1st trip...on-site advantages? Please help...

[alm1211]

Looking for some ideas about where to stay at Universal when we arrive Fri 12/7 in the afternoon and depart Mon 12/10 for our Disney stay (7 days at the Wilderness Lodge). The advantages to staying at the Pacific Resort seem to be proximity to the parks, earlier than normal admission, and opportunity to use the Express Lane (I think they call it Front Of The Line FOTL on here).

The advantages to staying at the DoubleTree, for example, appear to be earlier than normal admission, free breakfast and a savings of about $400.

So here are my questions:
1. do I really need the FOTL option for this time of year? Crowd prediction is low but it is a weekend.
2. Is the shuttle from doubleTree to the parks that efficient? I mean, will we be driving all around town or do we go straight to Universal or IoA.

This will be our first trip to Universal parks and our kids are 10, 7 and 3. Since we are arriving Friday afternoon, I think tickets for that day wouldn't be necessary but then we"ll have all day Sat and Sun to spend at each park.

Any suggestions are really appreciated!!

 

[macraven]

sometimes you have to consider the convenience of staying onsite over the extra cost compared to staying off site.

with the ages of your children (mainly 3 y/o), it would be so easy to be able to return to your hotel room within 10 minutes for an hour of down time.

or one parent could be with the other 2 kids at the park while the other takes the youngest back to the room for a nap.

it is a lot easier to do the early entry with less prep time to go to the parks.
get the kids up, dressed, some food from orchid court lounge and head to the parks.

by staying offsite you would need more time to prepare for the day.
probably need to carry items for the youngest the entire day at the park.

i found it was less complicated to stay on site with my kids.
very easy to return to the room for any reason and it didn't disrupt the day plans in the park.

my priority on the vacations was doing what was the easiest for us.
i took my 3 boys with me with no additional help.
staying onsite meant i didn't have to deal with renting a car for getting back and forth to the parks.
that alone was a time saver for us.


you are looking at $100 more for a 3.5 day time period.
if you are on a budget, i can see where you would want to cut corners and save that money.

i have stayed offsite for a night before and wasn't thrilled with the shuttle service.
very time consuming for us.

i have no idea if the doubletree charges for the shuttle or if they operate early so you could participate in the early entry for ioa.


it's a personal choice of which way would be best for your family.
there are pros and cons to staying on or off site.

 

[bumbershoot]

For me, I didn't even price out the other hotels. Just went straight to onsite. Our first trip was somewhere around that time, though I think a little further into December. (Universal was stuck in the middle of a very long WDW trip) And we loved having the unlimited hotel-based Express Pass. Even if it only saves a few minutes per ride, it starts adding over a day!

If you do want to keep the option for onsite open, this is the website to get quotes from all 3 hotels at once. You can also enter in the code APH, to see if there's an AP rate that is SO amazing and will save you so much money that upgrading one of you to an AP would make sense. (AP rates come and go, FWIW, and probably aren't out *now* for that time of year)

 

[francie57]

We used to stay off-site and thought it was great - until we stayed on-site and there is no comparison. If you are trying to save some money, are you a member of AAA. If you are you can get a room discount and your AAA card also gets you 10% discount on the restaurants, shops in the parks and most of the City Walk Restaurants (Emerils is not included in discount). We save a good amount each trip by just using our AAA card.