Disney World May 2017 Trip Update

countdown courtesy of timeanddate.com

I promise to provide more general information about Disney planning but I've received a lot of feedback that suggests my personalized planning posts are helpful, as well. Please let me know if this approach gets old or boring!

I try to be as transparent as possible about my planning strategy and pass along as much information about discounts as I can. Our next trip to Orlando was decided in haste, which has provided me with less time to track pricing trends and keep up with discount codes. I think we're still getting a pretty decent deal on most of our plans but I'll let you be the judge of that.

Without further delay, here are the details of our next Disney World trip...

Dates

We chose the first week of May (2nd - 9th) because it's late enough to miss spring breakers, early enough to miss the summer breakers, and still falls within the Epcot Flower & Garden Festival timeline (our main objective for this trip). You may remember that I made a similar trip in 2015 when I traveled to Orlando May 1-10th and we had a fabulous time! I don't recall heavy crowds then and I'm hoping that holds true this year.

Airfare

We booked our flights through American Airlines on October 18, 2016 and paid $387 per person roundtrip between SGF and MCO. We had to fly a major airline because we are not utilizing a rental car on this trip and Disney's Magical Express only retrieves passengers from the MCO airport. I don't think $774 was a terrible price to pay considering our origin airport is a tiny blip on American Airlines' radar.

Ground Transportation

I hope to provide a more thorough review of Disney's Magical Express ("DME") once our trip is complete but we are very excited to utilize this option in May because we've heard mixed reactions and want to finally see what all the hoopla is about. On the one hand, DME will get our checked luggage and deliver it to the room for us but they have also caught flack for taking several hours to do so. It's a free service, though, and I don't think anything beats "free" at Disney.

Hotel

The lovely BoardWalk Inn is where we will rest our pretty little heads in May. We have a few other Disney resorts on our shortlist of places to stay but this one had the best travel agent rate available at the time of booking. We paid $1856 for seven nights in a standard room (roughly $265/night for a deluxe resort). This is very nearly the same price that we paid for the Contemporary Resort last year and it was worth every penny. There were a few things we had to consider when deciding where to stay this time: proximity to parks, transportation options, dining variety. We won't have a rental car for this trip so we wanted to make sure we would be close enough to the parks - or at least a variety of transportation options available - so we won't be stuck taking the resort bus everywhere. Also, the lack of a rental car means we can't go offsite for cheap food so we need to have lots of options near the hotel to accommodate our cravings. We narrowed the choices down to BoardWalk Inn and the Cabins at Ft Wilderness but ultimately decided to stay at BoardWalk Inn due to its ease of access to Epcot - which is where we will be spending a lot of time on this trip. I think we'll fare nicely in a room this size:

photo courtesy of Mickey World Travel

Tickets

I've said it time and again but we don't buy parkhoppers and that works just fine for us. We like to immerse ourselves in one park per day and the transportation between places takes too long. For this trip, we've decided on a 6-day ticket for one park per day ($735 total on undercovertourist.com using the MouseSavers.com discount link) and a 1-day water park ticket ($115 on Disney's website). We bought the park tickets and water park tickets separately because we couldn't find a third-party site that offered the blackout date pricing and they also didn't guarantee we could get into both Blizzard Beach and Typhoon Lagoon on the same day. Erring on the side of caution, we decided to get these tickets from Disney directly and it actually saved us some money. The standard park tickets were cheaper through a third-party, though, and that's primarily because Disney charges sales tax on top of the base price, which drives the total up. 

Itinerary

This is always subject to change but I'm fairly certain this will be our itinerary for the trip:

• Tuesday May 2 - Arrive 12:30pm, Epcot, Via Napoli dinner
• Wednesday May 3 - Animal Kingdom, Boma breakfast, Tiffins dinner (Rivers of Light package)
• Thursday May 4 - Hollywood Studios, quick service dining all day
• Friday May 5 - Water parks, Yachtsman dinner
• Saturday May 6 - Kona Cafe brunch, Epcot, Tokyo Dining dinner
• Sunday May 7 - Magic Kingdom, Be Our Guest lunch, Liberty Tree Tavern dinner
• Monday May 8 - Epcot, San Angel Inn lunch, Via Napoli dinner
• Tuesday May 9 - departure 6:00am

We've also assigned a host of FastPass options for the park days but we used the tactic that works best for us - picking popular rides early in the morning so we can assign more FastPasses while we're in the parks. Most of our choices closely mirror the options we selected on our last trip, which can be found in this post. 

Special Events

We are very excited to return to Epcot's Flower & Garden Festival; we loved the Food & Wine Festival last fall but it seemed to offer a lot of food at a lower quality level than what I have experienced at Flower & Garden Festival....it also didn't help that I have been craving Beijing candied strawberries and Frushi (fruit sushi) since 2015. You can probably already guess, but these are the reasons why we booked the May 2017 trip with such haste. I'm sure I'll devote a future post to Flower & Garden Festival plans but we are planning to eat, walk, and eat some more! We're also looking forward to the new Rivers of Light show at Animal Kingdom and crossing our fingers that Pandora will have a soft opening while we're there.

Total Cost

And now the information you've probably been waiting to hear; this all sounds great but how much is it going to break the bank? I've calculated a total of about $4,700 for two adults, including food and beverages. Normally we would spend 10 days in Orlando but this trip is seven days and will count as our honeymoon, as well. Keep in mind, I've been to Disney on a much smaller budget and enjoyed it just as much! The biggest expense for this trip is the hotel because we're trying to stay in deluxe properties while we have the means to do so.

Upcoming posts include a glimpse into our backpack for park days and a discussion on make-up/skincare/hair care in the humid Florida heat. You won't want to miss this information!