infant travel Archives - Page 5 of 11

Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Jan 28 2016

Daring to Disney: Touring Epcot attractions with a toddler

OK, I’ve gotten a little bored about writing about saving money and maximization, so I’m gonna take a break from that stuff and get to the fun stuff – parks! Including the afternoon we arrived, we spent six and a half days in the parks. We broke up our time into three days at Magic Kingdom and two at both Epcot and Animal Kingdom. Here’s what it was like touring Epcot attractions with a toddler.

Never really tired of the view — Never really tired of this view

For this post, I’ll be discussing the attractions at Epcot and how my particular toddler (who was about to turn three) felt about them. She is by no means representative of all toddlers, but hopefully our experiences can give you an idea of what to expect if you’re going with young kids.

For each attraction I’ll include a brief description, M’s take, and my take.

Before I start, a couple random thoughts about Epcot.

EVERYTHING is sponsored. BTW this post brought to you by Siemens!
World Showcase is a lot more interesting than I remembered (haven’t been to Disney since the late 90s)
Wear comfortable shoes – it’s the most walking you’ll do at Disney
Soarin’ being closed straight up sucked. It reopens in June 2016.
Epcot is a great place to take a date (subject of a future post)

Spaceship Earth

Ride a slow moving vehicle to learn about how technology has evolved through the ages

Adult take: Spaceship Earth is a ride created by nerds and for nerds. Thus, I loved it. The animatronics are great, there are generally very low lines, and there are a lot of cool things to look at. They’ve added an interactive portion at the end which is nice, but they end at the personal computer – the house sized ones. Could use an update.

Toddler take: This was M’s very first ride at Walt Disney World. In what was to become a recurring theme, the dark portions of the ride were a little too scary for M to want to ride again. She thought some parts of the ride were cool, especially the end, but had no interest in going back. Great for infants in carriers though!

Living with the Land

A boat ride talking about farming and various agriculture innovations and experimentation

Adult take: Again, the nerd in me was a big fan, especially the science nerd in me. Not sure if Disney is BSing about the amount of research that goes on there (maybe a little?), but the experiments and different growing techniques are pretty cool, as are the large variety of crops.

Trust me, he's into it — Trust me, he’s into it

Toddler take: A nice, peaceful ride, though with a dark thunder and lightning section that can be scary. M had fun identifying different fruits and vegetables though obviously all the science stuff was over her head. Another great ride for an infant.

Journey into Imagination with Figment

Take a ride with a purple dragon and the power of your imagination

Adult take: One of my favorite rides as a kid, I was a little underwhelmed this time. I think they only play the chorus of the song in one section so as not to annoy people (a la It’s a Small World), but I liked it and kind of missed it.

Toddler take: Some scary moments, especially when they blow a big gust of air, but this ride made an impression on her and she still references the purple dragon. Pretty tame overall, though they could turn the volume down a little.

The Seas with Nemo and Friends

Ride a clamshell through a synopsis of Finding Nemo

Adult take: The tech was pretty cool, they were projecting Nemo onto real tanks and stuff. It was a nice ride but you don’t need to take the ride to go see the main tanks, which are the real draw. The tanks were great, as impressive as any aquarium and as we talked about on the last Observation Deck you can even go snuba diving in them if you’d like.

Toddler take: With no knowledge of the movie just another ride that was too dark for M. She was into the turtles though. M absolutely loved the main tanks though, we spent a good forty five minutes to an hour just looking at fish. One of her favorite places to visit in Epcot. Never got to go to Turtle Talk timing wise, but I think it would have been great.

Pure bliss for the 3 year old — This made her day

Meet Disney Pals at the Epcot Character Spot

Greet three of the fab five (Minnie, Mickey, Donald, Goofy, Pluto) one at a time, grabbing pictures and autographs from each of them individually

Adult take: The Epcot character spot is probably my second favorite character meet and greet in Walt Disney World. The lines are low (and Fast Pass is easy), and it’s great meeting three characters all at once. It also moves very efficiently, you move from character to character in three different sections that are all in the same room.

Toddler take: The Epcot character spot kicked off M’s obsession with getting character autographs that lasted our entire trip. She didn’t have an autograph book the first day but they found notecards and a Sharpie to give her autographs. She slept with all three by her bedside that night and the only reason she didn’t go to bed holding them is because I told her she might wrinkle them. We were at the park with an autograph book the next day.

Gran Fiesta Tour Starring the Three Caballeros (Mexico Pavilion)

Slow boat ride with a bunch of singing ducks

Adult take: Kind of a weird ride, but relaxing and with some nice scenery and a killer view of the Mexico pavilion.

Toddler take: Enjoyable boat ride for kids, good to kill time, singing ducks are funny.

Kidcot Fun Stops at World Showcase

In each pavilion, you can get a special stamp on a Duffy the Disney bear that they give you (basically a piece of card stock attached to a stick). Each pavilion has its own unique take on it.

Adult take: We didn’t realize what the fun stops were until late on our last day at Epcot, which was too bad. This isn’t for adults but requires adults to keep track of things and know what they’re looking for.

Toddler take: M was a huge fan of this and wanted to get every stamp (once we figured out there were multiple stamps to get). She got shy with a lot of the people giving out the stamps but I think it really made World Showcase “worth it” for her. I think this would appeal to some kids all the way up to even middle school.

Final Thoughts

You’d think Epcot wouldn’t appeal to toddlers, but I actually think it’s pretty good for them. You could spend a whole day at the world showcase exposing them to different cultures (or reminding them of places they visited when they were too young to remember!). The character spot was great, the lines are shorter, and there are lots of great places to eat. Also, it doesn’t hurt to try to turn your kid into a nerd sooner rather than later. Just kidding. Not really.

"I only came here to see Mickey" — “I only came here to see Mickey”

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Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Jan 13 2016

Daring to Disney: Saving money by staying off site

When I had originally booked this trip, we originally had booked two rooms at Port Orleans: Riverside for seven nights at a rate of about $200/night. After much thought, however, I ultimately cancelled that reservation and booked a vacation home rental. So we would experience Disney staying off site. The question is, how much money did we end up saving and was it worth it?

The rental property

So we ended up renting from Sweet Home Vacation. They have a bunch of properties located all over the place, though many of them, like ours, are fairly close to Disney World.

We rented a three bedroom apartment complete with kitchen and two living rooms (Sun Lake Condo 2). It was a great location; it never really took us longer than 15-20 minutes to reach any of the parks.

Having three bedrooms was super useful. My parents stayed in one room, M stayed in a second with one parent while Baby H stayed in the master with parent #2 (we rotated).

Sweet Home Vacation did a good job of taking care of us. They provided a pack and play and stroller on request, although they didn’t include a sheet for the pack and play so we didn’t use it. We brought our own strollers as well but it was nice to have a stroller at our property to give us options.

I think having a ton of space, especially with a toddler and infant, was invaluable and singlehandedly justified our decision to switch. The kitchen was useful for heating up things and would have been more useful if we had stocked up on groceries on day one and cooked. Having two living rooms meant adults could find space away from the kids when necessary, and a laundry machine completed the useful appliances available to us.

The condo wasn’t perfect – the A/C was kind of uneven, although that didn’t totally matter since the weather was kind of cool.

Ultimately, not looking at cost, moving from Port Orleans Riverside was the right move. We missed out on some of the Disney magic and it would have been nice to have access to multiple pools (we never checked out ours as it was a bit chilly), but when you have little kids space is the real key. However, staying with Sweet Home Vacation did add some costs in terms of convenience.

Renting a car

We were probably going to rent a car anyway, but when we decided to move off site we were locked in to renting a car. As I mentioned in my planning post, I used Autoslash. We ended up with a rate of $100 for the week for a standard car from EZ Rental (same as Advantage). If I have one beef with Autoslash, it’s the inability to eliminate certain car companies from their price slashing.

If we didn’t have kids, EZ would have been great. But we have two kids, and I had to wait in line for over 30 minutes to get our car (at least we didn’t have to take a shuttle). Luckily the kids kept it together but it could have been a real disaster. My parents got a rental from budget for $180, in retrospect I would have paid the extra $80 for the quick car service (or even just a shorter line).

Money saved meant more money for dessert

Another thing we lost moving off site was Disney’s Magical Express. If you’re not familiar with the service, basically they tag your checked bags with special Disney tags at your origin and they show up at your hotel sometime the night you arrive. Then you just take a bus directly to the hotel and skip baggage claim and all that.

We really ended up needing something like that, since I had to use some space from my dad’s car for luggage. If not for that, I would have had to upgrade the car which would have added to cost.

Another added cost was parking at the theme parks, which cost us $20 today. I could have saved money on that, but that’s for a later post.

Final Cost Analysis

So here is how much things ended up costing us.. I used $175/night as the rate for Port Orleans: Riverside since that’s the lowest price I found with various discounts after we had already switched (yes I kept an eye on it).

Item	Port Orleans: Riverside	Off-site condo
Total Room Costs	$2450	$840
Rental Car Costs	$100	$100
Parking Fees	$0	$240
Miscellaneous Purchases	$0	$100
Total Overall Cost	$2550	$1280

So we saved about $1200 overall for the cost of some convenience (the Magical Express). So we ended up with a lot more room and some freedom and saved a bunch of money. All in all I think it was the right decision – maybe when our kids are older it’ll be worth the extra premium. I’m sure on site hotels have the Disney magic but…well, maybe next time. If you want to read more about deciding about on and off site, I found these posts by Dia invaluable.

Suddenly M has started asking for a twin bed

Final Thoughts

I’m super happy we took my friend’s recommendation and checked out Sweet Home Vacation. While we may have lost out on some of the Disney magic and lost the convenience of the Magical Express, we saved a bunch of money and ended up in a condo that was a lot better suited for our needs with a three year old and an infant. I should have saved even more money – that’s tomorrow’s post.

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Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Jan 05 2016

Daring to Disney: Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans touring plans

As I mentioned in my last post, Touring Plans is a web site dedicated to making the Disney experience either. The site is named after their touring plans – itineraries designed to minimize your wait times in the parks. According to the website, “using a touring plan is 5 times more important than picking which park to visit.” In this post I’ll discuss really optimizing your time at Disney using Touring Plans!

Follow the trip in real time on Twitter or Instagram!

Now as you’ll see in this post, touring plans are really well suited for Type A sorts. If you are happy to wander in the park and go where the wind takes you, touring plans aren’t for you. If you are trying to squeeze every last drop of fun and maximize every last second in the parks…well, the year long subscription is only 13 bucks.

To be clear up front, I have not yet gone to Disney, so I cannot evaluate how well Touring Plans did at this very moment. I will, however, go through how I used the website (paid subscription) to optimize optimize optimize our times in the parks. Or at least attempt to. Once we’re back, I’ll come back with some thoughts on how well everything went.

Pre-set Touring Plans

Part of the overwhelming nature of Disney is that there is so much to do. Four parks, dozens of things to see/do/experience in each park, etc. etc. What’s good for adults? What’s good for toddlers? What’s good for families traveling with grandparents? I found that the pre-set touring plans on the website really helped me to narrow down what I wanted to see.

If you have a paid subscription, you have access to all the touring plans that Touring Plans have come up with. There a ton of different touring plans for different preferences – I counted 14 for parents of small children in the Magic Kingdom alone. Some are very specific, like utilizing evening Extra Magic Hours, while some are more general, like “hit up all the highlights in a day” sort of plans. Each touring plan has a list of recommended attractions to see – they are listed in a recommended order of visiting (usually with busier attractions front loaded). Of course, these are just lists that don’t take into account predicted crowd levels for a given day, time of year, what time you’re getting to the park, etc.

As an example, I chose the “Two Day Dumbo or Die” plan for small children. Here’s the top of the list of attractions they recommended:

I chose similar plans for each of our days in the park (having already used the crowd calendar to decide which days we will go where). Of course, this just gives you a list of attractions to see, not very fun in and of itself. Where I really started going nuts was with the personalized touring plans and optimization software.

Personalizing and Optimizing your touring plans

If you subscribe to Touring Plans, you can copy one of the pre-set templates and fiddle with it on your own. So for example, if you look at the above, I determined that the Haunted Mansion might be a bit much for M, so I took it off. I also threw a couple extra rides on It’s a Small World onto the touring plan, an extra Dumbo ride, and subtracted things like Wishes (she’s too young and she already told us she doesn’t want to go because it’s too loud, though of course I’ll ask again). You also give Touring Plans your expected date at the park so it can factor in crowd levels.

Once you have your personalized touring plan, you have the option to optimize, evaluate, or view and print your plan.

Viewing and printing your plan is obvious. The “optimize” button takes all the attractions you are interested in, throws it into some kind of algorithm, and then spits out the best possible order you can visit the attractions. You can add in rest times, breaks, dining reservations, etc. at certain times to help break up the day and the software can account for that as well. The “evaluate” button updates the wait and travel times for the attractions in the order you have them listed. So, if optimize spits out something you don’t necessarily like, you can move things around a bit and then see how that affects your wait times. Every step of your touring plan has something like this:

Touring Plans calculates your estimated wait time, the duration of the ride, and the amount of time it will take for you to walk to your next step. You can tell Touring Plans what you want it to optimize in your touring plan. There is a slider for you to give your preference of walking less or waiting in line less and a slider for you to estimate your walking speed.

Finally, once you are done, Touring Plans spits out a map which is useful to get a general feel for the geography and the ground that you will be covering.

I started getting a little crazy with this information, but I should talk about how Touring Plans works with Fast Pass+ first.

Using Fast Pass+ with Touring Plans

If you already have Fast Pass+ reservations, you can add them into your touring plan and Touring Plans will take them into account. Interestingly enough, Touring Plans sometimes doesn’t use your FP+ reservations. When that’s the case, it explains why (usually it’s because they don’t think they are going to save you time). If you want to still use it, you can “force” the program to use it via the Evaluate button as discussed above.

If you haven’t made your FP+ reservations yet, there is a way to get Touring Plans to recommend FP+ to shoot for, though I found it a little difficult to figure out at first. Basically, you need to open up the FP+ reservation tab in Touring Plans and tell them how many FP+ reservations you have to make. Everyone of course gets 3, but there might be instances when you have less than that. For example, Jess and I are planning on heading back to the Magic Kingdom one night on our own – we can theoretically “save” a third FP+ reservation for the night and thus would only have 1 to put into our separate touring plan. We’re not, but I’m just saying that is a possibility.

The group one and group two business is for parks like Epcot that have tiered attractions. For example, you’ll never be able to reserve a FP+ ahead of time for both Test Track and Soarin’ in the same day. Anyway, after you’ve put in the number of FP+ selections you have, hit optimize and Touring Plans will recommend which rides to use them on. Then you can go to Disney’s site and try to sync as much as possible.

Going down the touring plan rabbit hole

So I optimized our touring plans for a couple of days in the park (though not the last day because I want to see what M is into) over a month ago. A funny thing happened when I logged in last week. I hit “optimize”, and lo and behold, Touring Plans calculated a whole new order of attractions for us! My guess is they use Fast Pass data or…I don’t know, magic? Either way, it threw a real monkey wrench into things because I had spent the last two weeks going over our first Magic Kingdom day itinerary with M. (I know, I know, maybe that wasn’t wise but I was excited and she was too).

Long story short, I spent a few hours messing with our touring plans – moving a ride from one day to another, flipping around FP+ options, splitting FP+ options – it got pretty intense. Of course, I loved every moment of it. It’s kind of silly – who the heck knows if their estimates are going to be on point? – but I took extreme joy in fine tuning our plans. I spent most of my time on the Magic Kingdom stuff, though we have a full day at Epcot that I want to maximize as well. Animal Kingdom is whatever and we likely are going to pass on Disney’s Hollywood Studios because M is too young (though Star Wars stuff is tempting).

Anyway it will be straight up hilarious if the touring plan completely sucks and is off – but I think it should be okay (we’re also not going at an extremely busy time so that’s going to help a ton). Either way, I’ll be sure to let you guys know. At the very least, I think I got my money’s worth just “gaming”.

Our Magic Kingdom plans

So we’re likely spending three days at the Magic Kingdom – this is what I’ve got on tap for us.

On the first day, M and I are going to “rope drop” – aka get to the parking lot by 8:15 AM and to the turnstiles by or before park opening. After hitting Winnie the Pooh first, we’ll hit a few attractions in Tomorrowland including a FP+ reservation at Tomorrowland Speedway. I was really nervous she wasn’t going to be tall enough to sit behind the wheel herself (we’ve been on similar rides and she’s always been disappointed). Thank you, growth spurt! After we’re done with Tomorrowland we’re going to spend the rest of the day in Fantasyland – FP+ at Peter Pan, Enchanted Tales with Belle, and Little Mermaid (we’re working with four adult tickets so I’m playing fast and loose with our FP+ reservations. I’d play even faster and looser but I’d like us all to ride some stuff together). Hopefully we squeeze in two rides on It’s a Small World and Dumbo before we take M home for the night. After her nap Jess and I are gonna head back to the park and hopefully do Pirates, Haunted Mansion, and one or two thrill rides.

On our second day we’ll hit the attractions in Frontier and Adventureland that we missed – Jungle Cruise, Country Bears, etc. etc. I FP+ most of the same things from Day 1, figuring if she likes them a lot we’ll probably want to skip the lines. That second day is also a day we can take her to see shows if we think she’s going to be into it, and we’re planning on hanging around for a parade. By then I’ll have gauged how she does on rides and we’ll be able to talk about whether she can do something like Haunted Mansion. I sincerely doubt it but who knows. That’s also the day we can do stuff like ride the train or ride the People Mover six times in a row if she wants (or if I want…pretty sure I’ve done that before).

For day three, I’m planning on taking all her favorites and throwing them all into one mega over-stimulation station of a touring plan!

Anyway, after typing this last section, I realize nobody probably cares except me (I’m including my wife, parents, and even M) but you know what I’m so excited it just came out! Sorry!

Final Thoughts

Creating your own personalized touring plans with the Touring Plans software is every Type A Disney fan’s dream. Well, it’s mine, at least. We’ll see how well the software does – plus I’ll be monitoring crowds in real time using the Lines App. Hopefully I’ll have good news to report!

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Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans

Jan 04 2016

Daring to Disney: Using Touring Plans (the non-touring plan parts)

With Disney fast approaching, I’ve been in turbo planning mode. You’d think that once you’ve booked your flights, hotel (though that’s changed), dining reservations, and tickets you’d be done right? For most people that’s true, but for the truly crazy – you can plan out your day to the minute thanks to Touring Plans. I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole so I thought I’d share some of what I’ve found out.

What exactly is Touring Plans?

Touring Plans is a website designed to help with Disney planning created by the same people who wrote the Unofficial Guide(s) to Disney. The site has a ton of features, including super helpful stuff about when to go, where to stay (including info on pretty much every single room in every single Disney resort), links to cheaper (barely) tickets, info on every single ride and restaurant, but most importantly: access to their premium touring plan creator and optimization software.

You can get a lot of this stuff on their free site, but signing up for a year long subscription is where the magic truly happens. The site subscription only costs $12.95 a year, though if you scroll all the way down on the homepage you can find a 20% coupon code making it even cheaper.

The crowd calendar is what initially attracted me to Touring Plans

Almost everything I’m going to be talking about is as a subscriber, I decided early on that ~$10 was well worth it. But I should let you know the one big caveat: you need to trust that Touring Plans has quality crowd calculators and line optimization software. They supposedly have people in the parks every day and they also crowd source data via their Lines app, but if you don’t trust their ability to make the right calculations then you probably think the entire website is a crock. I choose to think that they take their jobs pretty seriously and know what they’re doing, but I guess I’ll find out soon enough.

For what it’s worth, I’ve heard a ton of good things, but who knows. Anyway, let’s go through Touring Plans features one by one. They have a handy dandy checklist for planning a trip, so I’ll just use that. I’m sure they have a ton of features I haven’t even scratched the surface of too!

Pick Dates and Pick Parks

I originally paid for the Touring Plans subscription for one thing only: the crowd calendar and tracker. Basically, Touring Plans uses historical data, data they gather from the parks daily, and…I dunno, magic? They use this information to predict the sizes of crowds at each of the four Orlando Disney parks for every single day of the year. They offer an overall crowd level for Disney, along with individual crowd levels for each park. It’s on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the most crowded. Also if you want to get into the nitty gritty they have graphs for how long you can expect to wait at certain attractions depending on the crowd level.

Graph of potential wait times with variance!

Without a paid subscription, you are limited in the days you can look at (usually I think it’s just some upcoming dates). With a subscription, you can look at all the days they have predicted thus far, up through a year in advance or so. So you can plan your vacation around less busy times. Most of these coincide with what you would think, but Touring Plans takes into account the school vacations of the entire country and just has access to more information than your common sense.

Another nice feature with the paid subscription is you can track dates – Touring Plans will notify you if the crowd sizes they are expecting changed. I booked this trip over six months ago and have received one or two such notifications for our trip.

Finally, using the Lines app, you can actually track how crowds are looking on the day of, including current wait times at the park. Obviously I haven’t tried this yet but I’m looking forward to seeing how well it does. Touring Plans also uses this information to reflect on how well their predictions went.

Find a Hotel

Touring Plans also has a lot of information about on site hotels. What is specifically useful is they have pictures of many (all?) of the rooms on site. They also will fax in a room request for you if there is a particular room you like. Their room search is very extensive. You can search view, floor, accessibility, walking distance from lobby – you name it you can probably search for it. While I think there are better resources out there when looking at Disney hotels, Touring Plans definitely has a lot of breadth that you can get lost in if you want to find that perfect room.

There are tons of search criteria to help you find the perfect room

Buy Tickets

If you want to get a feel for how much money you can save on tickets, you can use Touring Plans to do that as well. They have links to various places you can buy tickets for a slight discount (I assume they are some kind of affiliate links). Ultimately, I ended up making my own discount – check out the comments from that post for a lot of great ideas from people better at this than me!

Explore the Parks – Attractions, Shows, and Dining Options

Again, Touring Plans does a comprehensive job of listing all the attractions, shows, and dining options in the World. They have information about wait times, busy times, whether rides are good for kids, height restrictions, rider switch availability – again, it’s very comprehensive. They have a rating for pretty much every single attraction for every age level which I found very useful. I also found it useful to know what kind of “scares” to expect so I could decide whether to take M or not.

Touring Plans

Now the absolute, most wonderful thing about Touring Plans, to me, is their touring plan software. To simplify: they basically take all the knowledge they have about park attraction wait times, throw it into a computer, and help you determine the best route through the parks. But that is worth a post in and of itself, because I went pretty deep down the rabbit hole. Let’s just say that if you like maximizing itineraries and want to go to Disney, Touring Plans is the website for you. But more on that later.

Final Thoughts

Even without the touring plans themselves, Touring Plans is a great website for planning a Disney vacation. It can assist in planning every aspect of your trip, even if you are using the free version. If you pay a little bit of money for a year long subscription, you get a ton more features that personally got me more and more excited about the trip (if that were possible). Stay tuned to see how crazy using Touring Plans can get!

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Optimizing a visit using Touring Plans’ touring plans