions for each day of your stay.
Guests staying offsite at Good Neighbor hotels or other properties may book up to 3 Multipass attractions beginning 7 days prior to each day of their stay.
Since you’ll be booking these in advance, it’s very important know which rides or attractions you will book before this 7 day window opens. You may continue to make Multipass reservations while visiting the park, each time you use an existing reservation.
Step 3 Decide Where You Want to Eat
While getting into some popular table service restaurants may require some advanced planning, you’ll find that deciding ahead of time where you will eat also makes it easier to plan you day. For instance, you wouldn’t want to schedule an 11:30 a.m. MultiPass on Soarin’ on your Disney World itinerary if you have a reservation at Biergarten at noon. Given the walking distance between the two locations, you’d never make it in time. On the other hand, planning to eat at Sunshine Seasons, a table service restaurant in the same building as Soarin’, is an excellent way to plan
Understanding where you will eat and when, allows you to plan, selecting experiences near the restaurant both before and after. So, take some time to select your restaurant choices for each meal.
Creating Your Disney World Itinerary – Getting started
We usually create our Disney World itinerary in two phases. In the first, we pencil in the itinerary as we’d like to experience it, including the times we plan to use the Lightning Lane as well as when we’d like to eat at each restaurant. This should be done more than 60 days before your arrival date. That way, you are ready and prepared to make restaurant advanced dining reservations when the time comes.
You’ll find spaces to pencil in both your restaurant selections as well as your Lightning Lane Reservations in your Disney World itinerary template. Go ahead and pencil in the restaurants and times when you plan to eat. However, don’t fill in your Lightning Lane selections just yet. Instead, go back to the front pages and locate the park for which you are creating this itinerary, and follow the steps below:
1. Review the list of attractions for the park, and pencil in a check mark next to each attraction that you want to experience.
2. Once you know which attractions you plan to visit, go back and review those that include the Lightning Lane symbol and select 4-5 that you hope to book. A good way to do this is to review the average wait times on each. Select five with the longest wait times for booking.
3. Once you have recorded your Lightning Lane and restaurant selections, you can start to pencil in your itinerary. Start, by penciling in any prescheduled events, such as restaurant reservations, shows or parades. Since these have set times, you will need to work around them. To schedule shows and parades, you’ll want to consult the latest list of Disney World entertainment times.
4. Once you have anything with a definite time scheduled into your Disney World itinerary template, you can start scheduling other rides and attractions around them. To begin, look at the rides with the longest wait times, and began scheduling those for early in the morning when lines are shortest.
We’ve placed average wait times in the list of attractions. You’ll notice these cover a wide range. If you are traveling when crowds are lighter, such as late August through September, you’ll experience wait times at the lower end of the range. On the other hand, if you’re visiting during peak times, such as around holidays, late February through Easter, or many weekends, you can expect wait times at the upper range of the scale. If you’re visiting at other times of the year, you can expect to fall somewhere in the middle. You can also use the symbols as a guide as to when to schedule each attraction.
It’s helpful to have a park map handy at this stage, so that you can try to schedule attractions that are close together.
Last, don’t forget to pencil in your Lightning Lane selections. Generally, you want to start scheduling these mid-morning, as the park crowds begin to fill up. This way, you can utilize the Lightning Lane to its fullest advantage. Here is a sample morning itinerary to give you an idea. Notice how we’ve written notes to remind ourselves when to open the My Disney Experience app and make a new Multipass Lightning Lane reservation (formerly FastPass)?
As you can see, in our Walt Disney World vacation planning, we have tried to place rides with the longest wait times in the morning. Opting to experience the attractions that typically have the longest lines before 11:00 am, allows you to experience more before the parks reach peak crowd conditions for the day and lines get longer.
We have also noted in our Disney World itinerary template when we need to go into the My Disney Experience app and create another Multipass Lightning Lane reservation. We usually do this after tapping into each Lightning Lane. Just remember to schedule this one as early as you can as well, to increase the number of Lightning Lane reservations you can schedule each day before they run out.
You may also be wondering how we decided the number of attractions to schedule before lunch. Again, this was determined by wait times. In general, you can probably experience one headliner attraction (those with the longest wait times) using the standby line in a morning hour and possibly one or two other rides that typically have lower wait times. If you use Lightning Lane for a headliner, you’ll fit more in.
However, some rides can take over an hour in a standby line. If you look at the list of attractions on the first page of your Disney World itinerary template, you’ll see that we’ve noted these as well as the best time to schedule them if you don’t have Lightning Lane. You can also see the average wait times as well as the time it takes to experience the attraction once you’re on the ride or the attraction. These will help you to know how many rides or show to schedule each hour.
As you begin to fill in the afternoon hours of your itinerary template, keep in mind that wait times go up as the day wears on, but gradually decline as you get closer to closing time. Again, we’ve included the average wait times for each ride in your Disney World itinerary template to help you plan.
Also keep in mind that there are certain times during the day when wait times on rides typically drop. You can expect shorter lines during parades or large shows, for example and slightly lower lines during peak mealtimes. If you’ve already seen a parade, consider using that time to hit a headliner attraction.
The Last Phase of Itinerary Planning
Creating a pencil itinerary is a allows you to easily change your approach if you don’t get the ADRs you had hoped to get.
Once you have your ADRs scheduled, now it’s time to finalize your itinerary. It will hopefully only require minor adjustments to account for time differences in the bookings you make. However, if you weren’t able to get the Advanced Dining reservation you wanted, it might take a bigger effort to rearrange your itinerary.
Either way, you will be glad you’ve taken the time to plan your itinerary in advance. Disney World itinerary planning will save you time in line and also make sure that you don’t miss any attractions.
If you have questions about your Disney World itinerary or our Disney World itinerary template, drop us an email at in**@se*********.net. We’ll by happy to provide tips based on our experience.
To download our free Disney World itinerary planning template, click here.
Looking to Take the Work out of Planning Your Disney World Itinerary?
Let us plan your days. When you book a vacation package (hotel room and tickets), we’ll take care of planning your itinerary. We’ll even provide Lightning Lane Multipass suggestions and make sure you know which attraction to experience when. Click here for a free no obligation quote or fill out the form to the right.
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