We are continuing our series showing you exactly how we are planning our next Disney vacation! We are excited to show you step by step how we are planning our trip.
Here is what you need to know: There are 12 of us traveling together. Jen and her family, Dave and Jodi (our mom!) and me (Katie) and my family. There are 6 kids ranging in age from 5-16.
In part one we decided how many days we wanted to gone on our trip. The next step was choosing our dates.
Picking Our Dates
Here are the factors our family was working with. Again, these are specific to our family, so they might not be the same factors for everyone!
- We did not want to go in the summer.
- We did not want to go over Christmas.
- We wanted to try to work around some school holidays in order to avoid missing too much school (especially for the older kids in middle and high school).
- Minor factors we took into consideration were sports schedules and busy seasons for work.
- Disney’s special events calendar was a minor consideration.
We initially started looking at October, November, and early December. We quickly ruled out November and December as those are the busiest work seasons for Jen and my husband. That left us checking out October.
Plan 1
Minnesota has a statewide school break in mid-October with 2 days off on a Thursday and Friday. Our initial plan was to take our vacation over that break. We have gone to Disney World during this time frame before. The biggest downside is that the airlines jack up their prices for flights leaving MSP and we would be massively overpaying for airfare. It feels like a kick to the stomach when we are already paying so much for Disney!
We did a quick check of our Disney Crowd Calendar to confirm those were the dates we wanted and to our shock that is now considered a high attendance time. We confirmed with a few other sites and sure enough, several of those dates are dates we would typically avoid when factoring in crowds.
Plan 2
This brought us to a conundrum. The high flight prices and high attendance were two big factors we wanted to avoid. As you may remember in Part 1, we had all decided we were ok with missing some school.
I reached out to my kids’ school and found out there were 2 days in early October that they would be off of school for conferences. After checking with the rest of our family, we decided to utilize those dates!
You know the saying “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry”? Well, the school calendar came out for this upcoming year and the conference dates are no longer the ones I was initially told. So while we tried to avoid having the kids miss school, it didn’t work out.
And so it goes with planning a Disney vacation! You do the best you can and then let the chips fall where they may. At this point in our trip planning we nailed down number of days being gone and the exact dates. We then sent this info to our amazing travel agent so we could start our next big decision: which hotel to stay at!
Time for you to plan!
How can you use this information for planning your family Disney trip? Think through the same types of questions we went through:
- What time of year do you want to go (summer? winter? etc)?
- Do you want to try to be there during a holiday (Christmas and Halloween are especially fun!) or do you want to skip the holiday to skip the crowds?
- Are there any school holidays or breaks your can take advantage of?
- Are there busy seasons for work or sports that you want to avoid being gone for?
Be sure to our our Disney Crowd Calendar as well as Disney’s special events calendar for additional consideration!
We’ll see you in the next round of “planing our Disney vacation” when we share what hotel to stay at!