Phil does Disney – part 1

Disney Orlando – worth doing?

First of all, it’s a definite yes!  I was sceptical in 2009 before I first went, it’s just a theme park with rides right?  Wrong.  It’s an immersive world full of design, creation, happiness, fun, food, thrills, experiences and of course the rides. You will live in a Disney bubble for a couple of weeks – it’s safe, it’s different and it’s not your normal UK life!

Has it changed and is it still as magical?  Yes. True, you’ll never recapture the feeling of your first time because that’s when you first discover and experience the magic and sheer scale of it, but on subsequent holidays you’ll maximise your experience and see and do more than you ever did before.  It’s expensive of course it is – and it’s more expensive than ever now – but when you break it down I believe it still offers fantastic value for money overall [we’ll talk about costs later]. 

There’s been evolution of fast passes, lightning lanes, Genie+, virtual queues and options to ‘pay extra’ for new rides like Tron – we’ve seen it through all these things and, to be honest, there are benefits and negatives of each, but they all serve the same purpose and that’s to control lines – and they do it quite successfully.  This time we had standard tickets, no Genie+ and did not pay extra for any rides and yet we still, rather easily, got on every ride we wanted to [more than once] in reasonable time (I can’t remember queueing for more than 1 hour for anything to be fair). So, if you want to learn more I’ll be posting a series of documents like this talking about costs, pre-travel, hotels, Disney & Universal, food, rides, tips, getting around, other experiences!  Watch this space…

Article by Phil Green, originally from June 2024