Travel dates: March 29 - April 7
Arrangements: Delta, LAX to MCO direct. Once in Orlando we rented a mini-van for 9 days
Accommodations: Sheraton Vistana Villages of the Starwood Network
Park days: 4
Participants: most days there were six adults ages 36 to 71 and five children ages 2 to 9
Background & Pre-trip
Every year my parents are remarkably generous and treat each of my siblings and me and our families to a week at a Starwood Resort. For 2014, Myrtle Beach in June (the place & time of our previous 4 reunions) gave way to Orlando in April. This marked our first trip to the World. Typically our reunion week is marked by lazy days at the pool, various activities for the kids at the resort, and occasional ventures out to the beach, golf course, movie theater, or mall. We take the days as they come one at a time with no grand plan. If there is a theme to these vacations it's that they're taken slow with emphasis on togetherness, relaxation, home-cooked meals, and downtime. 2014 would be no such vacation, particularly for the four days in the parks. This vacation/ reunion would be unlike any other, and this was never more evident than in the hours of preparation and research that went into it. Gone was the luxury to "just show up".
We arrived at the Sheraton a couple evenings before our first park day. As usual, the Sheraton Villas are spacious and comfortable; my sister's family and mine each had a villa. A door adjoined the two so it became one very large 3 bedroom/ 3 bath with one full kitchen and a kitchenette and one very large living area and one smaller one. There was much discussion about when and where to buy tickets. The Sheraton offered the four day base tix we wanted at an ever-so-slight discount, the main selling point being that their version afforded the option to visit one of the water parks which, due to our tight schedule and the high quality pools we could access at Sheraton, we weren't interested in.
My chief concern - I should say my only concern - regarding tickets was to get hard tickets (i.e. the credit card type w/ Mickey, Minnie, Goofy, Donald, etc.) in advance so I could begin linking them to my MDE. Since the hotel or any other third party would almost certainly issue vouchers to be exchanged later for hard tickets, purchasing them from a place outside WDW was simply not appealing. Accordingly, the evening before our first park visit, BIL and I drove to TTC and visited the ticket booths to purchase our base tickets. My family got 4-dayers; his family and the grandparents both purchased 3-dayers.
Purchasing them directly from TTC turned out to be the right choice since it enabled me sit down with my iPhone the night before our first park day and link each of the 10 purchased tickets to my app. In the months leading up to our trip there had been much controversy surrounding Fastpass+ and its availability (lack thereof I should say) to offsite and AP guests wishing to make FP+ reservations in advance. I figured although I couldn't reserve the FP+'s in advance, at the very least I could set up the MDE app to run efficiently once we got in. From what I could glean online, buying the hard tix in advance and inputting them into MDE would eliminate a tedious step our first day in the parks. So true. To put or scan all ten of the ticket numbers and link them to a name/person in MDE took the better part of an hour. This done, I'd only need to visit a FP+ kiosk upon park entry to make 3 quick FP+ reservations for each of the 10 ticketed members of our party (our youngest still is age 2 therefore without a ticket).
As coincidence would have it, on our opening day at the parks WDW opened up advanced (up to 60 days) FP+ capability to ALL guests for the first time ever. I accessed the FP+ kiosks day 1 but wouldn't have to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th days as I began making FP+ reservations a day or two prior to parkstorming.
Our group of 11 had varying degrees of park experience, not to mention the gamut of interests, expectations, physical capabilities, stamina, and other variables that make planning a large-group trip especially challenging. Accounting for these variables and finding common ground among my family (over 100 DLR visits), my parents and sister (a handful of DLR visits), and my sister's family (no Disney park experience to speak of) was a delicate balance. That said, one thing we all shared in common was we'd never seen or been to anything quite like Animal Kingdom, so we'd be very much on equal footing Day 1.
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