First trip to Florida in August/September: flights & villa booked!

[cmpjdp]

Hello and welcome,
You are doing the right thing by planning but leave room to be flexible. We find the best for us is a few hours in the parks in the morning, come out for some lunch by the pool at the villa, play in the pool, have some dinner then back into the parks for the evening.
Everybody is different, just remember there is a lot to see but don't rush it, and you probably won't get it all done in one holiday 😀

[cornishfrogboy]

Congrats on your decision and clearly you want to get a lot in, which is exactly what we have done on our earlier vacations.

The only comment I would make, (allowing for the overlaps on the 14 day tickets), is that I would try to get into all of the major theme parks once, and as early in your vacation as possible. Having obtained that knowledge, you can then decide which ones to revisit in the later stages of your vacation, rather than slavishly following 'the plan'

I do not necessarily agree that you have too much Universal (or disagree). That depends very much on your daughters and family. For what it is worth, my boys of 10 and 14 no longer have any interest in Disney whatever, preferring the other two franchises by a country mile to the extent that on our last 3 visits, we have not even visited Disney. The heights of your daughters, with shoes on also may change priorities a little as the key number is 54 inches for a lot of the more thrilling offers outside of Disney. Are your family into the bigger coasters or the rather much more tame, but well themed Disney offerings?

It is worth getting maps for every park and then utubing what is on offer if you are not sure.

We are not planners, especially now. I would however say that in each of the parks, there are some rides that become very crowded and very quickly. You need to have very clear ideas worked out in advance within each of the parks and most importantly, to either arrive before rope drop or stay right until the end in order to get on certain rides. many, (including us), will take in a park at Ropedrop, be out again by 1300 in order to either relax or visit a waterpark, have our evening meal outside the parks (saves a fortune), before returning to a different park to take advantages of the thinning queues. For instance, we have used Manta 6 times one evening during a 1 hour period. Whilst we may not know where we are going until breakfast on any morning, we most certainly know how we are going to tackle that park.

Enjoy your planning and in probability, you will arrive at a compromise between the viewpoints of lots of DIBBERS. It is for sure that any information you need can be found in this forum.

I am confident that your daughters will not be disappointed in any way by Harry P. With your Universal early entry, go straight for Gringots and don't dither looking at the Diagon alley scenery. You can do the looking and browsing afterwards.

As for Discovery Cove, it is always the no1 day of our vacation.

[Guest]

Wow, you lot are brilliant!

I moved my itinerary discussions into another thread, as I realised that this forum is more for travel and logistics plans.

But the advice here is just great...so I'll keep posting in this thread!

Our girls will be not-far-off 10 when we visit, and both are quite tall, so I think they will get on most things...but neither of them has been a real white-knuckle thrill-seeker in the past (but maybe this trip will be their epiphany!).

I'm kind of confused a little about the whole planning process. Some advice is to remain flexible but others say to plan in detail. It seems that with the FP system, you need to even reserve which rides you want to be on and at what time, never mind even which park you will be on any given day. Any advice for balancing the two?

And for sure, we are planning to include some rest time. The outline is just an idea of how we might fit in the park visits. Waterpark days are intended to be more restful, but the more I read on here, I think some of the days will be morning/evening visits with the afternoon by the pool.