Planning help needed- Canadian Comparison WDW vs. DLParis vs. DLTokyo-

[MaMudduck]

I live close to Toronto GTA and have been in the very early starting planning processes for a Disney vacation. Im starting to think that when all the Park packages & foreign exchanges are done and it's almost "cheaper" to fly to Paris or Tokyo to get my Disney fix vs. going to WDW (or even DL).

All Disney parks are on my bucket list, so eventually I will go but I have soooooo many questions.

What was your experience?
Have any of you fellow Canucks been to either?
Besides length of flight times is there anything else I REALLY need to reconsider?
All things been considered at what dollar value difference would change where you would go between the 3 parks?
When is it better to good to Paris and/or Tokyo - for crowds and weather?


Thanks for ANY feedback.

 

[mkmommy]

I went to Disneyland Paris, but it was an add on to a Disney cruise.


I spent 2 days in the park. The parks were beautiful and loved the 2 days there but I can’t imagine spending more than 2 days. That could have to do with I love Europe and have a huge list of places I want to see that I feel I can’t stay in one place too long.

I could spend weeks at Disney World, love checking out all the resorts and parks, and find I miss that when I am in California or Paris.

Long way of saying I can’t imagine going all that distance just for Disney, but for an add on great, but if I want an all inclusive Disney holiday I would go to Orlando.

 

[BadPinkTink]

for Disneyland Paris, I would advise you to check out the Disneyland Paris section here on Dis. There are tons of threads from Americans asking questions and comparing their experience of Disneyland Paris and the American parks. There are also alot of Disneyland Paris regualrs who can answer specific questions

 

[AngelDisney]

I am planning a trip to Japan this summer. The language barrier is a problem when booking hotels and dining reservations. We will be spending 5 nights in Tokyo Disney and 4 days in the 2 parks. Then we will move on to Tokyo city (Ginza and Shibuya), Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo before a week’s stay in Hong Kong. We will not be visiting Hong Kong Disneyland this time as we visited it in 2016 and 2018. TDR like DLP should be treated as a side trip not a main trip to Japan or Europe. There are so many things to see and do. We visited DLP for 3 days as a side trip to a Med cruise. We also visited Vienna and Barcelona.

You can check out the Disboards forums regarding these two parks. Lots of helpful tips there! Have fun planning!

 

[kuhltiffany]

Following along for info on DL Paris. We're doing the Iceland DCL cruise this summer leaving out of Dover and plan on going to DL Paris first. We've done WDW many times, DL a few times but this is the first "international" one for us. So far it seems a lot more complicated to plan, different FP systems, hotel and ticket types...I'm just glad one of our kids speaks French fluently!

 

[isabellea]

So far I visited WDW (8 times) and Disneyland in California (only once). My favourite is Disneyland but I'm not sure I would only do a trip to California for DLR, I think I would prefer to combine with some traveling the California. In fact, even when we go to WDW we never only do Disney, we always combine with a beach stay or a cruise.

Our next Disney trip will probably be Disneyland Paris for our 20th in 2020. That trip will be 2 weeks long with half of it spent in London and the other half on Paris and DLP for 3 days. Tokyo Disneyland is also in our near future, depending on how often DH travels to Japan in the next few months so we can combine his business trip with pleasure so we can save on one plane ticket.

I already started looking at the process to book DLP or TDL and the biggest roadblocks I've encountered so far are the language barrier (for Tokyo only in my case since French is my main language), calendar (Holidays are very different than ours, especially in Japan and I want to avoid heavy crowds if I can) and booking process.

 

[MaMudduck]

We will be spending 5 nights in Tokyo Disney and 4 days in the 2 parks. Then we will move on to Tokyo city (Ginza and Shibuya), Kyoto, Osaka and Sapporo before a week’s stay in Hong Kong. We will not be visiting Hong Kong Disneyland this time as we visited it in 2016 and 2018. TDR like DLP should be treated as a side trip not a main trip to Japan or Europe. There are so many things to see and do. We visited DLP for 3 days as a side trip to a Med cruise. We also visited Vienna and Barcelona.

How exciting for you! What a fun summer your going to have. I was planning on doing either trip as an add-on, because and to quote my DH "Im not going all the way the Japan to go to Disney, I'm going to see Japan" to which I replied "Im not going half way around the world to skip the opportunity of going into a Disney Park in a country that has one!" So with either TDR or DLP there would be the park part and at least 1 week in addition to see the country.
I'm interested to know from about your plans from Tokyo City and how you planned it? Travel agent? tour group? etc.

Thanks

 

[AngelDisney]

I research on hotels within my budget at convenient locations and use Google maps to check travel time/distance from places we would definitely wish to visit to decide on where we would stay. Tripadvisors is helpful. I usually take local tours to places which are far from where we would stay. We will be taking a Mt. Fuji tour via Viator and a Kyoto tour with a local Japanese tour which offers drop off at Osaka from Kyoto. This way we would not need to buy the JR Pass. We will take a bus tour to Mt. Fuji and then ride the bullet train to Kyoto on our own. You must buy the amazing bento boxes from the train stations to eat on the train. From Kyoto, we will take a bus tour to see important sights in Kyoto then end the tour in Osaka to save a trip on our own. Then we will fly to Sapporo. ANA offers special domestic fares to foreigners at USD100 one way. I am still waiting for two ryokans to open for booking. A stay at a ryokan with onsen bath and Kaiseki meal would complete the Japanese experience. DD is working on her Japanese. Hopefully we will be ok travelling around on our own.

We are staying one night in Ginza after TDR then move to Shibuya for 5 nights since DD wants to take a hip hop lesson or two at a dance studio in Shibuya which is 20 min walk from the hotel we will be staying. I feel like there are so many things to see and do in Japan with so little time. Definitely we will have another trip planned for Japan after this one.

Check out TDRExplorer Blog/Site. They have wonderful tips for TDR and Japan planning.

I have found making dining reservations challenging. We would like to try some Michelin Stars sushi places but we can’t book on our own as foreigners. Some websites charges a fee, up to ¥4000 per person, to book for us. I have a World Elite MasterCard and I am planning to use their service to book dining reservations for me. Otherwise, we will try JPNEAZY which charges ¥200-1000 per reservation.
https://jpneazy.com/reservation/

Have fun planning!

 

[MaMudduck]

I research on hotels within my budget at convenient locations and use Google maps to check travel time/distance from places we would definitely wish to visit to decide on where we would stay. Tripadvisors is helpful. I usually take local tours to places which are far from where we would stay. We will be taking a Mt. Fuji tour via Viator and a Kyoto tour with a local Japanese tour which offers drop off at Osaka from Kyoto. This way We would not need to buy the JR Pass. We will take a bus tour to Mt. Fuji and then ride the bullet train to Kyoto on our own. You must buy the amazing bento boxes from the train stations to eat on the train. From Kyoto, we will take a bus tour to see important sights in Kyoto then end the tour in Osaka to save a trip on our own. Then we will fly to Sapporo. ANA offers special domestic fares to foreigners at USD100 one way. I am still waiting for two ryokans to open for booking. A stay at a ryokan with onsen bath and Kaiseki meal would complete the Japanese experience. DD is working on her Japanese. Hopefully we will be ok travelling around on our own.

We are staying one night in Ginza after TDR then move to Shibuya for 5 nights since DD wants to take a hip hop lesson or two at a dance studio in Shibuya which is 20 min walk from the hotel we will be staying. I feel like there are so many things to see and do in Japan with so little time. Definitely we will have another trip planned for Japan after this one.

Check out TDRExplorer Blog/Site. They have wonderful tips for TDR and Japan planning.

I have found making dining reservations challenging. We would like to try some Michelin Stars sushi places but we can’t book on our own as foreigners. Some websites charges a fee, up to ¥4000 per person, to book for us. I have a World Elite MasterCard and I am planning to use their service to book dining reservations for me. Otherwise, we will try JPNEAZY which charges ¥200-1000 per reservation.
https://jpneazy.com/reservation/

Have fun planning!

THANK YOU , this definitely gives me a great jumping off place!

 

[glenpreece]

I've been to DLP twice and have loved it each time. It's definitely different than our parks. I'd love to go to TDL but the language and the cost are what stops me. I can understand french reading, listening but just can't speak it and I didn't have any problems on my trips to Paris either time.

 

[Disney127]

We visited all 3 Asia Disney parks this past summer. The original plan was to visit Japan and TDR while we were there but DD suggested that we visit SHDL and HKDL too since we are in that part of the world. Her goal is to visit all Disney parks in the world, we are finishing off the list next year with a trip to Paris. We booked flights thru Air Canada from Calgary to Shanghai and from Tokyo back to Calgary. We used Hong Kong Airlines for the Shanghai to HK portion and HK to Osaka portion of our trip. Since we were traveling in the summer, flight prices were quite high so I had to do some researching to find the best deals plus also the times that we wanted to fly. And we utilized the 144 visa free transit when we were in Shanghai - we only stayed 3 days, been to China before and really had no interest in seeing other parts besides SHDL.

We were pleasantly suprised by SHDL - we read about the pushing and line cutting so we were prepared. We saw some of this but we never really let it ruin any fun for us. We stayed at the Toy Story Hotel and we got FPs for our stay. Each morning, we took the hotel bus that dropped us off at the hotel guest entrance into the park. There were alot of people trying to jam into a few lines but we always managed to stand our ground and not get pushed around. The two days that we were at the park, we were let in early - 7:30 am while the main gates did not open until 8 am. This gave us lots of time to get to the rides of our choice. We really liked Pirates and Tron. The park is massive so there was alot of walking to do. Most castmembers spoke English and if they didn't, then they would direct us to someone who did. The park food was good too and prices were reasonable after converting it back to Cdn. $

Since we have been to Hong Kong before, our visit this time was only for 4 days in which 2 was at HKDL. We liked HKDL because it reminded us alot of California DL which we visit on a yearly basis. We stayed at the Explorer Hotel at the resort, they gave us FP too but it wasn't really necessary since the line were short. We found the food quite expensive and all the castmembers we encountered spoke English. Of course, food prices were much lower in Kowloon compared to HKDL.

After our short visits to SHDL and HKDL, we flew to Osaka airport and took a train to Kyoto. We stayed at a ryokan (booked all of our hotels on booking.com with free cancellations) near the Nishiki Market and took day trips to visit the Kinkaku-ji Temple, Fushimi inari Shrine and many more. We found Kyoto to be very relaxing and laid back. People were very friendly and always willing to help.

After 5 days, we took the bullet train into Tokyo Station where we stayed for 11 days. We stayed in the Shinjuku area since we wanted to be in a lively area. From Shinjuku, we took the train everywhere - it was very easy using google map, it gave us the train time and even the train platform. We visited many sections of the Tokyo districst - Shibuya, Akasaka, Tsukiji, Akihabara etc,. We always met people who spoke English so we did not have any language barrier issues. Our touring style is to go at our own speed and not follow tours so we just did our own thing. Google is our friend as my husband would say. We visited TDL and Tokyo Sea for two days each. Both parks were very busy and it's amazing that the lines can get very long in such a short time. TDL was nice but we enjoyed our time in Tokyo DisneySea even more. The food prices were comparable to our Cdn money so that was a bonus for us.

The weather was very hot in all three countries since our trip was in August. We have been to California and Florida in the summer too so we prepared - drink lots of water and look for shade when we can. There are alot of umbrellas in the parks so be careful to not get poked in the eyes. We knew that there would be crowds during this season but we also knew to have early starts.

I'm not sure if after what we spent on this trip, the money aspect would be comparable to a trip to the US Disney parks but the Asia Disney parks were on our bucket list so we are glad that we visited them. It was definitely different hearing Jack Sparrow speak Manderin and seeing PTN with Cantonese vocals.