The number one question I get from people about traveling to Disney is WHEN? When is the best time to go?
The short answer? It DEPENDS. There are a ton of factors to consider. The weather, the crowds, pricing, discounts, work schedules, school schedules, special events, new attractions, closing attractions, budget concerns…A Walt Disney World or Disneyland vacation is an expensive trip, and to maximize the value you receive for your family or traveling group, you want to make sure that you are choosing the best time FOR YOUR SPECIFIC FAMILY, depending on what is important to you.
For example, we are right now planning a big extended family trip to Disney for 2019. This trip will include my parents, my husband and myself, and my brothers and their families—which will include two high school age kids, and two elementary school age kids. A couple of factors are playing into our decision of WHEN to go.
First: Budget and time for everyone to SAVE. Originally, we’d talked about planning the trip for the fall of 2018. However, we quickly realized that it would be too difficult for everyone to save enough money to pay for the trip in time (about 1 year out when we started tentative conversations). All those kids are expensive, 😉! We determined that planning a trip two years out gave everyone more time to budget for the trip. Not that it necessarily takes two years of concentrated saving to afford a Disney vacation, but let’s face it…the bigger window you have to figure out how to pay for something, the easier it can be to figure it out! As a family, we’ve already discussed that the Christmas holiday nearest our trip will be a no-gift exchange Christmas—we will all focus most of our holiday budgets towards the trip. If budget or time to save isn’t a concern for your family, this is a consideration you can skip.
Second: School schedules and work schedules. When I plan trips with my husband, I pretty deliberately choose dates when I know kids are in school, because that helps a little bit with crowd volumes. However, when traveling with the extended family, school schedules are a BIG factor. Especially for the older kids—we really don’t want to pull them out of school for more than a day or two…but you also don’t want to go to Disney for a 2 or 3 day trip. If school schedules are your MAIN concern, you would most likely plan your trip for the summer months, or during Christmas break or Spring Break. The challenge with that strategy is that every other parent planning a Disney vacation is looking at those same weeks or months for THEIR trips…Crowds during Christmas and Spring breaks are MAMMOTH. The last two weeks of December and most of April are considered “Peak” periods at Disney, and you’ll see the highest resort room prices and the highest crowd volumes of the entire year during these periods. Summer is not quite as crowded, but you still see fairly high crowd volumes during the summer months. For many, the intense heat and humidity in Orlando during the summer months can be detractor for those months. For others, the heat is not an issue and the summer months are the ideal time to visit—especially if you want to include the water parks in your vacation plans.
Personally, I struggle a LOT with the high temperatures and humidity in the summer months in Orlando, so we tend to avoid going during those months when I plan trips for us. My May trips with my mom for Epcot Flower and Garden Festival tend to be pretty warm (at least for me), but the beautiful May weather is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to heat in Orlando during the summer. If you’re from the South or just used to warmer temperatures in general, the heat and humidity of the summer season in Orlando may not phase you at all. However, I will point out that the heat is harder on older people so if your group includes some seniors, you may want to factor that in…Also heat and humidity can contribute to irritability and hot tempers…and the heat can negatively effect even the sweetest most well behaved children! So again, it may be something you want to consider.
Another consideration, some companies are very strict regarding WHEN employees can take time off—for example, if you’re an accountant, you most likely can’t plan your vacation any time between November 1 and April 15. Teachers generally can’t take time off during the school year. If you are in landscaping, you probably don’t want to travel during your busiest seasons. You get the idea, I’m sure. Everyone’s situation is unique, and it’s important that you don’t try to shoehorn your family vacation into a mold that doesn’t really work for you. Just because February 15 was the PERFECT week for your neighbors that had such a wonderful trip doesn’t mean it’s the best week for YOUR family.
Once mom and I ruled out Christmas and Spring Break and SUMMER, we started looking at 3-4 day weekends that come up during the school year. Over the years, we’ve identified that we personally like traveling to Florida in the Fall…so we looked primarily at October and November. We don’t know what “teacher institute” days or special school specific days off may be, but we know that Columbus Day and Veteran’s day are always days that the schools are closed, so we focused on those dates, initially. If you can carve out a 3-4 day weekend by using a school holiday, you can fairly easily carve out a 5-7 day vacation—and the kids are only missing 2-3 days of school instead of 3-4. Of course, if it’s super important that the kids miss NO school at all, you will either have to decide to travel during Christmas break, Spring break or the summer break. It’s really all about YOUR priorities and the priorities of your group.
Third: Special Events and Celebrations: Are you wanting your trip to coincide with a particular scheduled event or celebration? For example, is attending the 50th anniversary of Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom a priority for your group? If so, coordinating your trip to include the official celebration will probably trump some of the other concerns. If you like to attend the Epcot Food and Wine Festival in the fall, your trip planning window will shrink to the 8-10 weeks that the Festival runs. Or if you are planning your family vacation around another event with a firm date, like a wedding or a birthday, you may place a higher priority on that event or celebration than on crowd levels or discounts.
In the example from above, our 2019 trip with the extended family, we are also planning our trip around the new Star Wars themed land, Galaxy’s Edge. Some members of our group are BIG Star Wars fans, so once we knew Galaxy’s Edge was coming, we knew that we wanted to be sure we could include that in the big family trip. Originally, it looked like Galaxy’s Edge would open mid 2019. Earlier this week, Disney announced that Galaxy’s Edge at Disneyland will open in Summer 2019, but Galaxy’s Edge at Hollywood Studios in Florida is scheduled for “Late Fall” 2019. Mom and I quickly convened for a pow-wow on this issue…we know that late fall could mean November 1…but it could also mean December 20. Or later—especially if Disney falls behind schedule. Since being able to check out Galaxy’s Edge is such a big deal for our family, we immediately ruled out both the October and November 2019 dates we’d been considering, as we are pretty sure the land is unlikely to be opened by then. We are now looking at going the first week of January 2020. The dates we are now considering have an added benefit of still falling during the kids’ winter break from school, but are after the holidays, so most families have completed their holiday travel and are back home—hopefully this will mean lighter crowds for us! We also may be able to add a couple more days to the trip since we are not trying to squeeze it around a three-day weekend with a school holiday. Given our financial strategy to help diffuse the costs of the trip by taking most of the money we all would have spent on Christmas gifts and activities for each other, and putting it towards the trip, mom and I think putting the trip AFTER Christmas all helps with that strategy, especially for the kids…Santa Claus will still come, of course, but Mom and Dad won’t be getting everybody lots of presents—but hey, we are all going to Disney in 2 weeks, yay!
Fourth: Attractions and activities: Something else to think about: if you have a beloved attraction that you MUST visit while at Disney for your trip to feel “complete”, you may want to take a look at the refurbishment schedules. Disney tends to do a lot of minor refurbishments during “slower” periods—not that there’s really ever truly “slow” periods anymore. But for example, there tend to be more refurbishments in January and February. There’s usually a crane near the castle for a couple of weeks when they are putting the holiday lighting in place, and again when they take it down…If having the crane in your pictures with the castle will break your heart…plan your trip AWAY from those weeks. Disney doesn’t always give a ton of notice when they will be doing refurbishments, so a little bit of this will be luck, but they do make some announcements months in advance—especially for major refurbishments, when an attraction will be down for months. Disney tends to do the water park refurbishments on a pretty regular schedule, so if you desperately want to include Blizzard Beach in your trip, check previous years to see when that park has closed for refurbishments, historically.
You may also want to consider what, if any, non-Disney activities you want to include in your vacation. For example, if you have always wanted to see a rocket launch at Cape Canaveral, check THAT schedule when planning your trip. If you’re planning to include a visit to Tampa, or to Daytona Beach, you will want to take a look at special events or challenges that happen in those areas.
Fifth: WEATHER. This is a big one, but may end up not being a high priority for many people, depending on what other things you’re considering. The great thing about Florida is that is has better weather than much of the country for much of the year. However, there are some challenges. As we discussed earlier, it can get very hot and very humid in the Orlando area in the summer. It can also be buggy in the summer. Hurricane season is officially June 1 through November 30. Now, it’s pretty rare for a hurricane to come that far inland, however, it’s NOT unusual for Orlando to be hit with tropical storms during particularly busy hurricane seasons.
Orlando has about 30 days of what most of us would consider “winter” each year. Those thirty days happen sometime between November and March..and tend to show up in little 3-5 day increments…We’ve had years where we visited in early November and had temperatures in the eighties…and we’ve had years where temperatures were in the low forties.
So…you may want to factor in the weather when choosing when you want to go. If you really want to go swimming or visit the water parks while in Florida, you want to be sure to go when temperatures will be warm enough for you to swim. Note: People from Florida may think it’s too cold to swim when it’s 70, but people from Wisconsin visiting in February may think 65 is warm enough…Your mileage may vary, depending on where you are from and your tolerance for temperatures.
You also need to consider your weather where you are traveling FROM. Last year, hundreds of flights were cancelled from the northeast due to snowstorms…it’s important to give the weather in your origin location at least a passing thought. While most of us probably wouldn’t mind being stranded in Florida for a few extra days, it would be very upsetting to be stranded at your home airport, unable to GET to Florida at all.
As you can see, there are a number of different factors that you’ll want to consider when deciding WHEN to go. It’s important to give at least a little thought to these different things as you’re planning…but of course, it’s also important to understand that nothing will ever be exactly perfect–and you don’t want to get so hung up on choosing the “right” time to go that you make yourself (and your family!) miserable.
In the example I’ve been using today, mom and I are pretty firmly decided now on January 1-7 or 8th…we may move the dates by a day or two, based on airfare challenges, but we are pretty committed at this point. Once you decide when you’re going, start planning on making THAT trip on THOSE dates the best trip you can. If you keep changing your mind on your dates, you’ll end up losing time and energy that would be better spent on other planning aspects! Of course, we remain cognizant that a lot can happen over the next two years that could impact our planned dates—we can’t even book our resort for another 18 months! So while I will be paying attention to major announcements, as always, and stay aware of major factors that could impat our trip, we are going to march forward with our planning based on a January 2020 trip.
Are you in the midst of planning a trip? When are you planning to go? What issues are important for you and your family??
Happy Dreaming!
Brooke
Note: If you need help planning your next Disney parks vacation, Disney cruise vacation, or Adventures by Disney vacation, please contact me at brooke@disneycastledreaming.com.