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Preparation

Well, this felt different. I’m used to looking at crowd calendars, booking fast passes and ultimately just turning up at the airport with our passports and if I’m feeling adventurous, maybe some flight reservation paperwork.

This time, the build up was spent wondering if this trip would finally be ‘the one’ rather than months of excitement.

Having just had our TUI holiday to Sapphire Falls cancelled an hour earlier, I decided to book a trip with Virgin Holidays knowing their flight cancellations were currently up to the end of October and the US borders were due to open in ‘early November’.

That morning I had priced up departing on Saturday 6th November, however lucky for me, the price had jumped up £2500 in the 10 hours since I last looked meaning we decided to book Monday 8th November instead. Had we not have booked the Monday, Virgin would have cancelled our trip within 24 hours of booking it.

The hotel availability at Universal seemed pretty sparse on our dates so we decided to stay at Cabana Bay, having last stayed there in 2018.



The next few weeks were spent similar to the rest of yours I’d guess, trying to work out the entry requirements from the CDC and other reliable (and not so reliable) sources when the guidance coming out of the US wasn’t so clear.

ESTA were completed a couple of weeks out and were approved about 45 minutes after application.

Around the same time I booked my car hire via Andy at Discount Florida Car Hire. We had originally planned to Uber based on car hire prices and having to pay for car parking at Sapphire Falls, but Andy found us a great price and since Cabana Bay has free parking for Virgin Holiday customers, it seemed like a good idea. Especially when we’d have been restricted to more expensive Ubers in order to have a car seat for our son.

We booked our pre-departure tests with Breathe Assured as I knew their certificate had the words ‘supervised’ and ‘CDC’ on it which filled me with confidence that it’d be accepted for travel to the US.

We filled some details in on their website ahead of time such as names and passport numbers which meant Breathe Assured had all the information they needed bar the test result ahead of time.

We joined the Teams meeting just before 19:00 and had our three negative certificates in hand (well, email inbox) by 19:30. I can’t recommend Breathe Assured enough. The lady we spoke to was lovely and made it a personalised experience.



Next came the attestation form which could be completed digitally via Virgin Atlantic’s site for myself, wife and son, which I hadn’t expected as I thought children had to complete their forms manually. Either way, I’ve completed a paper form for all of us to take to the airport just in case.

The form was simple enough to complete, especially the digital version.

This was the point when I felt I could finally get excited. Work was finished for almost 3 weeks, our COVID tests were negative and paperwork completed. Unless something unexpected was to crop up, we were actually going back to Orlando!

All though we did a trip to Spain recently with digital documents, I decided (since work was covering my printing bill) that I’d print out the documents, just in case, albeit I had everything saved on my phone too.

Online check-in was simple enough with the odd extra disclosure regarding COVID-19 symptoms. The only downside was I had to re enter everyone’s passport details even though I did this at the time of booking.

You used to be able to check in earlier if you were a Flying Club member, however this no longer seems to be the case and everyone is eligible to check in from 24 hours before departure.



So with everything in hand, bags packed and the dogs dropped off with parents for their holiday, it was time to try and get some sleep, battling the excitement and disbelief travel day was almost here, whilst hoping I didn’t do my normal trick of waking up at 2AM on the morning of a Florida trip.