Parks, Pins, Puke, Pennies...Not Enough Planning - April / May 2017

[moosha]

Originally Posted by sheluk

Ahhhhhh CONCEIRGE! Amazing can't wait for the pics!
Together with contemporary and beach club sounds like the most amazing Disney filled trip! M x

See more...

Thanks Michelle . I'm really excited about concierge on the cruise x.

Originally Posted by LadyDebs86

Ooooh I love your trippies Michelle

This holiday sounds AMAZING. I would so love to do a Disney cruise

See more...

Thanks Debs, very kind of you. I think once you read so many great reports of Disney cruises, eventually you have to give in and try one. That's my excuse anyway .

[Guest]

A Disney cruise in a concierge room, a week at the Contemporary, a week at the Beach Club, both with Dining Plan and another onsite stay at Universal. You can go off people you know Michelle.

Seriously though, sounds fantastic and great news for the rest of us as we'll have another fab trip report to look forward to next year.

Looking forward to hearing more of your plans.

[berniegroves]

Yay! So pleased to see you are doing another rip report and wow what a trip it will be!
A cruise, and 2 disney hotels. Wowzers!

We will be there a couple of weeks after you. So i will enjoy keeping up with your pre-trip report as it leads up to our holidays.

Looking forward to reading about what your plans are for Universal :-)

[PrincessLola]

Really enjoyed reading your trip reports and looking forward to the next one now! Sounds fab

[dixonsontour]

Wow lots of plans already.

I'd research and ask at guest services if there is anything you can do re the second set of tickets when you are there. £1000 is a lot to just lose when you already have tickets.

I've read on another forum of one person not travelling and disney being willing to re date their unused ticket for the following year.

When we booked the US free dining deal in 2009 you had to book 1 day MYW ticket to get the deal. We bought the UK tickets and didn't use the US ones, I actually sold them on ebay afterwards for not far off their face value.

Don't blame you on the cruise - we are trying a cruise for the first time this year, seems a natural progression.

[Campinggirl]

Wow I'm new to the DIBB and will keep an eye on this report.

We're booked for our first visit next August staying at the Yacht club with kids a similar age to yours , DS is 9 and DD is 6!

I'm very excited if somewhat overwhelmed by the options! Particularly interested to hear what you plan for Universal as we have the option of adding a stay at Universal at the end of our 14 days. My only concern is that DD may not be tall enough to do all of the Harry Potter rides so I'm not sure what to do

Off to read your other trip reports for tips!

[snowdrop100]

saw you've postponed this when reading the latest instalment of your last trippie. hope all is well

[EllieP]

I have read the latest instalment of your trip report and you mention something exciting! Can't wait until you can tell us what it is. Got my fingers crossed for you.

[moosha]

Update: A Slight Change of Plans and a Change of Dates

So a few month ago I mentioned in my other report here that we have postponed our Greatest Hits Tour trip by a year and are now planning to go at Easter 2017. We made the difficult decision to cancel the bookings at the beginning of October knowing that the balance payments would soon be due. The reason we have cancelled is because there's a very good chance that we'll be moving to America in summer 2017 and we want to get ourselves in as good a financial position this year as possible before we make a final decision on whether to stay or go and potentially put the house up for sale later on in 2016.

Mat works for a global asset manager and for the past nine months or so, has been focusing on relationships with colleagues and potential clients in the US. Anyone that knows us from our previous trip reports knows how much we love New York City and Mat was over the moon to be able to travel there twice with work this year and work out of the company's New York office. He has always wanted to work in New York. What I didn't know when he came back from his first working trip to New York and Philadelphia in July was that the seed had been planted in his head that he wanted to work out there all the time. He spoke to his boss about it and they discussed the fact that it was potentially a good move for the business as well as for him personally. They transfer lots of people out to the US so it's unlikely to be a problem for the company, it's just a matter of filling out a couple of forms for them.

But he didn't mention it to me because he didn't think I would go for it at all, and he wanted to keep the fantasy alive in his head for a while, I think. As I said, he came back at the end of July and it wasn't until we were in New York at the beginning of September that he finally told me what he was thinking. We were walking along a lovely street in Brooklyn Heights admiring the beautiful brownstones when I casually said 'If I lived here, I'd want to live in a house like that' and he paused and then said 'Well... ' and told me what he had been thinking about and discussing with his boss. Initially I replied that I wouldn't want to do it, mainly because I had the next few years all planned out in terms of the girls' education. Seren is due to take her 11+ in September 2016 and we have a fantastic grammar school in mind if all goes well. But we had a few more days in the city and the more I thought about it, the more I could imagine us living in the area and how fab it would be. The girls too were initially dismissive of the idea but by the time we came home, they were very much on board too.

That was September, and for a few weeks after we got back, our heads were very much already on our way to living in the US. I found an expat forum and we were looking at towns, schools and commuter routes. When Mat went back to work in the States again in November, he even visited the town in New Jersey that we liked the most, and he loved it. But knowing that we're not making any decisions until summer 2016, in the lead up to Christmas we put all thoughts of the potentially life-changing move to the back of our minds, which means that right now I feel 50/50 as to whether we will go or not. We made the decision not to live 'in limbo' for the nine months or so between our visit to NYC last September and when it potentially becomes very real next summer. So as much as I can imagine us setting off for the US on an exciting new adventure in a year and a half, we're also making the most of being here and making back up plans for Seren's education incase we don't go.

Anyway, we knew cancelling our 2016 Florida trip was the right thing to do for us, but it did mean we lost our deposit on both of our Disney hotel bookings and our cruise. Ouch. But still cheaper than laying out a further £12k or so on paying the balances / Universal accommodation when we really wanted to get some money behind us before we make such a life-changing decision. We contacted BA and arranged to transfer our Miami flight booking to a New York flight for May half term instead. So we still get a holiday, albeit a much cheaper one, and the plan is to visit a couple of towns in New Jersey and Connecticut that we potentially would like to live in while we're there.

We also decided to go to Disneyland Paris at Easter. The girls have been keen to go back to DLP since we last visited in 2013 but Mat and I aren't big fans and would rather save for Florida than spend money on a trip to DLP. However, bearing in mind we might be living a couple of thousand miles away from France in two years, it seems like a good idea to go now and (sort of) get the Disney fix we're missing in 2016 by not going to Florida. We've booked four nights / five days at Newport Bay (where the girls and I have stayed twice before) for the end of the Easter holidays. I originally looked at three days but the offer that was on meant it was much cheaper to go for the five days instead. As much as I'm not a huge fan of DLP, I was getting excited about going until I found out the other day that Big Thunder Mountain will be closed the whole time we are there. BTM is the best ride at DLP in my opinion, and it's much better than the WDW version so I'm gutted that we won't be able to ride it. Poor Mat has never even been on it, so we're already talking about nipping back for a quick two days another time to be able to ride it again.

When we cancelled our Florida 2016 holiday, it was on the condition that we would go instead at Easter 2017 once we had all our ducks in a row. It felt rubbish to cancel the bookings and I couldn't face the Dibb or anything Disney related really for a while. Mat kept reminding me that if we move to America, we'll buy Disney annual passes and go much more regularly, which helped. But it wasn't until I made the first bookings for 2017 this week that I felt better about the whole thing. I'm now already starting to get excited about it, even though it's 467 days away.

I actually think our Easter 2017 trip will be better than Easter 2016 would have been. When I was planning our park days and restaurants for 2016 just before we cancelled, I had a niggling feeling that since there would be nothing new for us to do having been in 2015, it might feel a little flat; no new rides would be ready (King Kong and Frozen both don't appear to be opening until after we would be back and I don't think Rivers of Light would be ready either).

When I looked at Easter holiday dates for 2017, with Easter being later than in 2016, the girls' school holiday dates mean that we can just about pull off being there for Seren's 11th birthday at the beginning of May. You may remember from my 2014 report that we spent her 8th birthday there in 2014 and it was absolutely magical. I never thought we would be able to do that again, and with the choice of Easter 2016 without being there for Seren's birthday, or 2017 with, I would definitely pick the latter.

I had decided that I wanted to keep the hotels and general plans the same as 2016, after all we had picked them out as our 'Greatest Hits'. We will still go for the Beach Club and the Contemporary as our Disney hotels and I just need to wait patiently for the offers in April to be able to book (keeping fingers crossed that we can get exactly what we had booked last time). I also can't book our flights yet of course, but I'm hoping that with Easter being later and our school holidays not falling at the same time as most state schools, that we won't need to fly to and from Miami this time because of ridiculous Orlando flight prices.

So like a lot of people, as soon as Christmas was over, my thoughts turned to holidays and I couldn't help but wander onto the Disney cruise website. I wasn't sure if April 2017's cruises would be available to book this far out, but because the three night cruises obviously don't sail every day, the cruise kind of needed to be the starting point for planning the holiday. I was pleased to see that April 2017 was available but not pleased to see the prices for the cruises around Easter weekend: double what we had booked for 2016.

The only option was to tweak the order we would do things and put the cruise later in the trip, further away from Easter and between our two Disney weeks. I looked at the accommodation options for the 28th April three night cruise and the equivalent concierge family stateroom we had booked was available for a few hundred pounds more than we had booked it for for 2016. We also looked at the concierge one bedroom suites. I never thought Mat would entertain the idea of upgrading to one of those, but when we looked at the photos, the one bedroom looked so much nicer: double the size, two sinks in the bathroom instead of one and a whirlpool bath, and an extra bathroom with a shower which sounded like a good plan so we could get out of the suite quicker. It was an extra £500 across the three nights, but we decided it was worth it, and with a year until we have to pay the balance, we reasoned that's an extra £60 per month to save which isn't too difficult. So we booked it, and the Greatest Hits Tour 2017 started to become a reality.

I also found myself on Expedia the same day, planning just to have a look at Universal hotel prices. I don't think I had got around to mentioning in the 2016 plans that we were going to stay at the Hard Rock for a week after visiting the hotel during our 2015 trip and loving the place (more than Portofino Bay where we were staying then). When we booked 2016, we had originally wanted to split our Universal week between the Hard Rock and our old favourite, Cabana Bay. But because the rates were lower for longer stays, it would have cost quite a bit more to do that than to pick one for the whole week. There was no way we were going back to Universal without Express Pass, so it had to be the Hard Rock.

When I looked this week for 2017, I had a play around with staying at one for the whole week or breaking up the week between the Hard Rock and Cabana Bay or the new Sapphire Falls. I was expecting the same to be true this time, and to have to commit to one for the week, but there really wasn't anything in it. Maybe because it's still so far in advance. I was briefly tempted to try Sapphire Falls because I love a new hotel, but the fact that it's a major convention hotel put me off after not enjoying the Hilton Bonnet Creek in 2015 because of all the conference attendees hanging around the lobby all the time. Also, the theming didn't grab me like Cabana Bay had and I didn't want to feel disappointed and like it didn't match up.

While I was going backwards and forwards on Expedia (8.4% cashback via topcashback.co.uk), Freya was looking over my shoulder and saying 'please can we go back to Cabana Bay?' Having gone into Expedia thinking we would definitely have a week at the Hard Rock, the more I thought about it, the more I wanted to split the stay with Cabana Bay. Having Freya say that too made me think it was definitely the right thing to do. Seren and Mat also agreed that staying at both would be better than staying at the Hard Rock for the whole week. We had loved Cabana Bay in 2014, and went back last year to have a look once the second half was open too. We expected to be unimpressed by the sheer scale of it and potential overcrowding compared to when we went during soft opening, but we still loved it. Being a budget hotel, the rates were much lower than the Hard Rock, so we decided it makes sense to have four nights at Cabana Bay first without going into the parks (as we won't have Express Pass) followed by three nights at the Hard Rock when we'll have all our time at the parks. There's no point paying extra for the Express Pass benefit when we won't be using it.

When we went to Cabana Bay in 2014, we stayed in a courtyard family suite (south courtyard) which was in the motel type buildings. We loved it, but this time we've decided to stay in the hotel style 'tower family suites' (north courtyard) with a view over the newer lazy river pool. Just to make it different to last time really. While we're at Cabana Bay we'll do Legoland, maybe a day at Clearwater and lots of pool / chilling time as it will be Easter weekend.

At the Hard Rock, we have somehow ended up with Rock Royalty (club level) for cheaper than if we had gone for a standard room with a pool view (which is what we had booked for 2016). We didn't set out to book the club level, but of course I wasn't going to turn it down when it was less than the standard room. We'll have continental breakfast, soft drinks / tea and coffee available all day, and a couple of hours of free beer / wine / snacks / desserts per day, so I'm sure we'll get some use out of those. All club level rooms have pool or garden views too as I understand it.

So as it stands, we have everything booked that we can book so far, and I'm already getting excited. It definitely feels like it is 'meant to be' for 2017. I will of course update as and when we make further bookings and plans.

Thanks for reading as always.

[bambikate]

Oh my goodness that's an awesome update! How exciting for you all! WOW! What a great opportunity! Your 2017 plans are the stuff of dreams! So jealous! So are you doing 2 weeks in Disney total, a week at a Universal hotel and a concierge suite cruise? Sounds insanely good. Still contemp and BC? Really excited for you all! x