Preparing for our trip to Walt Disney World Florida

It’s quite the exciting post today as we are now on the countdown to our holiday to Florida. It’s not long until I’ll be back in the happiest place on earth. As we all know I am a super planner and love planning everything when we go away and Walt Disney World certainly takes a lot of planning. I’ve been preparing for a few months now and the itinerary is coming together quite nicely. I’ve got to say there’s probably no such thing as a spontaneous, plan-free, chilled holiday to Walt Disney World anymore. There’s quite a lot that needs to be booked and organised in advance so I thought I’d do a post sharing how we have prepared for our trip to Florida.

Travel Insurance

First things first, Travel Insurance. It’s so important to get this sorted as soon as you have booked the holiday. Especially with everything that’s going on with Covid, it’s so crucial that you are covered with a decent travel insurance package.

CoverForYou have got some great family travel insurance packages which include covid cover. This means that if you have to isolate or get covid before you trip you will be covered. This is so reassuring for us as we have to do a test the day before we fly and whilst we are going to be isolating as much as we can, these things can happen. They also have a Travel Mate App which is where you can keep your policies all together and have things such as all the relevant emergency numbers, nearest hospital and even a jet lag calculator all in one place. With every country having different ruled upon entry, it can be a total minefield but CoverForYou will also guide you in what tests, paperwork and information you need for your upcoming travels. If you’ve got any trips coming up, I’ve got the code E29WBYYEEU which will give you 15% off for the next 12 months!

Booking park passes

As I said, going to Walt Disney World comes with a lot of planning. As soon as we booked our holiday over a year ago, we were advised to book our park passes. Park Passes were introduced after the parks reopened because of covid and manage how many people are entering the parks. You now have to book the park in which you are planning to visit months in advance. This means you’ve got to really be organised and work out where you are going to be and on what day. It’s also worth noting however, if you have a park hopper ticket, as long as you have visited the park you have booked in the morning, you can go to any other park after 2pm.

Disney Dining Reservations

The next thing on the check-list for planning our Walt Disney World holiday was dining reservations. These can now be booked 60 days before the date of the reservation. As we are actually staying on Disney property, we could book 60 days plus 10 days of holiday at the same time which is supposedly a perk of staying on-site. For UK people, the reservations are released at 11am and the super popular places such as Be Our Guest, Cinderella’s Royal Table, Topolino’s Terrace and Space 220 get booked up almost immediately. We managed to get some really great reservation and I can’t wait to share where we eat! I also plan to eat outside of Disney a little bit more than I have before so if anyone’s got any International Drive area recommendations – Let me know!

genie+

I still need to do a little bit more preparation when it comes to Genie+. The Disney Genie Service is a newly released system at Walt Disney World which helps you plan your day. However Genie+ is a paid service which is $15 per person, per day and essentially has replaced the free fast pass service. I’m pretty disappointed that it’s now a paid for service and if we used it everyday for 2 weeks, it would rack up quite the bill! In addition to Genie+, there is also the Individual Lightning Lane and these are for the big ticket rides such as Rise of the Resistance and Flight of Passage. On top of paying for Genie+, if you want to ride the most popular rides, Individual Lightning Lanes could cost up to another $15 for a fast pass.

This service has a lot of mixed reviews online, I still need to do more research on it. We plan to use Genie+ maybe once per park but just see how things go. It does sound very confusing and hard work when you are just wanting to enjoy your holiday instead of been glued to your phone. I’d love for them to bring back fast passes which were booked months in advance from the comfort of your own home but I doubt that will ever happen. I’m sure I’ll be doing a review after we return on my thought on the Genie+ service.

purchasing tickets

Tickets are pretty important. We purchased our Walt Disney World tickets as part of the package when we booked last year. However, we are also planning to visit Universal Studios too so we bought these tickets through AttractionTicketsDirect. I did a little shopping around and these had the best price along with the best deposit scheme. Our tickets through AttractionTicketsDirect also gave us a couple of freebies such as Dine4Less Cards and discounts at the local mall. We bought a 14 Day, 3 Park Universal Ticket so this includes entry to Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure and Volcano Bay Water Park.

covid testing

Finally, aside from lot’s more Disney researching and packing. The one main thing we need to get sorted is our covid testing before we fly. As i mentioned, we need to test ourselves the day before we fly to be able to go. I believe we’ll need to do a passenger locator form too. I’m dreading the test but we’re going to isolate as much as possible and hope for the best. These tests have to be done either in person or over a video call with a medical professional. I’m no expert so I’m glad that our travel insurance gives us a guide of what we need to do!

We’ve only a got a couple of weeks to go but I’m glad we’ve already done a lot of the main preparation. As i said, Walt Disney World now requires a lot of planning so just bare that in mind, especially with the added covid restrictions. Stay tuned though for lot’s of Florida content!