Our family spent the holidays this year in our favorite place-Walt Disney World! Normally this is one of the busiest times of the year, but with the COVID policies in effect, we were able to enjoy each of the parks. Here are a few tips and my experiences to take for your next Disney vacation.
The first thing you need to do after making your resort reservation or purchasing your tickets is to make park reservations. You do still need a park reservation for each day you plan to visit. Your Wishes & Dreams Travel consultant can give you instructions on how to do this, but you will need to do this yourself. There are some COVID policies and procedures you will need to read and agree to when making these reservations.
We always like to visit Magic Kingdom first. There’s just nothing like seeing Cinderella’s Castle to begin your Disney experience! And visiting the Walt Disney World during the holidays is always an extra-magical experience. Seeing all of the beautiful decorations definitely will put you in the holiday spirit! Magic Kingdom was crowded, and there are still no fastpasses to use, but you can use the My Disney Experience app to check wait times. I recommend getting to the park early (even before the park opens if you can!) to get to the more popular rides before most people arrive. On our first day at the Magic Kingdom, we rode Space Mountain with only about a 30-minute wait, and on our second day we rode the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train with only about a 45-minute wait. Make sure to keep the recommend distance in the lines. The spaces are noted on the floor of each attraction for you. The lines do tend to move fairly quickly, so it didn’t seem to be that long. And we found that the wait times were generally lower than what was posted at the attractions and on the My Disney Experience app, except for at Hollywood Studios.
Hollywood Studios was definitely the most crowded park of all four. The lines there were the longest, especially for the more popular rides like Millennium Falcon: Smuggler’s Run and Slinky Dog Dash. You do still need to get a boarding pass for the newest attraction, Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance, but now you can get that on your My Disney Experience app at 7 am instead of having to actually be in the park. The boarding passes do fill up VERY fast, so make sure you are online right at 7 am to get one! If you can’t get one at 7 am, you do have one more chance at 1 pm. You do have to be in the park to get a boarding pass at 1 pm. We were not able to get a pass at 7 am on our first day, but we did get one at 1 pm. Our boarding group for that day was called at about 6:30 pm. On our second day in Hollywood Studios, we did get a boarding pass at 7 am, and we were the first group called. They did begin calling groups about 30 minutes before the park opened, so make sure you don’t miss your group! You only have 1 hour after your group is called to check into the Rise of the Resistance. A cast member will scan your magic band or your ticket to make sure that you have the correct boarding pass.
We did visit Epcot and Animal Kingdom too. Epcot was surprisingly empty, and we were able to walk on to several of the more popular attractions, including Soarin’! I have never walked right onto Soarin’ before, even with a fastpass! And we had one of the best safaris ever at Animal Kingdom. I recommend heading to Flight of Passage in Pandora first, because that is the most popular attraction in Animal Kingdom now, but then make your way to the Kilimanjaro Safari. The animals are definitely more active in the mornings, and in the cooler weather. We saw so many animals!
There were things that were different from a “normal” Walt Disney World vacation, such as parades and fireworks, but Disney did have characters out at a safe distance from guests, and they had pop-up parades at each park every day for guests to enjoy. Go to our agency Facebook page to see videos of some of these parades. They were so much fun, and we even got to see Santa! So if you’re thinking of planning a Walt Disney World vacation now, there definitely is still that Disney magic to enjoy!
