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Disney World Tips and Tricks

I've always been partial to the Italian place at MK that's Lady and the Tramp themed.

Ohana is amazing and probably my favorite restaurant at Disney.
 
Funny how much difference a year makes:
PhDeac said:
I was at Disney over Memorial Day for our annual trip before our season pass blackout dates. Stayed at Port Orleans Riverside, same place we stayed last June. Probably the best priced resort for what you get. I highly recommend it especially if you have small kids.
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Back here. Still recommend it. Went over to French Quarter for the first time tonight in an attempt to tire my kids out. Nice pool. They added a really nice water park that opened in April. It's something you'd see at a legit water park. Problem is it's restricted to kids 48" and under.

One thing I love about Disney pools is the lifeguards. Today at Riverside, they had 4 or 5 lifeguards at all times on a set rotation. I stayed in one spot talking to my wife and the same lifeguard passed me once a minute for about 10 minutes. At that French Quarter water park at 10:30 at night, there was one lifeguard doing a continuous loop around the water park, probably a lap a minute even though there were no kids playing in the park.

A few notes:

There's a lot of construction at Animal Kingdom. The new Avatar Land and new Rivers of Life night time show are going to be huge. The new Africa marketplace area is nice enough and adds to the food options.
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Really excited to see the nighttime activities. It's going to be weird being there so late with people in the park. One of my favorite things was doing dinner at 7:30 or 8:00 in a near empty Tusker House and walking out as the only people left. Now I've got an 8:40 safari Fastpass.

Hollywood Studios is in trouble. It's hardly worth going. It has the few great things it has, but don't plan on making a day of it. I heard a rumor yesterday that there are no plans for a new Star Wars Land. The rumor is that Disney was waiting to to see how Universal's Diagon Alley went before going forward with their plans. The first draft of plans were rejected by the board sometime last year for not being big enough. The second draft of plans were rejected sometime in the last two months for not being competitive enough with Harry Potter. So it's back to the drawing board. They haven't broken ground on anything. That means it could be up to 2020 or beyond before they do a Star Wars Land. They could be several movies in before there's anything in the parks.
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Yeah, so that was wrong although 2020 is probably right. The new Star Wars Launch Bay is cool. The movie is a 10 minute compilation of interviews with various people involved in the Star Wars universe including directors of upcoming films, Lucasfilm execs, people running books, video games, Star Wars Rebels, basically everybody but George Lucas. The rest of the Launch Bay had cool exhibits and Chewy and Kylo Ren meet and greets. Didn't do those. But there were some Jawas interacting with guests and it was hilarious. They had a bunch of consoles set up with different Disney Infinity matchups (Rey and Kylo Ren, Rey and Leia, Han and Chewy, Obi Wan and Anakin). They also had tablets set up with Angry Birds Star Wars. I was impressed. It looks like something that will be around for awhile.

The Star Wars stage show was cool. Several need character moments. We did about 90 minutes of just Star Wars. Nice sign of things to come.

Apparently, the price tag for Fastpass+, Magic Bands, and My Disney Experience was over $2 billion. That has hurt Disney's ability to make improvements to the parks. The new system is nice and convenient, but the old system wasn't broken.
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My wife lost her Magic Band tonight. I went to the Disney website and activated an old Magic Band from our last trip that was just in the car. It worked on our hotel room. The new band didn't even show up as active or inactive. I'm assuming a cast member found it and deactivated it.

Here's a link to an interesting podcast on Disney World vs. Universal featuring a guy who wrote a book on the two parks. Good discussion on their respective philosophies.
http://www.studioscentralradio.com/shows/Episode_1462_-_05-27-15.mp3

The other big Disney news (and bad publicity) is that they're considering a new tiered ticket pricing model. Basically weekdays and a few slow weekends would be bronze pricing ($105, the current price). Weekends in non-peak times of the year would be $115. Peak season (summer, Christmas, Easter) would be $125.
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That happened. Still busy as ever. Going to Disney Springs for the first time tomorrow. Looking forward to seeing it.
 
Was also there this weekend, although we only did half days each day to beat the heat and crowds. A few thoughts...

I think they did an excellent job with Disney Springs. The theming is great. They need to add some benches to the town center area that just opened, but other than that, it should accomplish its goal of keeping people on property to spend money.

Loved getting to see the original Soarin two more times. Got fastpasses for Saturday morning and, since my son wasn't tall enough to ride it, got to go twice in the span of about 20 minutes. The film was great as always, but the clarity of the hi-def made it even better. Officially, the new film is supposed to premier June 17, but have heard you could see a soft opening on June 7.
 
I have to be one of the few people who thinks Soarin' is meh.
 
Agree with LK here. You people really talk yourselves into how great some things are at Disney.
 
I haven't been on Soarin' in years. It's fine, but of the "E-ticket" rides in the parks, it's the one I like the least. The Fastpass+ set up basically forces you to choose whether you want to ride Test Track or Soarin because the lines for both are always well over an hour.

Speaking of long lines, they opened a new track for Toy Story Midway Mania. All the standby goes on the new track and Fastpass+ goes on both of the old tracks. It's a much better set up. The standby line was well out the door but it was "only" a 70 minute wait. In the past, that would be two hours easy. By the way, I almost got 200,000 points and was 400 off the best score of the hour.
 
Even with two Disney Parks here, the lines are terrible. Plus in the summer, it's very hot in Anaheim.
 
RJKarl said:
Even with two Disney Parks here, the lines are terrible. Plus in the summer, it's very hot in Anaheim.
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I heard that the reason the lines are so bad at Disneyland is that, at full capacity, the two parks can hold about 110,000. Meanwhile, there are (or should say were before the recent drastic increase in annual passholder ticket prices) 1.2 million annual passholders. Its easy to see how those parks easily hit capacity on any given day. Disney's ultimate scenario would be to have about 600,000 annual passholders and it is expected that another drastic price increase for the Disneyland annual pass is coming in the next year to two. Basically, it will continue to go up drastically until the price reduces the number of holders to what Disney wants.
 
The Disneyland problem is location. They only have two parks and a few hotels to service a huge population within an hour along with the entire Western part of the country. They have no way to predict how many people who live nearby will how up any given day.

Walt realized this problem and put his second park several miles outside of a midsize city with plenty of room to expand.

Disney is expensive but not as expensive as it should be. Think of all the things like concerts, not so major sporting events, and such that cost $100 a ticket. There are plenty of small time tourist attractions in Orlando in the $25-40 range that clearly aren't a third as good as an entire day at Magic Kingdom. Unless people stop coming, prices will keep going up.
 
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Ahhhhhh, supply and demand !

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Anyone attend the night show at Animal Kingdom yet? Looks like initial reviews were pretty meh.
 
I've met West Coast donks who defend DL over WDW because Walt built it himself. And it's like well WDW is so big he died before it was completed.
 
HoosierDeac said:
Anyone attend the night show at Animal Kingdom yet? Looks like initial reviews were pretty meh.
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The Jungle Book show? It's clearly filler while they fix whatever was wrong with Rivers of Light which was supposed to debut on April 22. Just got back from it. Really wish I hadn't stayed. Both my kids fell asleep by the end. I had to get the double stroller that was parked quite awhile away and go against traffic to go back and get them. My wife had to deal with some not good stuff in the meantime and it made it difficult to get out of the park and get home.

The show itself was nice enough. Imagine Fantasmic mixed with Festival of the Lion King with a huge Bollywood influence. The new theater is nice. It's huge, bigger than the Fantasmic one, I think. The songs were good. It was Bear Necessities, I Wanna Be Like You, and another one with an Indian influence. Haven't seen the new movie yet, so it may be how they are in the film.

The problem is it features a water screen to project scenes from the film but the wind made it hard to see it. Fantasmic is tucked away and the water is low enough the wind doesn't really affect it. Honestly, the trees would have made a better projection screen. There are different islands with Indian dancers and drummers. There's a cool fire section in the middle.

It looks like they put something together as a backup plan at the last minute. They took the dancers from Festival of the Lion King, singers from Finding Nemo, and a few other performers from here and there, and showed movie clips.

BarcaDeac said:
I've met West Coast donks who defend DL over WDW because Walt built it himself. And it's like well WDW is so big he died before it was completed.
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The way I've put it is Disneyland may be the park that Walt build, but Disney World was the resort Walt wanted. Except Epcot. It's not anything close to the EPCOT he envisioned.
 
IMO the Festival of the Lion King at AK is the best show in all of the Disney parks.

Our family loved it- of course, the Lion King was one of the first movies my son saw in the theater when it came out decades ago, so we may be biased in our assessment. :)
 
Agreed. We don't even really do shows at other parks. There are only two attractions at Disney World we have done every time we've gone to a park. Festival of the Lion King at AK and Big Thunder Mountain at MK.

My oldest rode Space Mountain for the first time this weekend. He absolute loved it. He's been 44 in since he was 3, but my wife wouldn't let him ride it. My youngest rode Everest for the first time. We had to stuff his shoes with socks to get him tall enough. Unfortunately, my oldest was still spooked from the first time he rode Everest, so we didn't all go together. Next time at Magic Kingdom, we're doing Fastpasses for Space Mountain.
 
Here's the line for the debut of the new Soarin' at Epcot. Looks like they were smart to open this and the new Frozen ride within the same week to spread out the lines.

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As a point of reference, the people in the front in this picture aren't even close to the entrance of the ride.

Here's another picture I saw this week from Toy Story Midway Mania. They added a third track in the last month that is only for the standby line.




Normally, this line would be at least 90 minutes in the early afternoon like that. Last time we didn't have a Fastpass, we waited 2.5 hours. The line looked like it would be no more than an hour.
 
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