Hi there. I am a total NEWB! Have never been to Disney World. My husband went a couple of times when he was a teenager. We are in our late 30's (I will be 39 in a few months and DH will be 40 in December.) We have a 6 year old son. We are looking at taking a family trip to WDW the first week of April (spring break here). DS will be 7 by then. I am thinking we need to do it sooner rather than later so that it will still be "magical" to him. I am looking at maybe staying at the POP Century. I am so confused (or overwhelmed) by every aspect of planning this trip and I am a PLANNER. It's driving me crazy that I can't even check prices for April yet.
One of the things that confuses me the most is the dining plan options. I am not sure which one to pick. The basic one seems ok, but then I am not sure if we will need to eat more that what is offered on that one and maybe I should go up to the next option. When on vacation at a park like WDW, I am thinking we would eat less than normal because we will be so busy. But I don't want to choose the wrong package and not have enough food option for DH, who is a big guy.
Another thing I worry about is how do I know how many days to book? Everyone I have talked to says 4 days, but that doesn't sound like enough to me. I think I might want at least one day just to relax around the pool and not go to any parks. Is that realistic? Or do most people go to parks and do some relaxing at the pools on the same days? Are the water parks included in normal tickets, or is that a separate add on thing? What's the advantage to doing the Park Hopper option? Seems like a lot of traveling around, why not just do one park per day? I know I know, I worry ALOT.
Welcome!! Hope I can provide a little help. First off, I'm going nuts not being able to book/having pricing info yet too!!!
Re: Dining Plan. We've done the regular plan twice and have loved it. It sounds like there might be small changes for 2011, nothing official yet, and nothing major. We find it to be the right amount of food for us. We eat breakfast in the room or use snack credits for pastries, etc. Use the Quick Service credits for lunch generally, and then the Table Service for dinner. My DH is a big guy as well and a HUGE eater, and this satisfies him. He does purchase the refillable resort mug because he likes to drink a lot of pop. Kids and I drink bottled water that we bring from home (we drive). I would recommend looking at
www.allears.net at all the menus. See what places you'd like to try, for what meals. The Deluxe Plan sounds wonderful, but to get the value from it, I think you need to do at least 2 Table Service meals per day. I know we just wouldn't do that. We're not Commando types, we relax a lot at the pool, but I don't think I could get everyone to "we have to go 'here' to this restaurant" 2x each day. But a lot of people like this plan. I could see using it if you want to do sit-down breakfasts each day (we're not big breakfast eaters), then a QS lunch and another TS dinner. Or skip lunch and do a signature restaurant for dinner. To sum up - if you think you'll do 2 sit-downs per day and/or want a lot of signature places, price out the Deluxe plan (the menus have prices, just take guesses of what you think you'll eat). If you don't, price out the Regular plan. If you're worried DH will want an extra CS meal or two, or a few more snacks - probably still WAY cheaper to just pay for those out of pocket! I honestly don't think we've bought any food OOP at Disney other than our meal at T-Rex last trip - which isn't on the plan. We really find it to be enough food! Oh, and we do some of the buffets and all-you-can eat places (Chef Mickey's, Crystal Palace, Ohana) - DH can stuff himself silly and the kids love it!
RE: booking. I'd say do 6 or 7 days if you can afford it/have the time. 4 days would seem SO rushed to me. We've stayed 7 nights and it seems perfect. You could definitely do a no-park day with that. We do it our arrival day. We also find DHS and AK to be just half-day parks, one time for us. Our days worked out like this last trip:
Arrival day (Day 1) - rode the monorail, had lunch at our resort (Poly), swam, dinner at our resort (Kona), unpacked, watched fireworks, early to bed!
Day 2 - MK until about 2, pool, dinner at Chef Mickey's, back to MK for Spectro and Wishes (only time we watched them IN the park)
Day 3 - Animal Kingdom in the AM, Downtown Disney for lunch, more pool time, Ohana for dinner, Epcot in the evening (world showcase)
Day 4- Epcot (Future World) in AM, pool time, dinner at Wolfgang Puck in Downtown Disney. Planned to do DHS this evening, but kids wanted more pool time, so we skipped it. Didn't do DHS this trip at all
Day 5- MK until about 2, pool time, Downtown Disney for the evening, dinner at T-Rex
Day 6 - Blizzard Beach till around 2, relax at resort. Dinner at Crystal Palace, MK for the evening
Day 7 - Left this day open/unplanned. We ended up at Magic Kingdom for the day, pool time, and then Epcot at night, LeCellier for dinner.
Day 8 - we had orignally planned to stay until about noon and then start the drive home (stop for the night), but we had done everything and DD had a soccer game the NEXT day, so we left very early and drove straight home instead of a 2 day drive.
We find that 6 actual park days is perfect for us, so a 6 or 7 night trip with one non-park day (for us, our arrival day is when we choose to do it), works well. As you can see, we get Hoppers. We like the freedom to be able to go where we want, when we want. We like to go somewhere different at night, after relaxing at the Poly mid-day. Since we make ADR's for dinner - don't want to be locked into that park for all day. We also wing it sometimes, and that's harder to do without Hoppers. If on our planned DHS day the kids would've begged for MK time, rather than pool time, we could have done that. But not without hoppers!
Oh, and yes, the Water Parks are a different option - you can either buy 1 day tickets or add the Water Parks and More option to multi-day tickets.
here! In May, DH said that we could go back to Disney next year instead of going to 
