Disney World Websites for Planning Help

In my last post, I shared my favourite guidebooks to assist with your planning for a trip to Disney World.   This time I will focus on helpful websites. There are many useful independent websites with information on Disney World including Allears.net and Wdwinfo.com. Websites such as these give important information such as restaurant menus so you know whether or not there is a kids menu, and what the choices are. My son does not like pizza with sauce on it, and usually wants a cheese or peanut butter sandwich. Allears.net gave us great information including the prices for our first trip.

Mousesavers.com has money saving tips on it, including a timeline of when the various discounts offered have come out over the past few years, as a gage to what might happen this time around.   EasyWDW.com and Undercovertourist.com both have very useful crowd calendars to help you to decide which days to go, and which park or parks to choose, based on how busy they expect them to be.  Undercover Tourist is an authorized seller of Disney World (and other theme parks) tickets, at a slight discount.  Touringplans.com also contains crowd calendars, along with other information to reduce your wait times in line, but it charges for some information.

The website and app, My Disney Experience is important not only for useful information but also for making dining and Fastpass reservations. Remember though that you must have a Disney Resort reservation or have purchased your park tickets for Fastpasses (see another post on this topic), but only a credit card is needed for most dining reservations. If you buy tickets from somewhere other than Disney directly, make sure to link them to My Disney Experience.  There are also links to WDW restaurant menus, ride and attraction wait times, and even the times of special events and character appearance times and location for each day.

The last website I want to mention is Tripadvisor.com (again there is another post  using it). This website provides user’s reviews on hotels, restaurants and attractions, and ranks them based on how people rated them. We have chosen the Holiday Inn in Walt Disney World twice, in large part due to the reviews on tripadvisor.com. Everything they said in the reviews was correct including how nice the rooms and pool were, the high level of service, and the frequency and punctuality of the shuttle to the parks. This hotel is located on Hotel Plaza Boulevard, a five to ten minute walk to Downtown Disney.  You can also read restaurant and attraction reviews, but these are sometimes limited in scope.

There is a lot of information out there on the internet.  My suggestion is to start with Disney World's own website first, along with My Disney Experience, and then use the other ones to fill in some of the information that you can't find there.  Disney World Facebook groups are also good sources of information, particularly for opinions and gathering other people's suggestions and experiences.  Some members may even suggest a few of the websites above, or better yet, this blog!

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