Advice for First Disney Trip in Years

[ryangeek]

My family is taking our first trip back to Disney in years, probably since 2009 (definitely since before MyMagic+ existed). We’re going the on the first full week of October (3rd-9th), which just so happens to be the first full week of the 50th! We got 5-day Park Hoppers since we’ll take a day at Universal and a day to visit family.
We are going to be staying at BWI (Standard View) for the first time. The only other resorts we’ve stayed at have been the Swan/Dolphin and Animal Kingdom Lodge.
I’m looking forward to Galaxy’s Edge and hopefully Harmonious will be running by then as well. My family was also huge fans of La Nouba, so I’m hoping Drawn to Life will be open by then as well.
I know a lot has changed with how the parks operate since my family has last visited and with the pandemic even more has changed, so I guess I’m looking for some good tips and tricks to prep us.

 

[_19disnA]

We were at Disney in 2019 after not being there for perhaps 10+ years. The biggest thing we noticed is how much more crowded the parks were compared to the past. It takes at least twice as long to do rides/shows as our prior trips. No amount of advance planning is going to make the parks any less crowded. When a park is wall to wall people, even getting from one place to another takes quite a long time. Personally, I think they let far too many people into the park which tends to make ride lines way too long and the narrow walkways in some areas contribute to the congestion. None of us wanted to wait on any ride for 90+ minutes, so we looked for other less busy rides.

Newer rides need to be designed with sufficient capacity. I don't understand how that recently opened Star Wars ride gets sold out within minutes of the park opening each day. Clearly they didn't design it with enough capacity.

FastPass was in use at that time. Can't say when/if it might get restarted once covid is behind us. Since you could only pre-reserve 3 rides per day, it also wasn't that big of a deal to us and clearly you want to use them on the most popular rides. Many of the rides have been rethemed to recent Disney movies which probably means they will have to continue to redo these once those movies are no longer popular. Overall, we were disappointed and have no plans to return anytime soon.

 

[Disney Fool]

it's exciting that you'll be there for the first week of the 50th. However, and not wishing to dampen your excitement at going back, but please be prepared that it will be extremely busy that week. so plan accordingly. Do you have park passes already? You'll need those besides tickets. Get familiar with using the My Disney Experience app. Since you're staying at Boardwalk, figure out your strategy for getting to MK for mornings. And just plan for large crowds.

 

[ryangeek]

We just made our Park Pass reservations and other plans today (Epcot, AK, HS, Family Visit, Universal, MK, HS). Next thing to do is to wait to place ADRs and reservations for Droid Depot and Savi’s Workshop.
For MK we will most likely just take the resort bus there. If the the Epcot monorail Iine is open by then we’ll probably hop through Epcot to get back.

 

[Adventureland]

How exciting!
My biggest tip is to keep up with some news sources, keep up with the boards, etc. A lot can change from now through October (heck, a lot has changed since I started keeping up with Disney news about six months ago for our upcoming trip...) so sometimes things we suggest now will become null and void because of a policy change.

Two HS park passes is a good idea if you want to do RoR. Since you have park hoppers, you can always consider adding some HS days to give more chances (I'm assuming that HS park passes will go quite quick due to the crowds especially) and then park hop later in the day.

 

[AlanPetersdrew]

We went to Paris Disneyland when we were able to travel. You can't really do there anything