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Home / Type of trip / Attractions / How to avoid the queues at Disney World

How to avoid the queues at Disney World

August 19, 2013 by Gretta Schifano 6 Comments

Hippo underwater, Disney's Animal Kingdom. Copyright Gretta Schifano.

I can’t believe how much difference a library book made to our recent family holiday to Orlando. I dashed in for some guidebooks before we left and my haul included the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World. It’s a brick of a book, 848 pages thick, and I imagined it would give the inside track on what to do at Disney.

Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World

I had no idea that, besides giving a wealth of detail on each of the Disney parks and attractions, it provides touring plans for what to see in each park and, crucially, the best time to see things and the order in which to see them. In short, it’s genius and I believe that this book saved us hours of boring queueing. There’s a new edition of the book published every year, and the plans it provides are based on years of data from Disney visits by an independent team of authors. If you haven’t been, I can tell you that Disney is vast – it apparently covers an area twice the size of Manhattan – and you really need to plan what to do in order to make the most of a trip there, because it would take months to see everything.

There’s also an app to go with the book. It’s called Lines, and the $11.99 it cost to download to my iPhone was definitely money well-spent. It allowed us to personalise our touring plans by date and time of visit as well as adding or deleting attractions. Lines then calculated the best time to visit each attraction in order to minimise queueing. The app also told us the best and worst parks to visit each day, based on crowd levels. Free Wi-Fi across the Disney parks meant that I could update our plans as we went along.

Animal Kingdom

The first time we used the app was at Disney’s Animal Kingdom the day after we arrived in Orlando. We’d had a trying morning: our safe wouldn’t shut, my husband’s Blackberry was playing up and we got hopelessly lost en route to the park. We arrived at Animal Kingdom an hour later than planned, jet-lagged, hot and bothered. We picked up our tickets (we’d paid online for two-week Disney passes before leaving the UK), went in to the park, and as we headed to the first attraction in our plan, feeling stressed, I wondered why on earth we’d chosen Orlando for a holiday.

Parade at Disney's Animal Kingdom. Copyright Gretta Schifano

But as soon as we went on our first ride I relaxed and started to have fun. Animal Kingdom is leafy, green and spacious and has animals in their natural habitats as well as some great rides. It reminded me of nearby Busch Gardens in many ways. I loved Expedition Everest, where an open train whizzes you up ‘Mount Everest’ until it grinds to a halt, the end of the track twisted in the air above, and the train speeds backwards down the slope only to stop again because there’s a ‘yeti’ roaring up ahead. Kali River Rapids was great for cooling off: we sat in a round inflatable with another family and swooshed along a white water river. The Kilimanjaro Safaris Expedition was fun: a safari bus drove us through ‘Africa’ to see rhinos, zebra, elephants, giraffes and more, all housed in spacious enclosures which mimicked their natural habitats. The two theatre shows we saw at the park were brilliant: Finding Nemo – The Musical and The Festival of the Lion King were both of the highest standard. At the Conservation Station the youngest was fascinated to watch a vet working on a tortoise with a cracked shell – it had been run over by a car. For lunch we used the Lines app to find the best place to eat and ended up having salad at the Flame Tree Barbecue at a shady table by the lake. One of the best parts of the day was the wonderful afternoon parade featuring Disney characters, huge animal puppets, floats, musicians, singers and dancers. We followed our Lines touring plan all day and the only time we waited for anything was ten minutes for the parade to pass. I think that’s pretty good for early August.

Family travel lowdown

We paid £1020  in total for our four Disney 14-day Ultimate Tickets. The RRP for the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World is £15.99, but I borrowed it from our local library. The Lines app cost us $11.99.

This is not a sponsored post.

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Related

Categories: Attractions, Travel advice, USA
Tags: Animal Kingdom, Orlando, Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, Walt Disney World

About Gretta Schifano

I'm a freelance journalist and blogger specialising in family travel with teenagers, trips when parents manage to travel without their kids, and 50+ travel. I also write about vegetarian travel, parenting teenagers, adoption, SEN, ADHD and anxiety. My work's been published by the Financial Times, Guardian, Independent, National Geographic Traveller, Lonely Planet and others. I've lived and worked in Italy and Spain and am now based in rural south-east England with my husband, adoptive and birth kids and our dog. I previously worked as a social action radio producer for the BBC.

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Comments

  1. Susanna says

    August 21, 2013 at 2:10 pm

    We’ve never been to Disneyworld! I grew up near Disneyland in CA, so we always went there. The queues are truly boring (and hot) and can be enough to put anyone off. Those tips are great and a the app sounds wonderful too. x
    Susanna recently posted…Whitewater rafting with kids on the American RiverMy Profile

    Reply
    • Gretta says

      August 21, 2013 at 3:13 pm

      I’ve never been to DisneyWorld CA, but you must be a real expert if you grew up going there. The app definitely helped us avoid the queues.

      Reply
  2. NYlon Living says

    August 20, 2013 at 2:25 am

    I didn’t know about the app but we had the book too. It was recommended to me and I recommend it to all our friends who go to Disney. Really useful!
    NYlon Living recently posted…It’s Good to be a DukeMy Profile

    Reply
    • Gretta says

      August 20, 2013 at 12:45 pm

      I know, it’s brill! I was so glad I happened to find it at the library.

      Reply
  3. Trish says

    August 19, 2013 at 6:15 pm

    What a great library find! The app was a godsend too.
    Good to hear your holiday was a success x
    Trish recently posted…Beach Volleyball in AustriaMy Profile

    Reply
    • Gretta says

      August 19, 2013 at 6:19 pm

      I know, both the book and the app were fantastically helpful.

      Reply

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This is a personal blog written and edited by me, Gretta Schifano. Sometimes I’m given products or sent on trips to review, but I always make this clear and give my honest opinion. See my About page for full details.

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