Three Day Park Hopper - Early Entry Advice

[ashaway12]

Good morning, our family has been to WDW a few times and we are taking our 10 year old and 7 year old to Disneyland for the first time this April. We have three day park hopper passes and are doing a Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday and are staying at the Disneyland Hotel. The original plan was to start at Disneyland Wednesday, California Adventure Thursday, and Disneyland again on Friday and bounce around as needed. Now with the early entry feature being limited to one park per day if we wanted to take full advantage of that feature we would have to start two days at DCA. My thought is that we would need more time at DL than DCA and not being able to get there until after 11:00 AM on the last day wouldn’t be great. I wanted to ask the group, what would you do in this situation? Is it still worth on the third day to start at DCA and go to DL later in the day? Or if we want to spend more time at DL just skip that early entry feature on the last day?

 

[Pluto468]

I'd go with your original plan of DL-DCA-DL. You're right that you'll probably want more time at Disneyland. I don't think it's worth changing things up just to do EE at DCA unless you really love some rides at DCA.

 

[starry_solo]

I agree, you need more time at DL than DCA. Plus, with staying at DLH, if the monorail is running, you can time it by going through the turnstiles around 7:50-7:52 a.m. and getting onto the first monorail of the day, arriving inside DL at 8 am (around the bend at Matterhorn). We did that one day last week and it was nice

 

[RockyMtnMouse]

I'm in a similar situation (we're doing DL-DL-off day-DCA). I could switch my days to take advantage of EE but we're okay missing it. We'll get one EE day at DL and that's it. I'm not sure my kids will want to wake up that early more than once

 

[LKing]

If MWF are DCA EE and Thursday is DL EE, I think I would change it to DL, DL, DCA.

First day do Disneyland. Take in the park, ride what you can, meet characters, take photos and get your bearings of where things are and what your strategy will be for EE the following morning.

On Thursday, get up early and take advantage of EE at Disneyland. Hop over to DCA later in the day, get your bearings and create a strategy for EE at DCA the following morning.

On Friday, do DCA until you have done all you wanted to do and then hop over to DL for anything you might have missed. You can even hop back to DCA later if you want.