I'm booked at the BC from Aug 25 - 31. This is our first ever trip to WDW, and was also going to be our one-and-only, because it's so expensive and a long way for us to travel from where we live now in western Canada. We thought SWGE opening in the fall meant into October at least, and so we knew we'd be missing that. Our main motivation for that last week in August was to avoid crowds. While we have never been to WDW, we have done a couple of short (2 times 2 day and one time 3 day) trips to
Disneyland when we used to live in California and could drive (5 or 6 hours) there and stay offsite. On our last trip there we had a totally unpleasant experience with crowds on an October Monday - we were naive and had no idea about Halloween crowds (or that people even spent time predicting crowds, etc)! That was shoulder-to-shoulder people, couldn't move crushing crowds, our kids being swept up in the crowd and losing us, and it was awful. So we really wanted to avoid that and hoped to have a reasonably low crowd visit in that little pocket of time between the majority of US schools going back mid-August and Canadian schools going back after Labour Day - something we've been considering for the last year, since we learned of the existence of crowd calendars and realized that this would be a possibility for us now that we live in Canada. We are not going to take our kids out of school during term time, and so this seemed like the only way to get a trip that wasn't at the height of school holidays.
We are all big Harry Potter fans, so we're doing 5 nights/4 days at Universal before we head to WDW. We are also all big SW fans, so in theory, would absolutely love to see SWGE. But knowing that we have two days, Aug 29 & 30 (31 is check-out and fly home day) that overlap with the opening, there's no reasonable chance of us being able to see anything, is there? It'll be total chaos, won't it?
Before this announcement, my DH and I had talked about the pros and cons of us planning this once-in-a-lifetime trip before SWGE opens. Did it make sense to go all the way to Orlando, given that it wouldn't be open? Or should we wait and go late August next year? I thought, yes, let's go this year! We can see everything else, plus our twins will be 13, and seems like the sweet spot to take them to see all the Harry Potter stuff at Universal, and they're still young enough that they will get a thrill out of all of the Disney magic and characters. Then in a couple of years, once the dust settles from opening these new Star Wars lands, we could think about making a trip down to Disneyland to see the Star Wars land there.
I'm not cancelling, because we have so much else set in place for the trip already - plane tickets, our stay at Universal, a visit to Kennedy Space Center. Plus we booked with the free dining package (with a lot of questioning as to whether that was worth it / the right thing for us!), so that won't be available if we rebook. I am feeling like our last 2 days of the trip are a bit up in the air now. I'm not sure what to plan for!