Help with 2 questions on planning 1st Disney trip

[ThePeas]

Hello. We are going to Disney for the first time at the end of May. We are staying at AKL with our 2 daughters (10 & 12) for 9 nights including memorial weekend.
We have booked most of our ADR’s & will soon have to book our fast passes but I’m finding it difficult going into this level of detail about which park we will be in on a certain day & at what time. We are trying to make a flexible plan and have a couple of questions.

1/ What is your experience of using EMH’s ? I know we can do EMH’s and park hop after lunch but we are not the best at getting up early & I think it will make us feel like we are on a more hectic, fixed schedule.
Therefore my plan at the moment is to avoid EMH’s & head to a park which shows as having forecasted lower crowds, (I looked at 4 crowd calendars & averaged them). Has anyone got any feedback on this sort of plan or would you recommend EMH’s ?

2/ On 4 or 5 of the days we are looking to go to the the park for rope drop (using fast passes late morning/early afternoon) before going back to the hotel for a rest/swim to avoid the heat, then heading back to the parks in the evening. Have you found this works or did it become too tiring (especially for the kids) after a few days ?

Many thanks

[sha9]

We don’t use EMH a lot. I think if it’s going to feel like a chore I would avoid it and book FP from whatever time you think you’ll be in the park. You can then try and modify subsequent FP and once all 3 are used grab and 4th and go on like that.

It’s worth noting though that with jet lag you may find yourselves rising early the first few days.

[apple-fan]

Hi,

Our girls were a little older than yours on our first trip, but they are not great in the mornings & so we made very little use of the EMH's. We have found on subsequent trips and as they have got older we make more use of the evening EMH's.

We always had a plan, which park in the morning and then tried to schedule our ADR's in the evening at a different park. This allowed us to do exactly as you have described, park in the morning, come back in the afternoon and either relax or goto the pool, then back to a park for the evening with food.

I dont think we have ever stuck to the plan rigidly & we change things around even when we had arrived and were on site. The only obvious difficulty is changing the ADR, as sometime getting somewhere else can be difficult, but their is always options.

[tiger01204]

If flying from the UK, we found the EMH really useful for the first few days as we were still on UK time. After about the 5th day, we enjoyed a longer lie in and used the EEH's

[Guest]

I think go with your gut in terms of knowing your family... we planned for early am's using early EMH's on the basis of people saying about being awake early due to jetlag...however my 10 year old just felt so unwell getting up early ,was very affected by the heat so had to go back to the hotel unwell the first 2 days. however I was needing to be in bed by 8pm the first few days! it also felt stressful having to be up & out by a certain time so if I did it again we would prob book FP's for second part of the morning. later in the hols we really enjoyed being out in the evenings, so totally opposite to what we are like on a uk holiday. the only problem we found with going out twice in a day is that getting transport & having to go through security/bag check became really onerous but that was easter hols so May might be better.