theDIBB - It's The Greatest Hits Tour August 2018

It’s the Greatest Hits Tour - Pre-trip Report

Welcome along to Florida trip report number five. Yes I know number four is not finished as yet, but as we’re now past ADR day for the 2018 trip, I couldn’t wait any longer to get started. Plus it seems like so long ago now that we started booking this holiday, I’m in danger of forgetting what we have booked and any accompanying long-winded booking / planning stories to bore you all with :blush:.

Quick introductions because, well this will be my eighth trip report (two NY ones as well at the Florida ones) and hopefully you will know us by now, but if not, we are:

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Me, Michelle, 39, planner and control-freak, lover of all things WDW and also Florida / US holidays in general. I will be turning 40 a few weeks after we get back from this year’s holiday so I’m treating this trip as my birthday present and therefore having even more of the final say over what we do than usual ;).

DH, Mat, 41, has been beaten over the head with Disney and Florida for the past 17 years since we got married there and is now pretty much as big a fan as me. Not involved in the planning through choice (his and mine) besides me giving him the occasional multiple choice question to answer (eg restaurant options).

DD1, Seren, will be 12 when we go. Geek, Disney lover (especially Stitch), Harry Potter fan, now displaying bouts of alarmingly teenage behaviour but still a joy at least half the time. Has been lucky enough to spend both her eighth and eleventh birthdays at Magic Kingdom and will have to get used to me being the one with the birthday badge this time :).

DD2, Freya, 10, our little ray of sunshine and very much a free spirit. Most stubborn and determined person I have ever known, and also the sweetest and most caring. Disney (especially Marie) and massive Harry Potter lover.

The girls and I in Hogsmeade, 2015:

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This will be our fifth trip as a family (first was is 2012). Mat and I also got married at WDW in 2001 (his first Florida holiday) and I also went at least six times as a child / teenager (first trip was in 1988 I believe.)

Here's me with two tiny children :cry: on our first family trip in 2012:

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On our wedding day with the Wedding Pavilion in the background (where we got married) :

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So the major difference repeat report readers may notice is that this year’s holiday will be taking place in August rather than our usual April to May. Gulp. :omg: With Seren now at secondary grammar school, her Easter holidays are shorter than at her previous prep school where she had three weeks off. There’s absolutely no way they’d authorise term time absence (they’re fussy about her missing 20 minutes of lessons every week for a school organised guitar lesson), not that we’d seriously consider taking her out of school now she’s at high school anyway. In the past we would go slightly after the general school Easter holidays as the girls’ holidays ran a little later, which benefited us both cost and crowds wise (Spring Break is usually tailing off too). Taking them out of school for a few extra days had been no problem then. Now that wasn’t feasible anymore, we knew we had to bite the bullet and go in the summer holidays instead. I followed the ‘last two weeks of August are quieter’ advice on the Dibb and chose the second half of the school holidays. However, I decided we should do three weeks because a) the heat and probable extra rain may slow our plans down a bit and b) if it’s busier than we’re used to, we’re going to need longer to get everything done anyway.

One upside of going in August is that we’re going to be there for the first few Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween parties :D. When I read in Stephanie’s (Dixonsontour) report that they’d been to a Halloween party in August last year - the first time it dawned on me that we’d be there for the Halloween season, because let’s be fair, we’re going two months before Halloween - I actually let out an audible squeak of excitement, despite being home alone at the time. I’ve always wanted to visit Disney World at both Halloween and Christmas, but with school aged children, I figured that wouldn’t be an option until...ooh, at least 2026 when Freya starts university :erm:. Now that a rough idea of party dates is out there based on the park hours, I’ve factored one of the August parties into our plans and can’t wait until the tickets go on sale.

Even before our Easter 2017 trip, we knew we would be returning in 2018 one more time (for now) before having at least a year away from Florida to head to the West Coast. By the beginning of April 2017 we knew we would be visiting in August 2018. When free dining was released around that time, I panicked and decided we had to make a decision on our main Disney hotel. This was a few weeks before our 2017 trip and it was a bit tricky to make a decision for ‘next year’ without yet having been on ‘this year’s’ holiday. We had talked about doing another multi hotel trip, and were really keen to do part of the trip with free dining (we’ve paid OOP for our Disney meals on our last two trips and it can be pretty painful :(.)

I had the idea that we would book 10 days at our ‘main’ hotel with free dining and then add on some time at Universal beforehand and maybe an extra Disney hotel afterwards for a final few days. We very quickly narrowed down our choice of ‘main’ hotel to the Yacht Club and Beach Club. We love the Boardwalk area and our first Disney holiday as a family was at the Yacht Club in 2012. We absolutely loved our time there, and we have stayed at other Disney hotels since, but the Yacht Club feels like our Disney home. The fact that the Yacht Club has been more recently refurbished than the Beach Club was the cherry on the cake that made us pick YC over BC. So, booking the Yacht Club at the beginning of April was the first piece of the puzzle and indeed, the first of our ‘Greatest Hits.’ Here are the girls outside the Yacht Club in 2012:

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And with the beautiful hotel in the background in 2017:

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I was really pleased to get the Yacht Club booked (woods or garden view room) with free dining plan, 14 day tickets and free $200 gift card. Once that was all done, we were able to concentrate on our upcoming trip, and knew that experiencing the holiday would help us shape the rest of the trip. While we were there, we decided the following:

We would definitely return to the Hard Rock Hotel in 2018 as we loved our stay there in 2017. So a new entry to our Greatest Hits.

Happy at the Hard Rock, 2017:

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We were finally committing to the idea we had discussed over and over again on our four trips as a family: returning for a stay at the Contemporary resort where we had spent a chunk of our honeymoon in 2001. Another of our Greatest Hits. Every time we have been back as a family, we have talked about how being able to walk to Magic Kingdom from the hotel is worth its weight in gold. I’m too impatient to rely on the Disney buses, and the whole TTC situation really winds me up too. That five minute stroll to Magic Kingdom from the Contemporary is a much less stressful way to arrive at the park (and get home at the end of the night instead of a long wait for a bus or monorail.) The Contemporary is really what I had in mind when I mentioned adding on a couple of days at another Disney resort after our Yacht Club stay. Because we’re staying there mainly for the location benefit, we don’t need to stay there longer than a couple of days.

Loving California Grill at the Contemporary in 2014:

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And in 2015:

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We loved Disney Springs more than ever in 2017 and really fancied doing what I’ve read about in many a Dibber’s trip report: walking or boating to DS from Saratoga Springs so we can enjoy a few drinks there. So we decided to end the holiday with a couple of nights at SS. Something new for us, but Disney Springs is definitely a Greatest Hit for us.

The girls and I at the dance party in Disney Springs in 2015:

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During a perfect day at Disney Springs in 2017 (note the cocktail in hand, of course ;)) :

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Also 2017:

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When we got back from the 2017 trip, we booked three nights at the Hard Rock before our Yacht Club stay and then two nights at the Contemporary after YC (Garden Wing...so much cheaper than the Tower) and the last two nights of the trip at Saratoga Springs. With SS being DVC it wasn’t a confirmed booking straight away, but we received confirmation at 11 months out that all was good with the booking.

(Photo from google) :

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I had fancied doing the Contemporary stay before going to the Yacht Club, but I hadn’t realised that by booking the Disney hotel, park tickets and dining plan all together, the park tickets couldn’t be activated until we checked into the hotel booking attached to the package. So even though we were staying at the Yacht Club for 10 days and had 14 day tickets, those extra four days had to be used after the YC stay rather than before.

We were backwards and forwards for a few weeks trying to decide what to do at the very beginning of the trip. We couldn’t decide whether to begin with a few days at the beach which we all quite fancied, or a few days chilling in Orlando. In the end, we couldn’t find a hotel we liked enough at any of the beach resorts we fancied (one was Clearwater, I can’t remember where the other one was), and we decided that we’ve had some lovely days in Orlando just chilling round the pool, having nice meals and cocktails, popping to Disney Springs or mini golf etc. We’re not really beach people anyway either. So the plan was to spend the first four days doing those things. This is Mat during one of our chill-out days at Cabana Bay in 2014:

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And the girls after enjoying some mini golf in 2014:

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I really fancied testing out the brand new Aventura hotel and I knew we’d be happiest staying at Universal on our four day chill-out as that’s where we’ve been based when we’ve had park-free stretches before (another Greatest Hit.) I was so excited about staying at the newest Universal hotel only 11 days after opening, and I got a really good rate on an upgraded room, including $50 per night to spend on food and beverages.

(Photo from google) :

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I had booked Aventura on 1st June, and was really looking forward to staying there. Then Hurricane Irma hit in September and a few weeks later, I saw a blog post from one of the Orlando theme park pages mentioning that construction had been slowed down by hurricane damage. They were now quoting an opening date of 16th August rather than 1st August. Our booking was 11th - 15th August. For a few weeks, I didn’t hear anything from Expedia who I had booked with and discussed the situation on The Dibb. Other people with bookings before 16th had had them cancelled by their tour operator. I booked Sapphire Falls as a back-up as I didn’t want us to get caught short. I was hoping they were just being extra cautious and would move the opening day back again. Unfortunately on 1st November, Expedia sent me an email confirming they needed to cancel the booking :(.

I am still occasionally checking availability for my dates as I really hope they move the opening date back again. I mean, how could they be so sure 10 months before the opening date that they couldn’t catch up on that extra two weeks’ construction? And an unopened hotel isn’t making any money so why not push to get it back on track so that we can stay there. Sapphire Falls looks pretty enough, but I was so much more excited about staying at the brand new Aventura. Keep your fingers crossed for us that the opening date moves and they can accommodate us.

Sapphire Falls (photo from google) :

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Flights...well, booking flights was trickier than it had been on previous trips. When the flights were released in mid-September, I had a mini freak out about how expensive they were, which I think was at least in part down to the weak pound. Looking on The Dibb, it seemed a lot of people were also a bit horrified by the prices. Direct flights to and from Orlando were more than I (and others it seemed) had expected, or what I remembered prices being for Easter last year. Not to worry, because last year we had got a very good deal on a BA flydrive from Miami which also had the added benefit of requiring only a couple of hundred pound deposit. We’ll just do that again, I thought. Except the prices for flydrives to Miami were ridiculous too. And even more expensive than flydrives for Orlando, so totally pointless. A friend of mine had got a pretty good deal for an Orlando flydrive for last Easter, but just like the Miami ones, there definitely didn’t seem to be any cost benefit to booking one for this year.

I played about with it all for a few days, though didn’t have much room to manoeuvre as I couldn’t really change the dates because of our hotel bookings. Not that the few days before or after were working out any cheaper. I also don’t really have the freedom to choose another airline as Mat is a gold Avios member because of how much he travels with work, and so the benefits we get are worth booking with them over other airlines (first class check-in, usually priority security, airport lounge access, collecting lots more points on our flights to book free hotel stays.) Obviously if another airline was offering flights at half the price or something, we’d do it, and I did check the likes of Norwegian (around the same price) and Virgin (ha ha. Made BA’s prices look like a bargain :D).≈

Being massively impatient, I wanted to just get the flights booked. There was no way I could sit tight for weeks or months and see if the prices came down. To me it doesn’t really feel like you’re going on holiday until the flights are booked. I kept checking The Dibb and could see people getting really good prices if they were prepared to fly indirect, but Mat’s really against the hassle of that, and I’m not especially keen. Fort Lauderdale and Tampa had also come up in the planning forum as potential cheaper options. I fiddled around with those and it became apparent they were coming up much cheaper than Orlando and Miami (Miami being more expensive than MCO for our dates so very much out of the equation by this point.) In the end, I found an option that I was happy enough with: flying into Fort Lauderdale and out of Tampa which after deducting some Avios points and therefore saving £440 would be just over £2800 for the four of us (which I’m sure even last year was more along the lines of what you’d expect to pay for the equivalent to and from Orlando). This year I couldn’t get it under £3,200 ish and just wasn’t prepared to pay over £3,000 for flights. It just sounds so much more expensive once it starts with a three (probably because it is.)

By this point I was desperate to get these flights booked as it all looked pretty good to me. The outbound flight is 9.20 am, arriving into Fort Lauderdale by 1.45 pm so feasible to be in Orlando by dinner. Mat hadn’t enjoyed the drive up from Miami last year (which we’d done after a stop over in a Miami hotel) so I didn’t think he’d be up for that drive straight off a flight, but amazingly he was ok with it. All we’re planning to do when we get to Orlando that night is sleep, after eating either en route or once we arrive at Universal, so we can take it easy. The return home from Tampa is fine as obviously Tampa is much closer and the flight home is at 6 pm ish so nice and straightforward.

He was slightly less keen when he found out that the flights are in and out of Gatwick as he’d been hoping for Heathrow which was a definite benefit of flying into Miami. We don’t like Gatwick, especially because it’s so much further from home than Heathrow, but we’ll stay over the night before and it’ll be fine. But by the time he was protesting about Gatwick I had already clicked ‘book’ and paid for the flights.

So the itinerary is:

11th Aug: Fly to Fort Lauderdale, drive to Orlando, check into Sapphire Falls
12th - 15th Aug: Chill out in Orlando at Sapphire Falls
15th - 18th Aug: Check into Hard Rock Hotel. Universal park days
18th - 28th Aug: Yacht Club, Disney parks, dining plan
28th - 30th Aug: Contemporary Resort, Disney parks
30th Aug - 1st Sept: Saratoga Springs. Disney Springs and last park days
1st Sept: Drive to Tampa, fly home

Thanks for reading. Up next, ADRs and plans so far.