wow aussietraveleer, that must be one long flight for your family coming from Australia, how long of a travel day is that for you guys?
Flying time is about 19-20 hours, then travel time too and from airport, wait time at airports, changing planes etc (like in LAX, there are no direct flight from Australia to Orlando or New York, they all go through LA) that adds about another 7 hours maybe more if the stopover in LA is longer than 2 hours. So usually about 27 or so hours from door to door. Travelling to Europe for us is about 24hrs flying time, so door to door is often about 32 hours.
Not as bad as when we went to WDW last time. We arrived at LAX off our 14 hour flight from Australia at 7am only to be told that our flight from LAX to Orlando was cancelled, well the flight from LAX for Dallas FW was ok but the flight from DFW to Orlando was cancelled with nothing for another 5 days
So they would not let us on the first flight as we would have been stuck there. There was a problem with some M80 plane or something and they were grounded nation wide so there were lots of displaced people. We were then put onto a flight to NY that night so had a very long wait at LAX for the day, but AA were wonderful and did give us a room at the Hilton for the day and lunch and dinner voucher
to AA
So we we went to the hotel, had showers and lunch before heading back to the airport, by the time we got to the hotel after retrieving our bags that had been checked right through and AA finding us flights to get to Orlando it too a while so we didn't have that much time at the hotel but it was still very nice to be able to relax for a few hours, back at the airport we found that flight to NY had been delayed for a few hours. So there we sat again. The flight eventually left for NY and when we got to NY we had to run to the sky train or monorail thing to another terminal and AA had put us on a Delta flight from NY to Orlando and that was boarding already so we literally just ran from one flight straight onto the other. Then arriving in Orlando to find our luggage hadn't made the delta flight but magical express were wonderful and took care of that for us.
Long story short, we arrived at AKL with a grand total of 42 hours travel time
Now that was the longest travel time we have ever done and we were exhausted! and lost a day of our trip as we were due to check in the day before but instead were flying around the country trying to get to WDW
Luckily we were there for three weeks so we had plenty of time to settle into WDW and enjoy our vacation.