To Hop or Not

[TheBigErn]

In the current environment of park reservations, what are the pros and cons of park hopping? We're a group of 6 adults going to DW May 2022 and staying at SSR. We plan on hitting all of the parks and will be in the parks 4 possibly 5 days. The 5th day would be arrival day so would be a partial day at best. We will rope drop every day. If you do hop, how and when do you decide where to hop to?

 

[DVCkidsMOM]

The pros and cons are based upon what you want to do in the parks and when.
We like park-hopping because we frequently rope-drop in one park for rides then hop to another park for a meal or stroll or experiences with shorter lines if that park has shorter lines. The con, of course, is the cost and transportation time. Will you return to SSR between parks or not? Does where you want to eat match up with your rope-drop park days?
Honestly, we're not sure how the recent changes at WDW will affect our touring - we've already decided to not upgrade to APs for our next trip. In the future, we might also give up hopping in favor of $ spent toward Genie+ - who knows...

 

[TheBigErn]

The pros and cons are based upon what you want to do in the parks and when.
We like park-hopping because we frequently rope-drop in one park for rides then hop to another park for a meal or stroll or experiences with shorter lines if that park has shorter lines. The con, of course, is the cost and transportation time. Will you return to SSR between parks or not? Does where you want to eat match up with your rope-drop park days?
Honestly, we're not sure how the recent changes at WDW will affect our touring - we've already decided to not upgrade to APs for our next trip. In the future, we might also give up hopping in favor of $ spent toward Genie+ - who knows...

Probably won’t go back to the resort until the end of the night. Dinning isn’t an issue, we’ll work that in wherever

 

[loves to dive]

We have always hopped and I don't see that stopping any time soon. I have been since the reservation system/2 pm hopping rule. It is a little bit of a pain not being able to hop until 2, otherwise, I can't think of a bad thing about it. We go often so we are not rope droppers or the kind of people that need to see how many rides we can ride in a day. We aren't tied to any certain "must do" restaurants so we like the option of hopping somewhere else to eat. We also don't make advance ADRS, just day of, so being able to go to any park if something is open we are interested in works well for us. Before the reservation system we would just go to whatever park and if we were bored or it was too crowded or too hot or too whatever, we just hop on a bus and move on. We always use Disney transportation by the way, we do have a car but we enjoy refreshing adult beverages and certainly aren't going to drive after that.

I was there in April, solo. My days pretty much went getting up whenever, I am an early riser and that continues when I'm on vacation but I do sit around and enjoy a cup of coffee and take my time getting ready. I would then go to the park I had reservations in, do whatever I wanted to do and usually leave around 1 or so and either go back to the resort for some pool time or to the room to rest. Then I would hop to a different park, usually Epcot since F&G was happening and I was staying a Dolphin. One day I did hop to 3 parks. I started out the day at AK, did everything I wanted to do by around 1:45 so hopped over to Epcot for some snacking around the booths, then hopped over MK because I could and stayed there a few hours then hopped back to Epcot and snacked some more. MK always seems so crowded (and was the worst in April for people not wearing masks and not paying attention to the line markers) so we only tend to spend a couple of hours a time there.

Some people will tell you that if you use Disney transportation it's not good to hop because it takes too much of your time. I guess that is going to depend on what your goals are, frankly I kind of like the time it takes to go from point A to point B to get off my feet and rest in some AC. Since I've always done it, when I'm buying tickets I never actually look at the price of a single park ticket so the extra money has never been a factor. I can't imagine spending an entire day in only one park but, again, we have always hopped.

 

[CeCe0906]

We stayed at the Dolphin, so it was a no brainer to hop to Epcot in the afternoon/ evenings, made it easy to get to the hotel via walking path or friendship boat.
Also it gives you the flexibility that if something you want to ride is not running for some reason or the weather interferes with your plans for the day, you could return to that park and pick up what you missed.
Animal Kingdom closes earlier than the other parks, so a bus to another park was fun. We did leave about 30 to 45 min before closing to beat a crowd.
We didn't feel like we wasted too much time park hopping, it was kind of nice to have a 20ish minute break to sit down in AC and drink some water and plan what we wanted to do next. We were there in early August and the lines for the busses weren't long and busses came quickly.
Our last day we did HS, then went back in late afternoon to MK to pick up some rides that we missed and see the fireworks.