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Disney planning is not hard because there are a lot of decisions. It is hard because nobody tells you which ones come first, so everything feels urgent at once. It is not. Here is the order, and each step ends at the thing that answers it.

1When you go decides almost everything else

Ticket prices, room rates, crowd levels, weather and which festivals are running are all downstream of your dates. At a value resort the same room moves between about $213 and $396 a night depending on the week, so the date decision and the budget decision are the same decision. Settle this first.

Ranked on twelve years of our own weather records and Disney’s published rate calendar, the best months at a value resort are October, November and September, and December comes last. That ranking changes if you weight it toward price rather than comfort, which is the point of doing it as a tool rather than as an opinion.

Rank the months →Or read a month in detail

2How long you stay decides whether it is fun

The most common mistake is too few days for too many parks. Four parks in four days with travel either side is not a holiday, it is an endurance event with a mortgage attached. Fewer parks, more slowly, is almost always the better trip.

It is also cheaper per day, and by a lot: Disney prices tickets so that the first day costs roughly twice what the seventh does. Length is the one lever that improves the trip and lowers the daily cost at the same time.

Price a trip, itemised →What it actually costs

3Where you stay is mostly a transport decision

Resort marketing talks about theming. What changes your day is how long it takes to get from your room to a park gate, and whether you can get back for an afternoon break without it costing two hours.

The question almost nobody answers is who the room has to sleep. 19 of the 41 resorts we cover sleep five or more, so a family of five is choosing from a much shorter list than anyone tells them — and finding that out normally means opening every resort page on every site in the category.

Where we have not timed a route ourselves with a stopwatch, the resort page says so rather than repeating Disney’s estimate as though it were a measurement.

Filter the resorts →Every resort page

4What your family can actually ride

This is the step first-timers skip and then discover at the queue entrance. Height is the constraint that decides which park is worth a day — and the good news is that it bites less than people fear: 78 of the 99 rides we track have no height minimum at all.

Wheelchair transfer, rider switch, single rider and air conditioning are the other four filters that decide whether a ride works for your party, and every one of them is on record for all 99.

Check a height →Filter every ride

5Dining is the only thing with a real deadline

Reservations open 60 days before check-in at 6:00am Eastern and the hard tables go within minutes. Almost nothing else in Disney planning requires an alarm. This does.

The half of that rule nobody tells you: if you are staying at a Disney resort, day 60 books your whole stay, up to ten days. Off site it is 60 days for each date separately — which is why the hardest tables look gone the moment an off-site window opens. On day seven of a stay that is a six-day head start.

Every deadline, from one date →Restaurants, with prices

6Lightning Lane can wait, and so can the plan

Booking opens seven days before check-in if you are staying on Disney property and three if you are not. You do not need to decide now and you can decide on the day. Nobody should sell you a strategy in month six.

The same goes for the itinerary. Our own queue record says the value of a plan is concentrated almost entirely in the first hour of the day and the last — and that several of the rides everyone tells you to run to at opening are no shorter then, or longer.

What order to do a park in →Lightning Lane, priced

7Everything else is optional

Rope drop, park hopping, the perfect itinerary, the colour-coded spreadsheet — all optional. People have wonderful trips without any of it. The pressure to optimise every hour is where Disney planning stops being fun, and it is the one thing this site will never sell you.

What this site is, and what it is not

Most of what is here is measured rather than remembered. We log every tracked ride’s posted wait every five minutes — 1,757,150 readings over 19 days so far. We hold 4,400 days of daily Walt Disney World weather going back to 2014. And we record published prices with the day we read them — 36,029 of them across 293 different things, starting 2019-01-23.

The limits are on the pages that have them. The queue record is days old, not years, and every page built on it says so. Nobody here has been to the water parks or to Universal, and those pages say that too. Where published sources disagree — and on a few prices they disagree badly — we print the disagreement instead of picking whichever sounds most confident.

There are no affiliate links, no sponsored placements and nothing behind an email address. How we work · the data we keep · disclosures.

Common questions

What should you decide first when planning a Disney World trip?
Your dates. Ticket prices, room rates, crowd levels, weather and which festivals are running are all downstream of when you go, so the date decision and the budget decision are the same decision. Settle it before anything else.
How many days do you need at Disney World?
Enough that you are not doing one park a day with travel either side. Four parks in four days is an endurance event, and per-day ticket prices fall steeply with length, so more days is both a better trip and cheaper per day.
What is the only Disney World deadline that needs an alarm?
Dining. Reservations open 60 days before check-in at 6:00am Eastern, and the hardest tables go within minutes. If you are staying at a Disney resort, day 60 books your whole stay at once, which is a head start off-site guests never get.
Do you need to plan Lightning Lane in advance?
No. Booking opens seven days before check-in for Disney resort guests and three days for everyone else, and you can decide on the day. Nobody needs a Lightning Lane strategy six months out.

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