Sooooo excited to start my planning mission.Dh figured we have 2 Birthdays and our Anniversary in October and it is Halloween and Food and Wine Fest so why not October?? duh lol. Can't wait to do the investigating and planning!!!!:p

Congrats! Have fun planning. If you do it properly, it will take your full twelve and one half months (jesting!). Well, only half jesting--I spent 18 months planning mine!:p

Just a suggestion... Start making the calls now as October 2008 was booking up fast! When I started calling a couple of weeks back all of the STANDARD ROOMS at the Contemporary and the Wilderness were not available for several dates later in the month. And there were very few garden level at the Poly available. According to AAA that is a busy time of year because of school breaks (my daughter is off track), the Halloween, Food Festival, and great weather. We are deciding between the Poly later in the month or the Wilderness in the middle of the month. There is a difference of $1500! :|

Any thoughts between the Poly and Wilderness? Anyone stay at both? Besides the Monorail, we will be missing anything extraordinary staying at the Wilderness?

I love the Poly, but not for an additional $1500 that I could be spending on food and shirts! (Or airfare...)

I'm so excited for you dawz1026! Planning a year in advance is very smart, not only for booking purposes but just for planning and learning all you can about the best things about all of the parks. There is so much to know. We are going Jan of 2009 and I do feel a little obsessed already, I can't even imagine me in a year from now. lol I will have no friends left by that time because they will be sick to death of hearing about one more cool thing I learned about WDW :) Anyway, have fun with it, it's what it's all about!

Rooms at the Poly are about 100sf larger than the rooms at WL. And you are on the monorail and also walking distanvce to the TTC.

However in WL all the rooms are inside of one building but at the Poly to get to the restaurants/shops/front desk from your room you have to walk to a different building. If it is raining (heavily) at dinner time this can make a real difference.

Any thoughts between the Poly and Wilderness? Anyone stay at both? Besides the Monorail, we will be missing anything extraordinary staying at the Wilderness?

I love the Poly, but not for an additional $1500 that I could be spending on food and shirts! (Or airfare...)

We actually stayed at both on the same trip! 3 nights at the Poly and 5 nights at the Wilderness.

We voted the Wilderness because we just didn't have great luck at the Poly. Don't get me wrong...the Poly is gorgeous! But, they put us all the way faaaaaaaaar away in one of the back buildings (I forget which one) and the room was old, doors were broken, no hot water for a shower in the morning. We couldn't believe it! The lobby as lovely as it is, is soooooo crowded and doesn't have a great flow to it. When the lobby is empty, you can really take in the atmosphere.

Then, we switched to the Wilderness and wow! Clean, new and lovely. We loved taking the ferry boat everyday. The service was "grand" and we just thought, we could have saved money by just staying at the WL the entire time instead. The WL lobby is so enormous you just want to take a seat and sit and enjoy the atmosphere.

I know they have or are (still?) refurbishing the Poly, it really needed updating...so maybe we just had the crumby luck of an old room...

Oh well.......hope this helps a little. :fez: