Did planning used to be easier?

[Westcoastwild]

I think it's just disboarditis. It's a terrible affliction that you acquire by reading too much here.

This board got me worried on my first trip. Then it turned out, once I got there, that the only thing really different is fp+. The busses aren't bad so I think Minnie transport solves an imaginary problem. Not having ADR's? Won't starve. Disney Springs is a glorified mall, no more need for a touring plan than at DL, and I have yet to see a dessert package I find even remotely tempting.

And in a lot of ways, fp+ makes my life so much easier. I know where I need to be and I'm guaranteed to ride my top 3 rides without waiting in line for an hour or more.

Don't get me wrong. I do like to know the information, and I think some planning is useful. Food is pretty high on the list and I'm glad I got to see the inside of BOG. But there's so many options at Wdw that it didn't bother me all that much to not get a rez or to drop one.

 

[Dr.Mickey]

Lol, when I first read the title of the thread, I thought about my first trip as a kid in 1978!!! In my best grumpy old man voice, I thought, "Planning? What planning? When we ran out of E tickets, you were done with Space Mountain for the day. Time to ride If You Had Wings again..."

Now, comparing this to my adult trips in the 2000s, I will say planning is much more difficult - but it does come with some perks. It's pretty amazing to walk in at 3pm for a half day on arrival day with 3 FPs lined up. But, I think it is awful to try to decide where we will be, and at what time of the day, 30 to 60 days in advance. I love my trips to Disney, but I always stress about making FPs. In fact, I rarely do it all in one sitting. The first pass is snagging the top must-dos. Then I'll come back a few days later to start filling in the gaps, asking my wife a million questions in the process...to which she says, "I don't care. You decide." But once we get to Disney, it always seems to work out fine. And we are actually more flexible than I think every time. So, for me, it's a mixed bag.

 

[Gentry2004]

I've only ever planned trips in this modern Disney era (for my pre FP+ trips, I was not the one doing the planning) - but I think its even gotten more difficult since FP+ started. The ADR situation is crazy and frankly I've pretty much given up. My kids don't enjoy long table service meals anyway. I think free dining, 180+10, and the reservation finder programs have made finding even mediocre ADR's difficult. Especially during party season.

I don't mind FP+ that much. If you skip ADR's and skip dessert parties and holiday parties and BBB/pirates league, etc. (we skip all those things) its really not too bad. Just have your tickets in place more than 60 days out and know which FP+ you want. If I can snag an ADR or two I'd like, great, if not, I don't sweat it.

 

[Spacepest]

When we first began there was no home internet, certainly no DISboards. It was guidebooks and pencil and paper. I still have my circa 1988 edition of the Unofficial Guide Sure, there were fewer options to worry about but there was also much less access to information.

I was actually excited when Disney began taking dining reservations (Anyone else remember running for the Castle or the tele-kiosks at Epcot?) via phone!

I remember all this stuff! My parents took us to WDW in the 1980's, when there was no internet (and all the rides at Epcot worked). Back then there were still plenty of extra stuff when it came to WDW, it just was that the information was less available to the public. (For example, did you know that when Hollywood Studios still had a working animation studio, you could book a private tour to go backstage there, meet an animator, and then have that animator give you a private drawing lesson? Try finding info for stuff like that pre-internet!)

If anything, I now feel bad for my mother trying to plan our vacation in the '80s. She had to use the same physical guidebook, hunt down phone numbers, and call for EVERYTHING over the phone to get info, or to book things. She spent multiple hours on multiple days on the phone, often at 4 am due to time difference. Now I can do all that stuff while surfing my computer without having to be on the phone. ADRs and FPs...I can book those while eating breakfast at my PC, I can't eat and talk on the phone at the same time.

 

[scrapquitler]

I think that planning is easier with FP+ I know that I can ride my favorite rides without having to wonder if I'll get a FP for the day I want at a time that is convenient, and my husband doesn't have to go running around the park trying to get the FP slips from the rides we want. If I decide that my times with FP+ don't work, I can (generally) easily change them using my smart phone.

The reality is that for ME, the only planning I do is: buy plane tickets, make a hotel reservation, make 3 fp+ per day. Done. I don't plan a bunch of ADRs, We rarely (if ever) do 'extras' like tours, desert parties, fireworks cruises, etc. and if we miss something, we miss it, we know there are 846 other things to do instead. We almost never wait in a line longer than 20 minutes (well, except for FOP two weeks after it opened, we did wait 2 hours for that, but that was an anomaly) We don't get stressed out over the trip, and we always have a blast. My family would get stressed and have a full revolt if I ever tried to implement a touring plans type schedule for them.

 

[smallworldnh]

I don't find it more difficult. But then, a lot of the stuff that's mentioned as making planning problematic isn't an issue for my upcoming trip. Minnie van? Don't care, as we'll be walking or using boats for most of our destinations. Nighttime shows? Not interested. I think there's a feeling that if we don't do everything exactly right and plan every tiny thing, our trip will be ruined, RUINED. Which is not the case. Also, the parks aren't going anywhere. If you miss something this time, come back again another time. I'm giving Pandora a miss this upcoming trip because I don't feel like dealing with it and am not all that interested. I'll visit it in a few years when the hubbub has died down.

For me, I have to do anything and everything I can because what if I never get the chance again for one reason or another??? Awful way to think, but I can't help it!

 

[NavyDad]

Obviously it was easier to go to WDW when you didn't have to PLAN. The answer to your question depends on your frame of reference.

I have been going as an adult and doing all of the planning for our family and sometimes multi-family trips. If you want to be able to actually PLAN your trip out fully, it is my opinion that it is actually much easier to plan than it was 10 years ago.

Our first trip I had to call the ADR number and scream "Cindy's" as fast as I could to get our coveted CRT breakfast before going through a list with some lady on the phone of all the places we wanted to eat and going back and forth with her. Now I wake up, log into my phone while I'm still in bed and I'm able to make pretty much every ADR I want when I want it without having to waste time chatting with someone while they try to do the work for me.

I really liked the old paper Fast Passes once we got the hang of it and were really able to use that system to our advantage. With that system we were able to get a lot more FP than we do now with the new system but you didn't always know when you would be able to get FP for which rides. Some days certain rides would "sell out" of FP by 10 AM and some days you could keep getting them until late in the afternoon. Just depended on the crowd that day. With this system you can plan the vast majority of your FP down to within 5 minutes.

I think it breaks down to this: If you really like to plan every detail of every trip there is way more information and tools to do that now. If however you don't like to plan at all or like to have a very loose "plan" and play it by ear that is much harder to do now.

 

[DaisyJ]

Yes, planning used to be much easier.

 

[mousehockey37]

I don't find it more difficult. But then, a lot of the stuff that's mentioned as making planning problematic isn't an issue for my upcoming trip. Minnie van? Don't care, as we'll be walking or using boats for most of our destinations. Nighttime shows? Not interested. I think there's a feeling that if we don't do everything exactly right and plan every tiny thing, our trip will be ruined, RUINED. Which is not the case. Also, the parks aren't going anywhere. If you miss something this time, come back again another time. I'm giving Pandora a miss this upcoming trip because I don't feel like dealing with it and am not all that interested. I'll visit it in a few years when the hubbub has died down.

I agree with this.

If you're a micro manager of time (like down to the point of "you have 3 minutes and 27 seconds to go pee") then planning a Disney vacation has probably almost put you out of your misery. Likewise, there's people that get a room, buy tickets and that's it, whatever the day feels like is where they go. There's also everything in between.

Will Disney throw offers at you left and right between the time you start planning and the time you go? Yup. They're a business, after all, so yeah, that's what they're going to do. For a good percentage of us here on the DIS, we're not just once-in-a-lifetime visitors and we'll be going back.

@Auntie_Maim said it best... if something gets left for the next trip, it's no big deal (unless it's something on the bubble that may close), catch it next time. For some, Pandora will be good to go see when Toy Story Land opens next summer. There's a ton of scenarios that can play into this.

Ultimately, like I said in my first post here, the planning is what you make of it.... it just depends what type of planner you are.

 

[bdiddy]

I really dislike having to book the fast passes ahead of time. Especially after having just got back from Disneyland.

We were there last week just after Maxpass started and we loved it!! So so much easier than the FP+ system and we had fastpasses like crazy all day. They were almost immediate fast pass return times so you could get another right away. And even if you had to wait for one, for the people using Maxpass it was only a 90 min wait (paper fastpasses still had to wait 2 hrs) And especially since their rides go down so much and then they convert to the "multiple experience" fast passes that can be used at any time so at one point going into the evening hours we had 4 of those on top of our regular ones.

Anyway...I love planning and that's one of the best parts of the whole experience but I really don't care for having to book them ahead and the whole FP+ and the tiered system in general.

 

[flortlebap]

It is so much harder now.

12 years ago we didn't even particularly worry about ADRs, and legacy FP was great.

I still picked parks according to crowd levels though.

 

[Stefne]

I really dislike having to book the fast passes ahead of time. Especially after having just got back from Disneyland.

We were there last week just after Maxpass started and we loved it!! So so much easier than the FP+ system and we had fastpasses like crazy all day. They were almost immediate fast pass return times so you could get another right away. And even if you had to wait for one, for the people using Maxpass it was only a 90 min wait (paper fastpasses still had to wait 2 hrs) And especially since their rides go down so much and then they convert to the "multiple experience" fast passes that can be used at any time so at one point going into the evening hours we had 4 of those on top of our regular ones.

I'm completely with you. After using Maxpass last week, it will be really hard going back to WDW and FP+.

 

[chiburple]

I like the new FP+ system for one reason: it moves that part of the stress up from my park day to pre-trip. That way, I can be more relaxed while on vacation.

Planning in general does that for me. The unknown is scary and has the potential to go terribly wrong. By planning it, I don’t have to worry while I’m in the park. I’ve put boundaries on the possible outcomes and I have contingencies in place. Yeah, I know, it’s Disney, what’s the worst that could happen, right? In my mind, this answer is that whomever I’m traveling with gets cranky and doesn’t have a good time. Nothing would ruin my vacation more.

It's true that for me, I know I will always be back one day, but part of my stress is that I'm always introducing someone to Disney that has never been before and may never go again. In this case, my aunt is coming from Egpyt. It will be her first time to DW and I doubt she'll ever get the opportunity to see it again. So for me, I want to pack as much magic in it for her as I possibly can and not regret having missed something that would have been really special. Doing that makes the trip more special and memorable for me too, but this time the stress is starting to tip just slightly over from the fun side to truly stressful side.

 

[bdiddy]

I'm completely with you. After using Maxpass last week, it will be really hard going back to WDW and FP+.

My perfect scenario would be the Maxpass system but using magic bands to scan instead of your phone. And leave the machines as well. It seemed like *most* people had no clue about Maxpass which was to our advantage maybe? I had several people that were behind us in line ask us what app I had, how was I able to do that on my phone, etc.....so I don't think the word is quite out yet. Although I see it being too expensive for big parties that are there for an extended amount of time. We were only there 2 days and I was going to buy the photopass anyway and there's only 4 of us so the $80 for two days was so worth it for all our pictures and the convenience of booking our fastpasses like that.

 

[mousehockey37]

It's true that for me, I know I will always be back one day, but part of my stress is that I'm always introducing someone to Disney that has never been before and may never go again. In this case, my aunt is coming from Egpyt. It will be her first time to DW and I doubt she'll ever get the opportunity to see it again. So for me, I want to pack as much magic in it for her as I possibly can and not regret having missed something that would have been really special. Doing that makes the trip more special and memorable for me too, but this time the stress is starting to tip just slightly over from the fun side to truly stressful side.

In your case, I would book things and leave time open. Honestly, if you try and cram magic down her throat, it might get to be too much. I'd have certain "must-do's" lined up, but let her get there and take it in. Leave it so she can explore the parks, not be told where to go. Nothing ruins the magic more than not being able to take it all in and experience it.

An example, for me, would be taking in a Dapper Dans show on Main St. or seeing the Main Street Philharmonic. It's a little thing, but it adds so much to an experience and lots of times I've witnessed kids wanting to stop and dance, or just watch and the parents just drag them off as they're headed to the next ride, ADR or whatever... it's sad.

 

[detroitdad]

Lol, when I first read the title of the thread, I thought about my first trip as a kid in 1978!!! In my best grumpy old man voice, I thought, "Planning? What planning? When we ran out of E tickets, you were done with Space Mountain for the day. Time to ride If You Had Wings again..."

This comment made me smile. If You Had Wings was a great ride! Presented by Eastern Airlines. I'm pretty sure Buzz Light Year uses that same space now.

 

[chiburple]

In your case, I would book things and leave time open. Honestly, if you try and cram magic down her throat, it might get to be too much. I'd have certain "must-do's" lined up, but let her get there and take it in. Leave it so she can explore the parks, not be told where to go. Nothing ruins the magic more than not being able to take it all in and experience it.

An example, for me, would be taking in a Dapper Dans show on Main St. or seeing the Main Street Philharmonic. It's a little thing, but it adds so much to an experience and lots of times I've witnessed kids wanting to stop and dance, or just watch and the parents just drag them off as they're headed to the next ride, ADR or whatever... it's sad.

That's good advice! I will try.

Watch the gears turn behind my eyes as I try to calculate 'unplanned' time.

 

[detroitdad]

I love to plan but it's gotten to be too much. I miss the spontaneity of just getting to the bus stop and hopping on the first bus to arrive. We were always park openers and would get multiple fast passes all day long. Miss legacy fastpass. But I get the appeal of Fastpass+ too. I just don't like how it's driven up the standby lines for all of the rides that didn't use to have much of a wait. But that really was WDW's intent--to redistribute the crowds throughout the park.

 

[Stefne]

My perfect scenario would be the Maxpass system but using magic bands to scan instead of your phone. And leave the machines as well. It seemed like *most* people had no clue about Maxpass which was to our advantage maybe? I had several people that were behind us in line ask us what app I had, how was I able to do that on my phone, etc.....so I don't think the word is quite out yet.

Oh I would be all over a maxpass enabled magic band. We ended up buying lanyards for the kids because it turned into such a hassle trying to dig tickets out constantly. It really doesn't seem like information about maxpass was well known. I probably wouldn't have known about it if not for these boards and Disneyland Daily. We did a 5 day trip and purchased on 4 of the 5 days. Our next to last day we were doing Fantasmic, River Belle Terrace and concentrating on rides in that general area, so we just used the machines that day .

 

[LilyWDW]

I don't think it's that much harder. In fact, it's made my trips even easier in the long run. The biggest difference is that I am now booking 3 FP ahead of time. That doesn't make anything more difficult. Before I still planned what parks I was hitting what day and what rides I wanted to get FP for the most. So not a huge change.