Is this a good, okay, or bad idea?

[Mosey03]

We will be at WDW during one of the spring break weeks in March (March 10-18). We have 7 days and we are planning to do basically half days at the parks (so half the day in a park, half the day doing other stuff). Our current plan is to do park opening/EMH until afternoon for the first 3 or 4 days, then mid-afternoon until later in the evening for the last 3 or 4 days. My question is this: is it a bad idea to think we can get done the things we want to during the latter part of our trip when we'd be doing mid-afternoon to late evening? We probably wouldn't even have considered this before FastPass+ because of crowd levels during that part of the day, but we're thinking that having our 3 FPs will help a lot. What do you all think? Part of our reason for doing this is that we want to see some of the nighttime shows and we know we personally are not likely to make park opening after being up late.

 

[kappyfamily]

I think with a week your schedule is totally doable. Remember, you know your family best and what schedule will leave them happy in the end. Have a great trip!

 

[Klayfish]

That depends on your definition of "get done the things we want to". Yes, with FP+ you can get on a lot of rides even in the afternoon and evening. Just be sure to book FP+ as soon as you can. Also, it's easier to get things done as the parks get close to closing time. AK is nearly empty the last couple hours it is open. MK is pretty empty the last hour or so. So you can get a lot done there. When we make our trips, we rarely do a full day (to me, "full day" means something like 9am to 7pm). For morning days, we arrive 9-10am and leave by 3-4pm, for evenings we arrive 2-3pm and leave 9-11pm.

 

[Accident]

I love the half day touring style. I also love the relaxed schedule where most days are unplanned but you have a general idea of how many days you want to hit the parks, just not really trying to predict when or where you will be.. I would make 1 recommendation that you decide how important night entertainment is as weather could impact your ability to enjoy or even see it if it gets canceled. Doing evenings later in the week you don't really have a second chance to get back to the park to see them if that does happen.

How I generally do it:
- when we can hop: first couple days is concentrating on the "don't want to miss" things. so we'll do half days but just a focus on things we don't want to leave without doing, maybe some other stuff and then switch parks and do it again for that park.
- The rest of the week is largely unplanned although we do always have some fastpasses for somewhere, just not much care in what park as we don't decide that until we wake up and often change it when we see the bus lines for which park is not getting many people heading to it.
- the park we hit, if we even hit a park is largely what we're in the mood for and if we can hop, we'll leave a park if we get there and it's not doing it for us. we don't try to force the vacation to happen and go with how we feel. We generally miss most of our adrs and cancel most of our fastpasses as the week goes on.

Another tip, hold back a few days of tickets. It's pretty cheap and fast to add on days while you are there (with a package, you can do it at the resort. room only or offsite just stop by tickets or guest relations.). We've found a lot of savings doing this because you can't get a refund for unused days but we've never needed a ticket for every day and if your in a group that might do different things, you'll find a couple people in the group might need 1 or 2 more days than everyone else. fastpass+ really messes with this sometimes but you have a rough idea how much they matter to you already. Holding back also makes it easier to decide that your going off property a couple days if the mood hits you.

 

[DisneyWishes14]

You'll be fine. Yes, it will be more crowded in the afternoon, but if you focus on your FP+ rides/attractions and think of anything else you get in in the afternoon as bonus, you'll be fine. We do this a lot as we go often and aren't interested in RD anymore. In fact, on a Saturday this past August, we didn't walk into EP until around 11:30 am and were able to do Soarin', TT, Spaceship Earth and FEA by late afternoon along with some WS touring thrown in. IMHO, especially in AK and EP, there is so much more to do than just ride rides, arriving in the afternoons with a more laid back attitude works for our family.

 

[Katniss]

Sounds great to me.

 

[richkaryn]

I love the half day touring style. I also love the relaxed schedule where most days are unplanned but you have a general idea of how many days you want to hit the parks, just not really trying to predict when or where you will be.. I would make 1 recommendation that you decide how important night entertainment is as weather could impact your ability to enjoy or even see it if it gets canceled. Doing evenings later in the week you don't really have a second chance to get back to the park to see them if that does happen.

How I generally do it:
- when we can hop: first couple days is concentrating on the "don't want to miss" things. so we'll do half days but just a focus on things we don't want to leave without doing, maybe some other stuff and then switch parks and do it again for that park.
- The rest of the week is largely unplanned although we do always have some fastpasses for somewhere, just not much care in what park as we don't decide that until we wake up and often change it when we see the bus lines for which park is not getting many people heading to it.
- the park we hit, if we even hit a park is largely what we're in the mood for and if we can hop, we'll leave a park if we get there and it's not doing it for us. we don't try to force the vacation to happen and go with how we feel. We generally miss most of our adrs and cancel most of our fastpasses as the week goes on.

Another tip, hold back a few days of tickets. It's pretty cheap and fast to add on days while you are there (with a package, you can do it at the resort. room only or offsite just stop by tickets or guest relations.). We've found a lot of savings doing this because you can't get a refund for unused days but we've never needed a ticket for every day and if your in a group that might do different things, you'll find a couple people in the group might need 1 or 2 more days than everyone else. fastpass+ really messes with this sometimes but you have a rough idea how much they matter to you already. Holding back also makes it easier to decide that your going off property a couple days if the mood hits you.

I totally agree....since we've been so many times now, our trip last week we took a more laid back, relaxed pace, and some days only spent 3-5 hours in a park. I've always been very Type-A commando style planner/tourer in the past. This trip we were up in the air on if we were going to take DS due to him having to earn his trip back through a "reward chart". I bought our tickets through Park Savers, and waited till a week before we left, so that really messed with our FP+ planning.....some we didn't book till the day before or day of. Some days we had ADRs in park, and we had MNSSHP, but other days we didn't decide what park we were going to until the night before or even that morning. As a result, we took time to hit some of the "lesser" rides we've never ridden before (Figment, the boat ride in Mexico, etc.). Not necessarily things I'd repeat, but they were things we'd never experienced at Disney before. We also stayed Deluxe this trip (Split between Polynesian and AKL---never done a split stay prior to this either). Spent several afternoons enjoying the pool and resort activities. One day we just took in Food & Wine festival and didn't ride but maybe 1-2 rides. Spent a morning doing the Wilderness Explorer activities in AK with our son.....he loved that and didn't care that we weren't riding rides. We all came home much more relaxed and happy at the end of the trip than we usually do. I wouldn't recommend this style if it's your first trip necessarily, but if you're like us and have been many, many times by now, I don't think I'd do it any other way.