Do You Ever Feel There's Almost "Too Much Information" Now When Planning A WDW Trip?

dazzling

Mouseketeer
Joined
Dec 12, 2009
I'm not sure if that post title really explains what I mean so I'll try & make it clearer!

In 1999 I went on my first trip to WDW. And this is how we booked it. On the Monday we were looking on Teletext (there's a blast from the past) & we saw a holiday to Orlando going on the Thursday for £399. Hotel was to be allocated on arrival. We phoned up, booked it & three days later were on our way. As I said, we didn't know what hotel we were staying at, or which airline! We were given our seats when we checked in & I bought a copy of the Brits Guide at the airport to read on the plane. We bought our park tickets when we got to Orlando from the rep. The sum total of our planning was : wake up, see what we felt like doing, & do it. That was it! And it was a fantastic holiday, & the first of many trips back.

But how times have changed!

I'm currently planning a trip next February to WDW & I feel like I'm literally driving myself crazy with the amount of information & planning it involves now. From the very beginning, now not only can we research all the different airlines, we can look at seat maps of each plane, see what their food is like, what entertainment they offer, etc. And as for the hotel choice, there is a seemingly endless supply of information from these boards, to tripadvisor reviews, youtube videos, & if you have a Touring Plans subscription, you can even look at photos of what the view is like from pretty much any room at any Disney hotel!

Then there's crowd calendars & attraction reviews to read, plus now you can look at reviews of all the different restaurants & even look at their menus. Plus there are the "extras" to research, dessert parties, guided tours, etc. And all this planning is necessary as I need to choose & book restaurants 180 days before I get there, plus make fastpass reservations 60 days out!

So now I have to plan in advance not only what I'm going to do, but what park I will be in on a specific date & what rides I want to go on at a specific time & then decide where it is I'm going to eat months before I'm even there!!!!

I'm sorry if this sounds like a whinge, It's really not meant to be, I've just been planning like mad & I've now decided to stop for a while & take a bit of a breather. I was driving myself crazy! Just in choosing the plane seat for example. Like I said, you used to just arrive at the airport & were pretty much allocated a seat. If it was a bad seat then it was the airlines fault. But now I get to choose the seat. So if it's a bad seat, am I going to be annoyed that I chose that seat & it was terrible? Or if the airline changes my booking like they do, will I get frustrated that all my planning was for nothing?

You can see why I'm going a bit mad!

I do love having all the information we have now, & it's great to help avoid make mistakes like eating in a terrible restaurant. But for people like me it can be just a bit overwhelming at times & taking a step back is definitely necessary.

Oh, & don't think I'm ranting that it's put me off going, no way! Flights are already booked! That's one thing done at least. As long as I chose the right seat!

Does anyone else get a bit overwhelmed sometimes by the sheer amount of information & planning involved in a WDW visit these days? Or is it just me?
 
We've gone from not knowing anything in 2013, to hardcore planning over the next couple of years, to hardly planning at all.

We nowadays put in a few key/hard to get ADRs and FPs, and everything else is down to how we feel on the day, or the night before.
 
I think it is a sign of the times - with the internet now what it is compared to 1999, the is tonnes of information - but treat it with caution. Some is useful but most is just people's opinions! Here's our experiences:

We went to Disney for the first time in 2014.
  • We booked the cheapest flight option for us (at the time we had a BOGOF with BA so that worked) - don't really care for airplane food no matter who we fly with, and happy to sit anywhere as long as it is inside the plane!
  • We had free dining and did do our TS bookings in advance (but not 180 days ... maybe a month - still managed to get Royal Table, Be Our Guest, Chef Mickey's and California Grill amongst others).
  • We had heard of fast pass but it didn't really jump out as something essential to do before we went.
  • When we arrived, we had a rough idea of some of the parks we wanted to do on certain days (when we had planned lunch in a park) but just went with the flow for the rest. Decided we didn't want to wait in a line longer than 40 minutes, so just went on what was less than that.
  • At the end of the trip we had ridden all of the big rides in all of the parks and pretty much all of the other ones.

The following year, we returned and did do more research. We read all the reviews and thought we would go to the ones with good reviews which seemed popular - including Yachtsman Steakhouse and Narcoossee's. Both were underwhelming at best!

This year we are back again - have booked out TS and a few fastpasses, but that's about all. I don't pay too much attention to reviews as everyone's opinion is different and from experience, we disagreed with most people! E.g. one of our favourite QS is Pepper Market in Coronado Springs, which seems to get awful reviews from pretty much everyone ... but all the better for us as it's nice and quiet when we go there as everyone else has read it's bad without trying!

I think the best way to make your holiday work for you is to treat is any other holiday! If you like planning, then feel free to do lots of planning beforehand. Equally though, you can have an amazing Disney World holiday with very little planning. Don't get too hett up with what other people say - either what they tell you to do or where to go ... it's your holiday!
 
I've never planned too much. I've been plenty of times in the past and I know I will go several times in the future, so I'm not afraid of missing out on anything. We usually just decide the evening before or same morning which park we want to go to. We have made several ADR's this year as we've decided to upgrade to the DDP, but even if we have a meal in a park, it doesn't mean we have to spend the day there if we don't feel like it. We've also made a few FP's based on which parks we have ADR's in for that day, but again, if we don't want to spend the day there, we'll just cancel them. I just can't imagine going on a holiday where every single second of the day has been planned. I just want to relax and do what I feel like at the moment.
 


I always say that I’m pleased I didn’t know about these boards when I got married in WDW as I was blissfully ignorant of all the extra things we could have paid for... I’d have bankrupted us! We bought a Disney wedding package from virgin and that was it!
 
I've found it's changed massively from our last trip in 2012 to our trip this year. I've always been a planner in the sense that I'd like to have an idea of what parks we'd be going to on this day but having to book fast passes 2 months out has been a bit much, even for me. I booked them on Tuesday and I knew which ones I wanted but like op said, it seems a bit difficult to decide what ride you want to be on and at what time in 60 days from now!
 
I like that there is so much information available. There are many blogs, podcasts, websites, etc.

If I were to group them, what I find most helpful are in regards to (1) viewing rooms/resorts, menus, and attractions (2) crowd calendar/weather sites to help plan packing and timing (3) hotel, airline and discounter sites (ex. Mousesavers) to get deals if possible (4) Disney, Disboards, and a few related groups to be in the loop with what is going on at the Mouse.

I look at these periodically, so that when I plan my trip I know where to look for specific information and its not quite so overwhelming as if I were to start browsing right before a trip and being faced with so many choices. I found the few that are most logically set up to my preference, or speak in my voice so to say, and defer to them.
 


WHAT?!

Never had a bad meal at Yachtsman! lol

Afraid so - for a steakhouse, the food at Yachtsman was not what we expected - I'd say it was similar in quality to a mid level UK chain. Service was meh. Glad we had free DDP as would have been very disappointed!
 
Afraid so - for a steakhouse, the food at Yachtsman was not what we expected - I'd say it was similar in quality to a mid level UK chain. Service was meh. Glad we had free DDP as would have been very disappointed!
You must have been unlucky, service and food is on par with Cali Grill (maybe not Citricos), but its better than anything I've ever had in a mid level chain at home, and has always been on par with Hawksmoor or Gaucho
 
First trip we went on in 2001 I didn't plan/know a thing! Until I got there I expected WDW to be like Alton Towers or Blackpool pleasure beach!

For future trips the planning increased but I never got to the point that our days were fully mapped out. Now I book ADRs and fast passes - all in the evenings - and we spend most of the days around the pool.
 
I feel the same as OP. In 1998 we booked a Virgin package and just went with the flow. I enjoyed pre-fast pass Disney as everyone was equal and everyone queued and everyone paid for meals. PS requests were made the same day (no ADRs) and life was a lot simpler.

But and it's a big BUT the end of August was a quiet time back then, if the queues were longer than 30 mins we didn't queue.

I don't think WDW could manage the number of guests they now have without some sort of electronic controls.
 
Interesting topic!

There is a diminishing return effect with planning a WDW vacation.
Someone who's never been to Florida should read a guide before leaving. I suggest to everyone who ask me The Easy Guide. It has tons of information, a first timer will probably remember 40% of it and apply 10%. But that 10% is going to make his vacation so much better.
But then, if you read every post here, every blog post on the Internet, every news, your vacation won't improve proportionally to the amount of effort put into it. So there's a threshold when planning more isn't really adding much and might even be counterproductive, setting the wrong expectations.

Personally I enjoy reading about WDW, read every post on a couple of blogs (easywdw and Disney Tourist Blog) and spend too much of my time here on the Disboards. But that's because I enjoy doing it. The reality is that, being a DVC member and going to WDW almost every year, I've learnt to take it a little bit easier. The best think about planning is that you'll know how to adapt and change your plan whenever anything happens, being an incident or just that you want to sleep in a bit more one morning.
 
Interesting topic!

There is a diminishing return effect with planning a WDW vacation.
Someone who's never been to Florida should read a guide before leaving. I suggest to everyone who ask me The Easy Guide. It has tons of information, a first timer will probably remember 40% of it and apply 10%. But that 10% is going to make his vacation so much better.
But then, if you read every post here, every blog post on the Internet, every news, your vacation won't improve proportionally to the amount of effort put into it. So there's a threshold when planning more isn't really adding much and might even be counterproductive, setting the wrong expectations.

Personally I enjoy reading about WDW, read every post on a couple of blogs (easywdw and Disney Tourist Blog) and spend too much of my time here on the Disboards. But that's because I enjoy doing it. The reality is that, being a DVC member and going to WDW almost every year, I've learnt to take it a little bit easier. The best think about planning is that you'll know how to adapt and change your plan whenever anything happens, being an incident or just that you want to sleep in a bit more one morning.


I think you can read as many guides or blogs as you want, but nothing prepares you for the first time you go. You don't realise how much there actually is to do, and you'll never do it all in 14 days! - Families who can literally just go once in a lifetime have alot of hard choices to make if they read all the books and blogs. I have no idea how on our first trip to Orlando we managed to do WDW, UOR, BGT and SW in 2 weeks. I guess because we just ate crap for 2 weeks!

For me, you have to go and get that first trip out of the way, you'll enjoy every one more after that. In Jan 2018 we just went for a week, my wife was 26 weeks pregnant and I had just been diagnosed with Crohn's Disease and it was probably our best trip overall. It was so relaxed (for obvious reasons, but we did new things and didn't feel we needed to rush around and do everything.

The most common thing I see from people (boards, Trip Advisor etc) is that they had to queue for stuff. There are ways of not needing to queue too much, and not have to plan to the max, getting into the parks early and leaving at 12pm then coming back in the evening means you miss the crazy crowds.
 
First visit (though been to other Disney parks around the world) and, as I’m the one organising everything for my family, I’m finding it stressful.

First trying to find a hotel they’d like (not too busy, but within the Disney Bubble), then whether to upgrade dining plan and the restaurants we should visit so everyone would at least be able to pick one item they’d like...what days when, MNSSHP and FPS

I’ll be glad when FP day is over and I can finally start relaxing (well, until it’s packing and paperwork time). Then second guessing if I’ve scheduled too much...

Arghhhh

(and then onto next year and planning Hong Kong Disney perhaps!)
 

GET A DISNEY VACATION QUOTE

Dreams Unlimited Travel is committed to providing you with the very best vacation planning experience possible. Our Vacation Planners are experts and will share their honest advice to help you have a magical vacation.

Let us help you with your next Disney Vacation!





Top