Greysamaze
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Jul 8, 2010
Introductions and Planning
Hello and welcome to my first ever trip report! I’ve been following trip reports on here for years now and am finally writing my own. This is going to be a very in-depth report, with as much clarity into our experience; what we paid, what worked for us, and what didn’t, as I can muster/remember! I want to be as honest as possible so I can hopefully help first timers (or even those who are more experienced) understand more about coming to WDW from England.
This first post is going to be an introduction and a planning report! It started off as just an introduction, but I got carried away, so you get a double whammy! Here we go.
My name is Georgia, I’m 26 and live in Leicester, England. My favourite things in life are Taylor Swift, cats, and my girlfriend. I work in customer service, which is where I should be right now but, luckily for both of us, I have tonsillitis which is giving me the break I needed to start writing this! I grew up as a Disney kid where I visited WDW and DLP multiple times and cruised with Disney. I also visited DL and DCA in 2019. My first cruise was when I was 13, and I immediately decided I wanted to work for DCL – which I did! I got hired with Disney in the November of 2019, when I boarded the Disney Magic as a Youth Activities Counselor. This was not destined to last long. For a multitude of reasons related to the job, my mental health took a sharp decline, and I was signed off sick in the January – however, for those who noticed the date, I wouldn’t have been able to finish my contract anyway due to the pandemic. So, I guess it was destiny.
With me on this trip is my girlfriend, Harriet. She is 25, likes gardening and pretending she isn’t a Taylor Swift fan, is autistic (this will become important later), has wonky thumbs (will also be important later) and is a librarian. Harriet and I have been together for five years. We’ve both spent extended amounts of time in America whilst working at summer camps (I’ve done four years, Harriet has done two) and love travelling. We live together with our three cats, Maggie, Amber and Simon.
Now, Harriet did not grow up as a Disney kid. In fact, it took a whole lot of convincing and begging to get her to come to WDW with me on our first trip together in 2020 – even though she had visited DL and DCA for a day each in 2019 after working at summer camp in Colorado. We had planned a trip for when my first contract on DCL ended due to the free employee tickets, which was exactly what we did – apart from, when we arrived at the main gate it turns out that you can’t use your free tickets when you’re signed off sick (even if it’s for mental health and Disney is supposed to be the happiest place on earth?!), so we ended up having to shell out. We stayed at a cheap hotel on I95 and caught their shuttle bus to the parks at 7am every morning, stayed in the parks all day, and caught the shuttle bus back at 11pm every night for 10 days straight. Looking back now, I have no idea how we did this.
However, this first trip ignited something in Harriet, and she was hooked. As soon as we got back, it was all she would talk about. She scoured Youtube watching all and any videos she could find, subscribed to any vloggers we both clicked with (honourable mentions: Adam Hattan, Cheers Ears, Mammoth Club – although at this point Molly was still with Allears – and The Holgates). However, it was the pandemic: our last day in the parks had just so happened to be the last day the parks were open before they closed for the first time. We had a long wait until we could even think about returning. Not to mention, we were both now unemployed, I had just lost my dream job and felt like I had no direction in my life, and she was in the process of being diagnosed with both autism and ADHD. It wasn’t looking good.
Flash forward to January of last year (2022). We both had stable jobs and it was winter, so we had the travel bug. On a whim, we booked 3 days in DLP for around £800 total (hotel and park tickets) for April. Admittedly, we didn’t really think this through. It was ever so slightly out of our budget – had it been one more month away we could’ve done it, but not with only two pay days in between booking and leaving – and that was without budgeting for travel and food. We cancelled this probably two days later, but it had lit the torch within us both that we would get a Disney fix soon. So, I kept looking at DLP but it is just so expensive! For a four day trip during warmer months it is almost £2,000 – and that’s without travel and food! So we went on a little pricing trip and headed over to WDW website and priced up two weeks over several different months. We narrowed down the months we would want to do and those which were cheapest and found the earliest date at the cheapest available price: April 19th.
Then we had to pick a hotel. Harriet had never stayed on property, so at first I don’t think she fully understood the implications of different hotels – off to Youtube we went! We watched resort tour after resort tour and narrowed it down to Pop Century, Coronado Springs or Port Orleans French Quarter. I was leaning towards Pop or POFQ, but Harriet seemed to like Coronado Springs. I was put off by this because of the large bus loop, and the bus being the only method of transportation (I know POFQ has the boat only to DS, but it counts for something, right?!). However, CS was the first on site resort I stayed at, and so the romantic in me thought it would be sweet for it to also be Harriet’s first on site resort. However, for reasons I can’t quite remember now (probably the Skyliner and the price difference) we ended up picking Pop.
We were good and excited and sorted for about a month: then Disney announced their UK deals which they usually release in April. They were offering a $200 gift card, free tickets to cirque if you stayed at a deluxe, a certain amount of dining credit per night depending on the level of your hotel, included memory maker and 14 day Disney Magic ticket (park hopping and water parks included) ticket for the price of 7 day. We already had the latter two included in our original booking, but we couldn’t turn down a gift card and dining credit! So, we had a quick stop back at the drawing board to decide whether we wanted to upgrade to a moderate resort to get slightly more dining credit. However, this would have cost $300 more, which is about the same amount we would’ve got in extra dining credit, so it didn’t really make sense to swap hotels. Then we had to wait for the deal to be released and re-book our holiday, then email Disney to ask them to move the deposit from the first booking over to the second booking, and to cancel the first booking. This was easy, thanks to Disney’s customer service!
I know some people are interested in the price breakdowns of trips, so here is ours as written on our invoice. And this way you can also see everything that was included:
Accommodation rental: £2,450
Dining credit $36 per night: £0 (this worked out to $504)
$200 Disney Spending money: £0
Magical Extras: £0
Memory Maker: £0
shopDisney Online Discount: £0
14 for 7 Disney Magic Ticket (10-99): £489 x2 = £978
EARmail: £0
Total: £3,428.
This obviously doesn’t include travel. We flew with Virgin Atlantic. Our booking was for April 19th at 1pm, which would arrive at MCO at 5:25pm. Our return flight was for May 3rd at 5:45pm, which would arrive to Heathrow at 7:30am on the 4th. More on this later, but the total price for both of our tickets was £1,077.72.
We can get from our house to Heathrow in about two and a half hours on the train, however, to make sure we got there on time for the flight we probably would’ve allowed four hours for this journey on the day of travelling, which would’ve made for a very early start. Therefore, we chose to book a night at the Holiday Inn Express at Terminal 4. The price for this was £92.65.
We also had to get our train tickets to London! The price for both of us was £98.09. We booked Mears Connect to take us to Pop: $32. We booked travel insurance: £49.70.
And so, the grand total of our trip before we arrived (and this is my first time actually adding this all up too!): £4,771.42! Whew!
Ok, enough about planning. Let’s go to Disney!
Hello and welcome to my first ever trip report! I’ve been following trip reports on here for years now and am finally writing my own. This is going to be a very in-depth report, with as much clarity into our experience; what we paid, what worked for us, and what didn’t, as I can muster/remember! I want to be as honest as possible so I can hopefully help first timers (or even those who are more experienced) understand more about coming to WDW from England.
This first post is going to be an introduction and a planning report! It started off as just an introduction, but I got carried away, so you get a double whammy! Here we go.
My name is Georgia, I’m 26 and live in Leicester, England. My favourite things in life are Taylor Swift, cats, and my girlfriend. I work in customer service, which is where I should be right now but, luckily for both of us, I have tonsillitis which is giving me the break I needed to start writing this! I grew up as a Disney kid where I visited WDW and DLP multiple times and cruised with Disney. I also visited DL and DCA in 2019. My first cruise was when I was 13, and I immediately decided I wanted to work for DCL – which I did! I got hired with Disney in the November of 2019, when I boarded the Disney Magic as a Youth Activities Counselor. This was not destined to last long. For a multitude of reasons related to the job, my mental health took a sharp decline, and I was signed off sick in the January – however, for those who noticed the date, I wouldn’t have been able to finish my contract anyway due to the pandemic. So, I guess it was destiny.
With me on this trip is my girlfriend, Harriet. She is 25, likes gardening and pretending she isn’t a Taylor Swift fan, is autistic (this will become important later), has wonky thumbs (will also be important later) and is a librarian. Harriet and I have been together for five years. We’ve both spent extended amounts of time in America whilst working at summer camps (I’ve done four years, Harriet has done two) and love travelling. We live together with our three cats, Maggie, Amber and Simon.
Now, Harriet did not grow up as a Disney kid. In fact, it took a whole lot of convincing and begging to get her to come to WDW with me on our first trip together in 2020 – even though she had visited DL and DCA for a day each in 2019 after working at summer camp in Colorado. We had planned a trip for when my first contract on DCL ended due to the free employee tickets, which was exactly what we did – apart from, when we arrived at the main gate it turns out that you can’t use your free tickets when you’re signed off sick (even if it’s for mental health and Disney is supposed to be the happiest place on earth?!), so we ended up having to shell out. We stayed at a cheap hotel on I95 and caught their shuttle bus to the parks at 7am every morning, stayed in the parks all day, and caught the shuttle bus back at 11pm every night for 10 days straight. Looking back now, I have no idea how we did this.
However, this first trip ignited something in Harriet, and she was hooked. As soon as we got back, it was all she would talk about. She scoured Youtube watching all and any videos she could find, subscribed to any vloggers we both clicked with (honourable mentions: Adam Hattan, Cheers Ears, Mammoth Club – although at this point Molly was still with Allears – and The Holgates). However, it was the pandemic: our last day in the parks had just so happened to be the last day the parks were open before they closed for the first time. We had a long wait until we could even think about returning. Not to mention, we were both now unemployed, I had just lost my dream job and felt like I had no direction in my life, and she was in the process of being diagnosed with both autism and ADHD. It wasn’t looking good.
Flash forward to January of last year (2022). We both had stable jobs and it was winter, so we had the travel bug. On a whim, we booked 3 days in DLP for around £800 total (hotel and park tickets) for April. Admittedly, we didn’t really think this through. It was ever so slightly out of our budget – had it been one more month away we could’ve done it, but not with only two pay days in between booking and leaving – and that was without budgeting for travel and food. We cancelled this probably two days later, but it had lit the torch within us both that we would get a Disney fix soon. So, I kept looking at DLP but it is just so expensive! For a four day trip during warmer months it is almost £2,000 – and that’s without travel and food! So we went on a little pricing trip and headed over to WDW website and priced up two weeks over several different months. We narrowed down the months we would want to do and those which were cheapest and found the earliest date at the cheapest available price: April 19th.
Then we had to pick a hotel. Harriet had never stayed on property, so at first I don’t think she fully understood the implications of different hotels – off to Youtube we went! We watched resort tour after resort tour and narrowed it down to Pop Century, Coronado Springs or Port Orleans French Quarter. I was leaning towards Pop or POFQ, but Harriet seemed to like Coronado Springs. I was put off by this because of the large bus loop, and the bus being the only method of transportation (I know POFQ has the boat only to DS, but it counts for something, right?!). However, CS was the first on site resort I stayed at, and so the romantic in me thought it would be sweet for it to also be Harriet’s first on site resort. However, for reasons I can’t quite remember now (probably the Skyliner and the price difference) we ended up picking Pop.
We were good and excited and sorted for about a month: then Disney announced their UK deals which they usually release in April. They were offering a $200 gift card, free tickets to cirque if you stayed at a deluxe, a certain amount of dining credit per night depending on the level of your hotel, included memory maker and 14 day Disney Magic ticket (park hopping and water parks included) ticket for the price of 7 day. We already had the latter two included in our original booking, but we couldn’t turn down a gift card and dining credit! So, we had a quick stop back at the drawing board to decide whether we wanted to upgrade to a moderate resort to get slightly more dining credit. However, this would have cost $300 more, which is about the same amount we would’ve got in extra dining credit, so it didn’t really make sense to swap hotels. Then we had to wait for the deal to be released and re-book our holiday, then email Disney to ask them to move the deposit from the first booking over to the second booking, and to cancel the first booking. This was easy, thanks to Disney’s customer service!
I know some people are interested in the price breakdowns of trips, so here is ours as written on our invoice. And this way you can also see everything that was included:
Accommodation rental: £2,450
Dining credit $36 per night: £0 (this worked out to $504)
$200 Disney Spending money: £0
Magical Extras: £0
Memory Maker: £0
shopDisney Online Discount: £0
14 for 7 Disney Magic Ticket (10-99): £489 x2 = £978
EARmail: £0
Total: £3,428.
This obviously doesn’t include travel. We flew with Virgin Atlantic. Our booking was for April 19th at 1pm, which would arrive at MCO at 5:25pm. Our return flight was for May 3rd at 5:45pm, which would arrive to Heathrow at 7:30am on the 4th. More on this later, but the total price for both of our tickets was £1,077.72.
We can get from our house to Heathrow in about two and a half hours on the train, however, to make sure we got there on time for the flight we probably would’ve allowed four hours for this journey on the day of travelling, which would’ve made for a very early start. Therefore, we chose to book a night at the Holiday Inn Express at Terminal 4. The price for this was £92.65.
We also had to get our train tickets to London! The price for both of us was £98.09. We booked Mears Connect to take us to Pop: $32. We booked travel insurance: £49.70.
And so, the grand total of our trip before we arrived (and this is my first time actually adding this all up too!): £4,771.42! Whew!
Ok, enough about planning. Let’s go to Disney!
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