There seems to be two different types of people in the
world, those that wouldn’t dream of staying on Disney property and those that
wouldn’t dream of staying any place else. I’m not sure where I fall yet, but I do know
where I’m staying this time.
I spent a lot of time
looking into the options, probably days (we have already established that I'm a little obsessive). I started with the Disney website. I’m not going to
lie, the cost of staying on property shocked me and I ruled it out almost
immediately! So my plan was to land in Orlando, take a cab to an off-site
hotel, and rely on their shuttles to the park. I don’t want to rent a car to
rely on exclusively as it’s quite possible that my husband will run out of
steam and want to either sleep in one day or leave a park early, so we needed
some flexibility.
Luckily I ran across a
warning on one of the tip boards to check the shuttle schedule of the hotel you
want to stay at. I started checking and was disappointed to see how limited
these shuttle services are and that they are on routes that will likely make
more stops than the shuttles inside the parks. Also, I was reading stories of overcrowded
shuttles from these hotels forcing you to either wait for another or grab a
cab. I would definitely save money up front by staying off property, but it
really didn’t work for us logistically.
There are tons of house rentals in the Disney area and they
were very tempting as many have their own pool, but again we would be tied to a car so I let my dreams of midnight skinny dipping drift away. Actually, once I pictured that in my mind I knew a house was a bad idea!
The next best
thing might be to rent Disney Vacation Club points. There is a great website
called David’s Vacation Club Rentals that looks
like it makes the process pretty easy. I looked into the options available and
thought it was too expensive to get the more spacious rentals and the rentals
in my price range were tiny. Not to mention that with the DVC rentals you don’t
get daily maid service. If we’re all going to spend every night in the same
room I really need to have someone make the beds every day and take the garbage
out!!!
Frustrated, I went back to the beginning and started over. I
had seen some mixed reviews on the Disney Magic
Express but on closer inspection the really bad reviews were older and it
seemed a few kinks had been worked out in the system because more recent
reviews were better. It seems there are
still a few issues here and there, especially if there is a delay in your
flight, but overall it seems pretty reliable. Reviews of the Disney
transportation system were acceptable, glitches will happen from time to time
but the general schedule gives us a lot of flexibility so I bit the bullet and
decided we will stay at Disney.
Now the really hard part….which resort? But that’s a
question for my next post.
Note: All this happened before I contacted a Disney Travel
Expert, she probably could have saved me a lot of time and energy!
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