BingBongFan
Earning My Ears
- Joined
- Jun 4, 2023
My family and I finally made our first trip to Disney World, and despite having young children with us and having almost no knowledge of the parks it was the best vacation we have ever gone on. We did a lot of things that made the trip easier on us, but the most important by far was hiring a Disney VIP guide for all of our park days. I can't fully describe the professionalism or personal touch our guide brought to the trip. All I can say is that he made us feel like the most important people in the world the entire time, giving us insight into the parks and their history, arranging quick service lunches so they were like sit down meals waiting for us after rides to avoid wasting time, and making sure we never waited more than a few minutes to get on any ride.
We were able to ride literally everything multiple times, without any stress or needing to figure out (or buy) genie+. He also made park hopping seamless and let us do things like spending the day going on rides at other parks and then dropping into MK at the last minute for fireworks with excellent vantage points. Having the guide also let us start off at our own pace each day. We could get up, eat a leisurely breakfast, get ready without time pressure and then start the day at 9:30 or 10 instead of rope dropping.
Of all the things we did on the trip, I would definitely say the guide was the best, especially since we had him for multiple days and didn't feel pressure to maximize the time too much.
I would also quickly flag that we used a guide in Universal as well and had a much worse experience. The guide there had great front of line access to rides but had very little knowledge of the parks and didn't really give us direction or help us plan our day well. We will not use a universal VIP guide again in the future.
A few other things I would call out that made the trip easy and relaxing for us:
We were able to ride literally everything multiple times, without any stress or needing to figure out (or buy) genie+. He also made park hopping seamless and let us do things like spending the day going on rides at other parks and then dropping into MK at the last minute for fireworks with excellent vantage points. Having the guide also let us start off at our own pace each day. We could get up, eat a leisurely breakfast, get ready without time pressure and then start the day at 9:30 or 10 instead of rope dropping.
Of all the things we did on the trip, I would definitely say the guide was the best, especially since we had him for multiple days and didn't feel pressure to maximize the time too much.
I would also quickly flag that we used a guide in Universal as well and had a much worse experience. The guide there had great front of line access to rides but had very little knowledge of the parks and didn't really give us direction or help us plan our day well. We will not use a universal VIP guide again in the future.
A few other things I would call out that made the trip easy and relaxing for us:
- Anytime we weren't using the guide to drive us we used Minnie Vans and they were a life saver. The drivers were uniformly excellent and they were able to handle car seats which made our life much easier. Most days we went to the parks in Minnie vans and met the guide to avoid using expensive hourly guide time driving to the parks.
- We stayed in a 2 bedroom villa, allowing the kids to have their own room with the living room as a buffer from us. This let us actually spend time as adults at the end of the day without worrying about waking the kids and it allowed us to spend time in the rooms without dealing with the clutter of suitcases and clothing in our living space.
- We spaced out the trip enough so that we usually had a down day by the pool in between park days.
- We made a point of having a sit down meal in a signature restaurant each day (before or after the guide time) which gave us a chance to relax even on park days.
