How Do You Spend Your 8-12+ Day Trips?

[Jabroniville]

I'm curious how others do this. When I got to the parks, it's typically for LONG trips, especially at WDW. What used to be "just enough to do every park's things" I now make full days for the smaller parks and then multiple days for MK & EPCOT.

For me, I typically do Disney Springs only the day of arrival, then do MK & EPCOT early for 1 day each, then thread in Animal Kingdom (often early, as it's pretty brutal for walking and I never wanted to be tired for it) and Hollywood Studios last (less walking), then I alternate MK & EPCOT days. I never take a "rest day" no matter how long I have- it always feels like wasted time to me. Too much to do!

Since I always seem to spend more time for every trip, I end up with something like: Arrival Day (Disney Springs), 1 (AK), 2 (MK), 3 (EPCOT), 4 (MK), 5 (HS), 6-7 (MK), 8 (EPCOT), 9 (MK), 10 (EPCOT), 11-12 (MK). I park-hop only on early closing days for something like AK.

Questions:
* How often do you park hop?
* Do you do rest days?
* How many days do you do each park?
* Do you do Disney Springs first or wait? And do you return to it mid-trip?

My only regrets from last trip were not going back to Disney Springs after the first day (on my vacation before last, I did once for a couple hours- this time I found the parks closing at 9-10 and I was usually too tired to want to go to DS for a short period of time), and maybe not leaving MK mid-day to do HS or AK bits again. BUT in those cases, I find the buses take too long and it blows an hour of all-important park time, and I wanted to maximize the amount of times I saw certain shows (like the Magical Friendship Faire & Parades).

 

[Disneylover99]

How often do you park hop?

Whenever we feel like it. But pretty much daily at some point.

Do you do rest days?

No. But we don’t go, go, go all day either. We might rope drop and be done at noon, or just head to the parks in the evening. We usually relax by the pool and swim at some point each day too.

How many days do you do each park?

It varies. No set plan. We do spend more time at MK/Epcot than HS/AK though. And we do find ourselves hopping over to Epcot the most to eat.

Do you do Disney Springs first or wait? And do you return to it mid-trip?

We don’t have any set plan for DS. Sometimes we visit early in the morning, or late afternoon. We get there about 3 or 4 times, mostly to eat.

The beauty of longer trips for us, is that we don’t book reservations or buy any lightening lanes. We just do a bit each day and go with the flow.

 

[BarbLynnM]

Questions:
* How often do you park hop?
* Do you do rest days?
* How many days do you do each park?
* Do you do Disney Springs first or wait? And do you return to it mid-trip?

1) We park hop nearly every day
2) When we stay for 10 days or more, we usually have two off days
3) I do all parks at least twice
4) It depends on the weather. Disney Springs is a concrete heat sink (imo) and I don’t go on the hottest days unless we really need something. Otherwise, we go a couple of times, usually for ambiance and fooding. I spend too much money every time we go there, so I try to not go there so often lol.

We usually spend the most time when we stay at the Fort. Since we’re traveling around 1500 miles one way, it takes me a day or so just to decompress from the travel, so staying less than a week doesn’t work for me. Our normal stay averages 12 days, but we stay at least 9 days. Lately, it’s been more 2 week stays.

We’re flying down in January and we’re staying on property, so it’s going to be a shorter time, 7 days 8 nights, so we probably won’t take a day off unless himself decides (and weather permits) a pool day.

 

[goofyernmost]

Never did more than 4 day park hoppers per trip. To many other things to see in the area to spend it all chasing a 5 foot mouse. Don't get me wrong, I love the little rodent, but I get bored easily and also have respect for my wallet and my credit cards therein. Four days in the parks is enough for me. I used to buy 10 day, non-expirational park hoppers and still never used more that 4 days on trip. Once they stopped the non-expiration tickets I have never done over two days a trip. The rest of the time I explored the central Florida places from coast to coast or spent a few days at Universal.

 

[AnnaS]

Just got back from my 9 day stay. More or less the average stay (or we used to do split stay with Vero/HH). Stays are usually 7 nights or longer.

Have AP - make reservations but don't necessarily go every day. This trip I did not go to HS at all. DS is usually one or two evenings. This trip - only once.

Park hop - yes. Most of the time. But in the evening I/we will usually be at Epcot (F&G or F&W).

Love to spend time at the pool and resort hop (dinner/dole whip, etc.).

 

[Jabroniville]

Interesting! Looks like everyone park-hops more than I do, haha.

I typically only park-hop on AK days (since it closes early) or on trips where I wanted to ride the Frozen ride as much as possible (leaving some parks early-ish to hit EPCOT again). I usually get PH for this purpose, or just as an option in case something is broken one day and I want to make sure I get it. It sometimes made me feel like I was wasting the extra cost of a PH ticket but at least on this last trip I think it was the only option (I got a fancy foreign pass).

I don't buy LL for every day... but I usually will for each park at least once, and usually for nearly every MK day. By the end of the trip, I usually don't at all. But I live in Canada and it's much harder to get to the parks, so I feel the need to make it more worth it, time-wise.

AK & HS are parks I can do "entirely" in one day, though I've often thought about maaaaaybe visiting HS twice to see all the shows (I still haven't done Indy, crazily enough. Five trips! Never done!).

I've only done DS twice on one trip- the one before last, where I left AK at 7 and went back to DS for a couple hours. It was kinda fun, and I REALLY like the ambiance of Disney Springs... but I always felt like I was wasting park time if I just left back to DS on park days, as there's usually "one last thing" I wanted to do and didn't want to take a ton of travel time. Plus I usually had dining reservations somewhere. Another thing is I REALLY like MK late at night and on Main Street during that "last hour".

 

[StarCruzer]

Honestly the longer the trip, the more we incorporate rest days. I think EPCOT is probably the only park we do two days in, and that's usually more for snacking, shopping and enjoying the live entertainment.

We also use the extra time to eat at other Disney resorts. A TON of resort restaurants have stopped doing (or never did) lunch service, so if you want to eat there you have to leave a park early. And we much prefer being in the parks in the evenings.

 

[marmentrout85]

We used to park hop basically every day on our trips. That was when we'd stay a bit further away from the parks in the Disney Springs area, either at a good neighbor hotel or Saratoga.

Now we usually do split-stays every trip since becoming DVC owners. Half of the trip will be at a MK area resort and half at an Epcot area resort. We'll basically only do MK (sometimes AK) when we're staying at Grand Floridian and then we pretty much stick to Hollywood Studios and Epcot when we're staying at either Riviera, Beach Club, or Boardwalk. We still park hop almost every day we're at one of those three resorts.

We have a toddler now and thus far we haven't taken a rest day per se, but we'll usually head back to the resort early afternoon for nap time, maybe a little pool time, and we just enjoy chilling at the resort for 3-4 hours. Probably around 5pm-ish we'll head back out to the parks.

 

[Meriweather]

We usually do 10-14 days.
2 days are travel days since we live across the country.
2 days in each park.
day at Disney Springs
a day resort hopping for just staying in our villa

We don't usually park hop, but do once in awhile (we have APs)
We do go back to the resort early to rest (we're seniors) and then if we want to see something we go back.

 

[elvispursley]

Our trip last month was 9-days (me and 71-yo mom). We went to Epcot arrival day evening for dinner and rode 3 cablleros. Back to the resort for “early bed”—early for us as we’re from the west coast.

We did rope drop every day (except the mornings we had ADRs for breakfast. This is the first time in 20 years we’ve rope dropped and definitely found it worth it to be able to get a chunk done and leave the park by noonish to get out of the heat and take a nap or dip
In the pool.

We park hop everyday, usually to another park for dinner. We do DS once or my wallet could not keep up

We generally do MNSSHP when we go so the day we get a later start/have a nice breakfast and head to MK for a bit. We then head back to get ready and having done a lot of the rides earlier in the day, we focus on party-specific things and entertainment.

 

[Tink9721]

My mom and I usually do 8-9 day trips and we always go into the parks every day, but not usually rope drop to close. We're not morning people, we'd rather start the day later and stay out late. We never do full rest days but we'll take breaks some days. We always have hoppers but don't usually hop every day. Sometimes we go to DS, sometimes we don't.

We weren't able to stay out as late as we wanted to on our last trip since I had to be up early every morning to book Genie+. I'm definitely one of the people who's happy about Multi Pass. Looking forward to sleeping in on my upcoming trip!

 

[disneydreamer1980]

We do 14 day trips. Our upcoming trip is 1/11-1/25/25, with 14 day hopper tickets (although we don’t plan on hopping). We take a rest day on a Saturday just because the parks are too crazy on Saturday. We don’t usually park hop. We do 2 days at AK, 2 days at DHS, and the rest split between Epcot and MK (about 4 days each). We do some late starts in there and some open to closes. Epcot days are usually sleep in days. I don’t like “rest” days, I feel like I’m missing out. So basically every day except one we’re in a park. We usually do Disney Springs in the evening on one of our AK days and that’s enough for us. Not huge DS fans. On our rest day we hop around to other resorts and hang out at our own, because it’s usually a Saturday and DS would be crazy and I love checking out the other resorts.

 

[gottalovepluto]

8 is my perfect trip! I take a break from 1pm/2pm to around 6pm for pool time every day unless changing resorts it can be later (or nap time if weather doesn’t cooperate). I do 1 resort pool day. 2 mornings per park except 1 for DHS, and then wherever I want to go for dinner/evening entertainment- can be a park, evening entertainment, DS or dinner at a hotel.