Continuing the fun at the Family Travel for Real Life (#FT4RL) conference, and continuing the live blogging! I hope that you will follow along with me as we learn about family travel, and how those of us with families can take part in it with their families. See below for the lineup of speakers and follow us throughout the day with #FT4RL
- Live blogging the FT4RL conference (with intro)
- Bonnie the Frugal Travel Lawyer on "the new Frontier" (and Southwest and JetBlue and more)
- Leslie from Trips with Tykes on Mastering the International House of Mickey (Disney)
- Jason Steele - current events and sweet spots in miles and points
- Kenny from Miles4More - National Parks and destinations off the beaten path for families
- Shawn from Miles to Memories - immersive travel, family adventures, educational experiences, and ways to give back
- FT4RL Conclusion - what did you learn?
- My first 5 star hotel
The next speaker is Leslie from Trips with Tykes. I had not yet met Leslie in person before this conference, but she always favorites my tweets, so I know she must be amazing!!!! :-D. I know that her site has a lot of great information about Disney, so it’s probably no surprise that her talk will be about Mastering the International House of Mickey.
Hacking the Disney Magic
Leslie is a self-admitted “Disney geek”. First off, she “called out” Disney skeptics – people who don’t like Disney – her advice was just to quit complaining and just embrace the magic! Another thing that can be great for Disney is multi-generational travel. There were actually a TON of people here at FT4RL that had lots of Disney experience.
There is a ton of advice on Disney from your neighbors, friends, or other bloggers out there. One watchout is to make sure to not take advice from people who have different travel habits than you do – make sure that it is someone who is likely to travel Disney the same way that you do. Also, Disneyland (California) and Disney World (Florida) are VERY different.
Best Disney sites and information
- Disney Tourist Blog (Tom Bricker)
- Touring Plans
- And of course, Trips With Tykes herself!
- “The Unofficial Guide” Disney books (written by the authors of the Touring Plans sites)
- Mousesavers
- Undercover Tourist
One thing that I didn’t really realize is that there is a lot more to Disney than just the theme parks in California and Orlando. There are Disney Cruises, Disney Aulani, Adventures by Disney and Disney Vacation Club (timeshares).
I also didn’t realize that Disney World (in Florida) is a LOT (30,000 acres) bigger than Disneyland (510 acres)
Common Disney Questions
Age: When is the right age to take my kids? Leslie says that there isn’t really a wrong time to take your kids to disney. Kids under age 3 get free admission and ages 3-9 do get a slight child discount. You also want to work around school schedules – times when most schools are off in session are going to have a LOT more lines and crowds
Crowds: Speaking of crowds! Look for school schedule anomalies: teacher in-service days, fall break, etc. Schools in different parts of the country start and end in different times, so you can check that for your situation, if you don’t want to pull your kids out of school. Some sites for crowd calendars are IsItPacked.com or Touring Plans.
Lines: Oh… the agony of lines. Some tips for beating them are: Arrive RIGHT at “rope drop”, or even better, 30 minutes BEFORE the park opens. Disney also has the FastPass system, which is free. If you are staying on Disney property, they also have Extra Magic Hour where you get extra time in the park before or after the time. There are also apps / software / website that track historical wait times (RideMax, MouseWait).
Some FastPass hacks are the 2 hour rule, Rider Switch (benefit of having a baby / small child, which is defined as anyone that doesn’t meet the height requirements for a ride. There’s a post over on TripsWithTykes that has some more detail on this)
Walt Disney World has a Fastpass+ system, which uses the “Magic Bands” system. You get 3 per day but in 1 park only. Once you use those 3, you can get more at the in-park kiosks.
Here’s the Swan hotel on-property at Disney World
The cost: Yup, it costs a lot of money to go to Disney. The big cost items are going to be tickets, hotels, rental car / parking, food and souvenirs. Leslie said that the Disney Vacation packages can actually still be useful. This can be a good time to actually use a travel agent, since you (the consumer) don’t pay them.
Ticket Prices start at $99 / day, but the longer your vacation, the lower the average cost per day. Only buy the tickets that you need. For example, if you have little kids like I do, you might not be park hoppers, so you don’t need to pay $40 / day extra to park hopper. One way to cut down cost is that you can buy Disney gift cards at Target for an instant 5% off.
For hotels, you CAN save money by staying off-property, or stay at Value Resorts at DisneyWorld. There is some discussion as to whether you want to stay on or off Disney property itself. Leslie recommends for Disneyland it’s a Maybe but for Disney World it’s a definite YES. The perks and proximity outweigh the extra cost. At Disneyland, there are lots of points hotels nearby, but Leslie’s opinion is that you’re often better off paying cash – $139 vs. 35,000 points / night. For Disney World, there are 2 Starwood hotels (the Swan and the Dolphin) that are actually on-property – Category 4: 10,000 points per night with the 5th night free. There are a few Disney-branded credit cards, but the perks weren’t super amazing.
There is so much on Disney that we couldn’t possibly cover here, but I think the #1 takeaway was that in order to really maximize your Disney experience, you really need to plan the trip. For me, that’s part of the fun – but that’s because I’m a planning kind of guy!
What about you? Ever been to Disney? Have any good tips to share?
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Dan Miller travels with his wife and 6 (SIX!) children. He loves to help families travel for free / cheap, especially larger families. If you are looking for help, drop him an email at 
We’ve been a few times. Fully paid (before we knew about miles/points). The biggest advice I tell people, is don’t go during a holiday, summer or weekend. It is Sooo expensive. Take your child out of school (middle school and below), trust me, they won’t miss anything! We’ve gone during school where we nearly had the park to ourselves. And we went over Presidents Day weekend, where we spent 2 1/2 hrs in line for one ride, never again!! Now our kids are in high school, we can’t do that anymore 🙁
Don’t. Stay. On. Property. The perks are minimal and the costs are massive.
Staying off property is the best way to save money. And as you can imagine, there are on Property resorts that are very far away from a few parks on that 5,000 acre property. There are plenty of off property resorts that are closer than on property to one or more of the parks. And I’ve never minded driving 20 minutes to get to a disney park if I stay a bit further away. Stay off property, get a big ol house/condo/timeshare rental and enjoy the savings and the chance to spread out in actual bedrooms, kitchens, and living rooms.
There are dozens of online sites you can leverage to rent a vacation home or time share rental. And they will cost you in a week what a disney deluxe costs you for a night.
What about using points to stay with the Dolphin and Swan and use points? 40K points for 5 nights seemed pretty reasonable, especially given the perks of staying on-property
Ran across this post while looking for something else. The problem with the Swan/Dolphin is that the money you “save” on points can be eaten up in other ways. While it is on Disney property, it is not OWNED by Disney thus you miss some of the benefits. Like….no free Magical Express bus airport transfer, no free Magic Bands, a $23/day resort fee, and if you drive it costs $18/day to park (and if you don’t drive, make sure you have a high dining budget because you will be captive in the hotel/Disney dining bubble). There are some other funky differences (advance dining reservations?) between the Swan/Dolphin and the Disney-owned properties. I agree with Cheapblackdad that from a financial perspective it is best to stay off property. I think that I would only stay on-property if going for a special experience (i.e. the princess or pirate-themed rooms) or using other people’s money (a lot of business conferences are held at Swan/Dolphin). We just went to WDW last month during spring break when the crowd levels were maxed according to the crowd calendars. You will save money by having a bigger room or condo and being able to manage your food costs. We stayed at the Sheraton Vistana Villages timeshare property which was a short 15 minute drive to the Magic Kingdom in the early morning (we would leave at 7:15am for 8:00am rope drop – getting there early is KEY to avoiding long lines for the popular rides as well as having a touring plan). We had a 1BR villa with a kitchen and washer/dryer (a handy feature for packing light). It slept 4 people with a king bedroom for us and the kids were on a king-sized sofa bed in the living room. Our villa was in the St. Augustine section which had an awesome kids-oriented pool with a pirate ship and water slides. They have several other pools as well as BBQs that are free to use. We picked up groceries from a nearby Publix and ate breakfast before we left and made sandwiches/snack bags for the day. This strategy allowed us to limit our restaurant expenses on-property to one big meal and maybe an ice cream. Have small kids? Definitely do an inexpensive Apple Stroller rental. It makes it easy on your kids’ stamina as well as being helpful for hauling food/snacks/drinks around the park. Because Sheraton is Starwood, you earn SPG points (and since it is a timeshare property, if you agree to take the 90-120 minute tour, they will offer 5K or more bonus Starpoints – just don’t purchase the timeshare, no matter how good it sounds). You can find great rates for the Vistana Villages and the sister property Vistana Resort via special links at allears.net and mousesavers.com (which also have better cancellation terms, BTW).
Erik – thanks for the very detailed comment! We’re looking at staying at WDW next year and had budgeted SPG points to stay at the Swan / Dolphin, but your comment (Among others) has made me wonder if we should try something else. We have a family of 8 so lodging is always a bit tricky for us anyways!
I’m pretty sure you can use SPG points and even cash+points at these Vistana properties. The 2 BDR sleeps 8 (it is basically two 1 BDR villas connected by a door). They even have some 3 BDR units. If you can travel during the slower season, there are some outstanding rates – we’re going back in a couple of weeks thanks to a Frontier sale and secured a 1 BDR villa for only $123 under the allears.net special rate.
Interesting – the Vistana is 10K SPG points / night (Same as the Swan and Dolphin) but that’s for the 1BR. There’s nothing available with points for the 2BR, but worst-case we could just book 2 1-BR units, which is what we’d have to do at the Swan / Dolphin
We went to WDW a couple of times when my kids were younger. We opted to stay on property and on the rail line (Polynesian twice). I also determined that concierge level practically paid for itself with breakfast and snacks.
I think the common ninja strategy is to head to favorite ride or back of the park ASAP in order to most avoid crowds.
Of course, visiting off season trumps all. I was amazed when we stayed one time the week before Thanksgiving. The park was practically empty for a few days. We checked out on Saturday before Thanksgiving and it was a madhouse, absolute mayhem.