Planning Our 3-Year Old Princess’s First Disney World Visit!

My husband and I are long time Disney fans and spent our Honeymoon at Disney World. We have spent the last 8 months planning our 3-year old daughter’s first Walt Disney World vacation. We’ve learned a few things in the process so I thought I would share some of our knowledge with all of you Disney vacation planners out there!

1. Air Travel: The first and best tip we received was from our AAA Travel agent who turned us on to AirTran (now owned by SouthWest) for discount airline tickets. Boy, she wasn’t kidding! We bought our tickets 8 months prior to our trip, which I am sure contributed to the ridiculously low price, but we got 3 round-trip direct tickets from Detroit to Orlando for $500 TOTAL!
2. Resort: The second thing we did was book our trip through Disney.com. This allowed us to plan our entire trip out and buy what we wanted as we could afford it. So, we made our resort reservations first. We are staying at Port Orleans Riverside because it is our favorite resort and Disney had a 20% off special running for Aug-Oct stays. We put down $200 initially and then made regular payments (each paycheck) through the Disney website. Subsequently, we had paid off the resort portion of the trip by July.
3. Park Tickets: Next we priced out park tickets. Now, because we are traveling with a preschooler this means that we need to keep our schedule relatively chilled out – so no park hopper for this trip. We decided to go with the cheaper standard tickets and made reservations to have dinner at other Disney resorts on the days when we are visiting a park without good evening dining options (i.e. Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom). More on this next.
4. Dining: My husband and I are like a lot of people who love Walt Disney World specifically because of the fantastic food! This means that we spent the majority of our planning time on where we were going to eat.We chose all of the restaurants we wanted to eat at (some old favorites, some new ones we wanted to check out) and priced out the dining plan vs. out of pocket. In the end we decided we didn’t want to have to worry about the price of food while on vacation (Let’s be honest, it just gets in the way of our good time.)Well, we were pleasantly surprised at the beginning of August when we heard about the Free Dining special! I told my husband to immediately call Disney and ask if we were eligible. They informed us that you can only partake of one special and we already had the 20% off our resort stay, as I mentioned earlier. We inquired to the difference in price and they told us it was an additional $500 to pay full price for our hotel stay and get the Free Dining. Well, the standard dining plan we wanted is about $800, so this was a no-brainer. Hence we saved $300 on our food at Disney, SCORE!
• Character Dining: Because we were on our Honeymoon the last time my husband and I were at Disney World meeting characters was not at the top of our to do list. This gave us a great opportunity to schedule some fun character meals for our daughter. We researched them all and the ones we finally decided on were:
  1. The Crystal Place (Magic Kingdom) – Dinner with Pooh, Tigger, Piglet & Eyore
  2. Akershus Royal Banquet (Epcot World Showcase – Norway) – Dinner with the Disney Princesses
  3. 1900 Park Faire (Grand Floridian Resort) – Dinner with Cinderella, Prince Charming, The Step Mother and Step Sisters – which are our Daughter’s favorite Disney characters!
• Dining for Mom & Dad: As I mentioned earlier we are total foodies and couldn’t resist making reservations for some fantastic restaurants on Disney property:
1. Boatwright’s Dining Hall (Port Orleans Riverside Resort) – This is phenomenal restaurant right at our resort and we have a tradition of eating there the night we arrive.
2. Coral Reef Restaurant (Epcot) – One whole wall of this restaurant is a GIANT aquarium! As if that isn’t enough the food is fantastic as well! In addition, it has nostalgic value for me because it is where my husband did the most romantic thing EVER! During our honeymoon, he made arrangements with the Coral Reef staff to have us seated right by the aquarium glass. During dinner they had a diver swim over, tap on the glass to get my attention and hold up a sign that said “Happy Honeymoon Jenn & Kevin” while tiny white shells fell all around the diver from above. I kid you not, I had NO IDEA! In true Disney Magic fashion the entire restaurant spontaneously gave us a standing ovation while I blushed from ear to ear! Here is picture proof!

1. Ohana (Polynesian Resort) – This is a new one for us. We have heard great things about the food, plus they have fun games for the kids during dinner – Bonus!
2. San Angel Inn (Epcot World Showcase – Mexico) – We are having lunch here because this is my FAVORITE place in Epcot. The food is good and the ambiance is AMAZING! I have a thing for outside-inside, if you have been there then you know what I mean .
3. Cape May Café (Beach Club Resort) – They had us at all you can eat seafood buffet! Also, the ice cream at the Beach Club is supposed to be incredible, so we’ll need to check that out too!
1. Attractions: Just like everyone who visits Disney World we want to do EVERYTHING! However, with only 6 days at the parks we can only do so much. In order to keep ourselves sane and to avoid sending our 3 year old into atomic meltdown we decided on a few key attractions and some strategic breaks:
• Parks: We have devoted two days to the parks we want to do the most at: Magic Kingdom and Epcot. We have planned only one day at Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios.
• Breaks: We have a break planned for every afternoon at the resort, for some swimming and general downtime during the hottest & busiest time of the day. The exception being Thursday, which we will take the whole morning off, to give ourselves some downtime during the middle of our week.
• Misc: Some additional things that we have plans for include: Taking advantage of Magical Express, bringing our own travel stroller (rather than renting one), packing our swimsuits in our carry-on luggage so we can swim as soon as we get to the resort, packing individual snack packages and carrying them into the parks with us so we can use our snack credits for bottled water. We have an appointment for her to get a makeover at the Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique and we have read that it is much cheaper to buy the outfit ahead of time so we plan on spending sometime at Downtown Disney shopping for our daughter’s princess outfit.
2. Preparation: Due to the fact that our daughter is so young we have done a lot to prepare her for this trip. We have, of course, watched all of the Disney movies, read books, painted pictures and generally prepped her for all of the different characters she will encounter while at the parks. We took her on a bus ride, using our local city transportation system, to get her used to riding mass transit. She has been to several festivals this summer, including a Renaissance & Scottish festival to see people in costume. We wanted to get her used to large crowds, hot days, lots of walking and the general atmosphere that she will encounter in the parks. We have gone on carnival rides with her and stood in long lines and eaten lots of fair food, all of which she has been a trooper for. We see all of this as a good indication of how she will handle the parks.

We leave this Sunday and I plan to put up a post about our trip once we return. In the mean time, if you have any questions please put them in the comments and I will answer as promptly as I am able. Thanks!

Tags: 1900 Park Faire, Akershus Royal Banquet, Bibbidi Bobbidi Boutique, Boatwright's Dining Hall, Cape May Cafe, Character Dining, Coral Reef, San Angel Inn, The Crystal Place