What apps do you use for planning & scheduling?

[Straulin]

We are new members and have our "welcome home" trip planned for early October.

We can't book dining reservations yet and also don't have park hours yet for finalizing park reservations.

I went ahead and set some park reservations for now but will adjust based upon hours when they are available. DHS is already booked up during the week so itight get interesting. Therefore I want to adjust them as soon as the hours are posted.

Do any of you have good countdown, scheduling, or reservation stalking apps you like to use?

 

[CarolynFH]

I just use the MDE app and website to keep tabs on changes to park hours, check menus, etc., and of course all our resort/park/dining reservations are recorded there. I also maintain my own spreadsheet with the same information but arranged as more of a schedule. Before we leave I print it out so that when DH inevitably proposes changes I can show him the effects before I actually change things.

 

[varyth]

In pre-COVID and pre-Genie+ days, I subscribed to https://touringplans.com/ for my WDW and Universal Orlando trips. It worked great for us, but I'm not sure how accurate it is with all the new changes in the past couple of years.

 

[Hoppy-tn]

WIFE

 

[DduzDis]

WIFE

Sounds expensive...

 

[Hoppy-tn]

Truer words have never been spoking

 

[Straulin]

I just added in reminders to my email software's calander for 75 days out for updating park reservations and 60 days out for dining (which may impact our park reservations again but we will have to see.) This is also when I will hand it over to my wife for actual planning. I am just in charge of telling her when it is time. I'm still not used to fast passes being gone so there is a lot less to plan than previously.

Thanks for the replies everyone!

 

[JoeyPeligroso]

TripIt is very nice for planning the overall trip and organizing travel and transfers.

At the parks I use Disney MDE and still use a bit of touring plans as well.

 

[BrianLa]

In pre-COVID and pre-Genie+ days, I subscribed to https://touringplans.com/ for my WDW and Universal Orlando trips. It worked great for us, but I'm not sure how accurate it is with all the new changes in the past couple of years.

I use touring plans as well. My last 2 trips (April 2022, November 2021) , I found their wait times to be more accurate than the wait times posted by Disney

 

[JoeyPeligroso]

I use touring plans as well. My last 2 trips (April 2022, November 2021) , I found their wait times to be more accurate than the wait times posted by Disney

I agree, on my most recent trip over the Memorial Day weekend, touring plans was a nice way to consider ride options between scheduled Genie+ rides, ILL$ rides, and other experiences. It was quite accurate on wait times.

 

[sethschroeder]

Have Touringplans for some of the stuff but have an excel. I import a list from Touringplans schedule and it automatically aligns to my week with the best/worst park each day, best park day for each park, color codes everything, and I have locations for dining, parks we are going to (AM and PM), and other aspects.

Even have travel day schedules where I just have to put flight departure/arrival times and it tells me when everything will happen from needing to load up vehicle to when we could expect to be at the parks.

 

[PsycProfPlum]

I tend to use a lot of technology in general but haven't found anything I love TBH. Probably a shared google calendar is what my family uses most, though it's a hassle to have to go in and update it. Sometimes I'll use TripIt to help. Essentially all hotel and dining reservations are emailed to you, then you forward that email to TripIt and they add it to their app. You can also set it up to show TripIt as a google calendar. The downsides here is that it's a bit tough when two different people are making various reservations for things, things like lightning lanes etc don't really work with it, and it's not easy to remove things from the TripIt google calendar because you aren't the "owner" of it. Eventually I end up having to cross reference MDE with our calendar to make sure everything checks out as we tend to cancel things and add others.

We use TouringPlans as well, but mostly just for in-park suggestions about what to ride.... it's not great for holistic planning (flights, transpo, dining reservations, etc) as that's not really what it was designed for.

For DVC planning, I've tried a few DVC specific apps but didn't love most of them. I use one called "DVC Calculator" just to estimate how many points a hypothetical trip would cost and it works quite well for that limited task.

 

[PsycProfPlum]

Sounds expensive...

While I LOLed, my wife failed to see the humor in this

 

[DannyV]

I use DVC Calculator as well. Along with showing points per trips, also shows the 7/11 months dates for booking. Because it stores the the data locally, it's much faster than the DVC website for just checking out how many points a trip would be.
Touring Plans as well, use the crowd calendars as reference but still pick the parks that work best for us those days.