Early January trips

[alloyd1170]

We just returned from WDW over Jan 2-4 and wanted to give a heads up for those planning on a trip next year at that time. Things were still pretty crowded at that time! FL schools did not start back up until Jan 5. It seemed that there were a lot of foreigners there as well. On the 4th (we didnt do the parks that day) it seemed the parking lot and mopnorails werent as full. Im sure it was nothing like over Christmas (the monorail driver told us Christmas day they had all 12 monorails running-4 on the Epcot loop, and on Mon. they had 3 running that loop). Epcot wasnt too bad though. My husband rode Test Track and Mission Space back to back several times in an hour. MK seemed to be the worst. I think the longest we waited was 30-35 minutes. Anything longer, we skipped it and went back later. Take advantage of the Fast Passes! We couldnt understand why people were waiting in line for an hour when they couldve walked right on with a FP. For example-we got a FP for the next Little Mermaid show (starting in 20 minutes). There was a standby line over an hour long for the same show. Had people simply gone to the kiosk, they wouldnt have had to wait! Maybe Im missing something????

alison

 

[TeamMMouse]

Yes, we just got back and were surprised how busy it was right up until the 4th. Actually, the 4th was a bit better, but still busy. We had expected that after the 1st it would clear out. Our take was that it had to with the 1st being on Saturday and some had the 3rd as a New Year's holiday...so the weekend pushed out the crowds. Agree on the number of visitors from other countries..we wondered if the exchange rate might make it a more economical trip. We estimated that at least 1/3 of the guests were not Americans. Just a different mix than typical. The typical traffic patterns didn't seem to apply this year!

 

[MarkLem]

We just got back from a 12/31-1/5 stay as well and agree with all the commetns. Lots of spanish speaking folks and big crowds. We expected it to be busy on 1/1 & 1/2, but thought it would drop way down on Monday the 3rd and 4th. It did drop some, but was way busier than we expected.