[Guest]

I don’t believe in must dos or do nots, plan for yourselves. Some people like being in the Disney parks on busy days like Christmas and New Year, it is not for me though and if I were there on your dates I would be spending the weekend of 4/5 July by the pool.

I don’t plan Universal as no need. For Disney, my planning is done on a spreadsheet and the first thing I do is see how many park days I have in total and then I decide how many days in each park. Well kind of, in practice we will do more than one park a day and maybe a waterpark, but what I am actually planning is which park I will book my first three fast passes for each day.

If I had say twelve days on which I could book fastpasses, I would probably split it as four lots of FP in Magic Kingdom, three each in Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios and two in Epcot. I then try to alternate the days in each park. I don’t often make use of EMH, but others do and these are available at least six months in advance so some onsite guests would allocate their days depending on what park has morning EMH.

Once I have my park days sorted, I think about dining, just the bookable ones that is. These days I have good knowledge of the options so I don’t need to research, I know what I fancy and any park based ones I would fit in around my plans.

When I plan fastpasses, I try to book the ones I know are more difficult to get, so for example I will tend to book the mountain rides in MK as other rides tend to be easier to get on the day. Similarly if I am going to AK more than once I would book FOP more than once rather than try to cover all the rides, again because I am more likely to pick up other fastpasses on the day as extras.

I enjoy planning and that is why I do it, but I would never say it is essential. I end up changing the majority of my dining reservations and I even change quite a few of my fastpasses, although if I have a particularly hard to get one booked then I am less likely to change.