All these people!! All these attitudes!! December 2017 Pre-Trip Report *Final Update 12/12*

novajeanjellybean

I love to laugh! Loud and long and clear!
Joined
Nov 14, 2004
Hello All—Welcome to my first Pre Trip Report!!:welcome:


This will be my 3rd trip to Walt Disney World and my sister and I will be planning the trip for our large group made up of friends and family. We will be a group of about 15 people…..a few are subject to change LOL. I decided to write a pre trip report to chronicle the planning for a large group filled with so many different personalities. As I'm sure some of you can relate to.



My sister and I’s first trip was in 2002, we did ZERO research and basically missed out on a lot. I mean, we tried to walk up to CRT. Our next trip was in 2011, a family trip, and was awesome. We totally planned it and had a great time.



My sister will be chiming in from time to time with additional information. She’ll be in the RED letters.



We are booked at Caribbean Beach Resort for December 15-22 with FREE DINING. Whoop Whoop!!! 131 days to go.




The Group:



Me:



I’m an avid Disney lover and super Disney planner. I love the Dis and have been a member since 2004. I mostly lurk, and have learned so much from these boards.
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My Dsis, her hubby, and their 2 boys, (3 and 11). This will be the 3-year old’s first trip.


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My wonderful parents



My friend C and her daughter (age 3) This will be their first trip.


My Friends J and H and their twins (age 1) This will be their first trip.
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We also have some possibles (we call them asterisks), my DBF, my cousins, C’s cousin, and C’s DBF….We’re waiting to see if they will be able to go, but won’t know until closer to the trip.




How it all started:



My sister and I originally wanted to plan a trip for August 2017, but due to other obligations had to move the trip back to December 2017. We asked some of our friends if they wanted to join and they said YES!!! We set up a planning meeting for March to go over some of the main points about a Disney vacation and most importantly, price.



Everyone was in and after reading these boards, we found out that Free Dining would most likely be offered around the time we were planning to visit. Our family had the Disney Dining Plan during our last visit and completely loved it. For our family, it’s not about the dollar for dollar savings, it’s about having the food paid upfront.



We read the boards some more and found out the tentative date that Free Dining would drop. And of course, on that date, I overslept :rolleyes1:rolleyes1:rolleyes1:headache::headache: But my AWESOME friends were up, and trying to get through to Disney. I swear we each called Disney about 100 times and NO ONE could get through. And there we NO ROOMS available online. There was speculation that all the rooms were gone and that we missed it. Then one random call in the afternoon, it initially gave a busy signal, and then because I was washing my hands and couldn’t hang up, the phone went through to the beautiful sound of calling the Walt Disney World Resort. I booked my room and conference called C on 3 way so that she could book too. The rest of our group was able to book shortly thereafter. In hindsight, I wonder if Disney didn’t drop the Free Dining until the afternoon on purpose. We see you Disney, LOL.



Any Who….We were DISNEY BOUND!!!!:cloud9::cloud9::cloud9::cloud9:


Next Steps—Flights and Dining Plans…….
 
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Wow, what a diverse group! Sounds like a planning challenge!

I was the planner for our trip last year which included 13 people: 69 year old in-laws, me, DH, kids 16, 13, 10, BIL and 11 year old niece, SIL/BIL with 10 and 7 year old nephews. If I hadn't offered to plan I think we would have just showed up like, "so what do you want to do? I don't know what do YOU want to do?" My MIL thought she "knew" WDW because they had been there 25 years ago. UM, things have changed a little.

ANYWHO, it really helped that everyone in our group was tall enough for all rides. You will have an added challenge with littles.

Just curious, did you keep the QS dining plan or did you upgrade to DDP? We were lucky last year we got free DDP at POR. Looks like those days are over.

Also, how does that work with the "possibles"? Do you have free dining rooms booked for them and will cancel if they can't make it?
 
Wow, what a diverse group! Sounds like a planning challenge!

I was the planner for our trip last year which included 13 people: 69 year old in-laws, me, DH, kids 16, 13, 10, BIL and 11 year old niece, SIL/BIL with 10 and 7 year old nephews. If I hadn't offered to plan I think we would have just showed up like, "so what do you want to do? I don't know what do YOU want to do?" My MIL thought she "knew" WDW because they had been there 25 years ago. UM, things have changed a little.

ANYWHO, it really helped that everyone in our group was tall enough for all rides. You will have an added challenge with littles.

Just curious, did you keep the QS dining plan or did you upgrade to DDP? We were lucky last year we got free DDP at POR. Looks like those days are over.

Also, how does that work with the "possibles"? Do you have free dining rooms booked for them and will cancel if they can't make it?

Thanks for reading @mamamelody2

We upgraded to DDP. As far as the possibles, we have 5 different room reservations right now, so if the "possibles" are able to make it, we'll add them to our reservations. My 3 cousins are college students with much tighter budgets, so we may be putting them in their own room if a room discount comes out. Another option is to add them to our reservations (I'm in my room alone right now), if they determine that they are able to come.
 
Dining Decisions……………


Let me just preface this by saying, my sister and I have been doing dining research for yeaaarrrsss!!! I am a regular Disney Food Blog reader. Not having the DDP was never an option for our family. The last time we went, we also had the DDP and loved it. On our previous trip, we ate at these places: Ohana, Chef Mickey, Whispering Canyon Café, T-rex, Narcoossee’s, Cape May Café, and Boma. When we began actually making plans for this trip, we decided that we wanted to switch it up and eat at some new places. All of our reservations are upgraded to DDP instead of the QS Dining. We then asked everyone to go through the list of restaurants and let us know if anything jumped out at them. We wanted to make sure that everyone’s input was considered. Pretty much everyone decided, we’ll just eat with you guys. Cool….works for us!!!:smooth::smooth:



Our initial picks for dining were: Be Our Guest lunch, Kona Café breakfast, Whispering Canyon Café, The BOAThouse, 50’s Prime Time, La Hacienda de San Angel, San Angel Inn, The Wave, Homecomin, Tusker House, Cape May Café, O'hana, and Raglan Road.



Obviously, we needed to make some choices.:rolleyes1:rolleyes1



I sent an email to everyone and attached the menus for each of the restaurants from Allears. Then, we had a planning meeting to decide where we would eat. H and C mentioned that they’d like to eat in the World Showcase. We looked through all World Showcase menus and decided on Tutto Italia. We eliminated La Hacienda de San Angel and San Angel Inn because we live in Houston, Texas and can eat Mexican all the time. We also decided against O'hana since our family has eaten there twice. We also cut 50’s Prime Time and Raglan Road due to dining credit restraints.



We were left with the following dining choices: Be Our Guest lunch, Kona Café breakfast, Whispering Canyon Café dinner, The BOAThouse dinner, The Wave dinner, Homecomin dinner, Tusker House breakfast, Cape May Café dinner, and Tutto Italia dinner.



My sister and I had been playing around with the reservation system to make sure we didn’t have any surprises on reservation day since our party is so big. We decided to make our reservations for 16 in the event that some of the “possibles” make it. As I’ve read on the boards here, reserve for more, not less. We had trouble finding anything available for a group of 16 so I decided to call Disney Dining and ask about reservations for 16 people. When I called, they told me that some restaurants have limits for online reservations and gave me the limits for each restaurant. They also suggested that we make 2 reservations around the same time that equal 16 people (including infants) and then call the restaurants to link the reservations.



I’ll share the limits here, just in case anyone is planning a trip with a large group.



WCC: 15 people



BOG: 9 people and cannot accommodate groups over 21



BH: 9 people



Cape May: 13 people



The Wave: 13 people



HC: 12 people



Tutto: 9 people



We are able to do Kona Café and Tusker House online.




Up Next: Actually making Dining Reservations:yay::yay::yay:
 


following! I have a big family trip on the horizon (2019) and can't wait to read all about yours.

I think it's HILARIOUS that you called your folks "asterisks" - In my PTR I called them "wildcards" :rotfl2:

... and PS, they aren't going! :joker:
 
Actually making Dining Reservations


Our 180 mark was on June 18th, Father’s Day. In the weeks prior to then, my sister and I put together a day by day park plan. Around the same time, Disney decided to drop the park hours day by day 180 days in advance. IT.DROVE.US.CRAZY. :headache::headache::headache:We used existing hours to determine EMH parks and days. Our family tends to avoid AM EMHs but loves PM EMH. Trying to figure out a workable park plan, along with figuring out the park hours and MVMCP, it was a P.I.T.A. Nonetheless, this is the original, tentative, park plan that we came up with:



Friday 12/22: arrival day, no park



Saturday 12/16: AM Epcot PM Magic Kingdom



Sunday 12/17: AM Animal Kingdom PM AK or Ep or DHS



Monday 12/18: AM DHS PM AK or MK



Tuesday 12/19: AM MK PM Epcot



Wednesday 12/20: AM AK PM MK



Thursday 12/21: AM MK PM open, maybe DHS since we don’t have a lot of time at this park



Friday 12/22: departure day



As you can tell, there’s a lot of room for tweaking before we go. :duck:LOL We read on these boards to try for the "hard to get" reservations (i.e BOG) for the end of your stay. This way, you’ll have a better chance of getting them. Based on this park plan, we planned to aim for the following ADRs/times:



Tusker House bfast: 12/17 PPO no earlier than 730



Cape May Café dinner: 12/19 between 5-7 pm



The Wave Dinner: 12/15 between 6-8 pm



BOG lunch: 12/21 or 12/19 between 11 am -12 pm



WCC dinner: 12/16 between 5-7 pm



BOATHouse dinner: 12/21 between 5-7pm



Kona Café bfast: 12/16 before 9am



Homecomin dinner: 12/18 either really early or really late



Tutto Italia: 12/17 after 8 pm or 12/20 between 5-7 pm





We decided to make 2 reservations of 8 online instead of calling each restaurant directly on 6/18. We’d call the restaurants directly later to ask to be seated together. C, Dsis and I volunteered to take on making the ADRs. We split the list above and all agreed to log in at 5:45 am CST on 6/18.



Now comes the morning of 6/18….



We had taken a day trip to Austin the day before for H’s bday and gotten back at around midnight. C had a birthday party to attend that night also and got home really, really late. Dsis and I were online at 5:50 am and were looking for C. She completely overslept and didn’t make it. LOL. Since Dsis and I already knew that C would be out late before, and could possibly oversleep, we had a contingency plan in place. Once it was apparent that C was asleep, we split her part of the list and got started.



We ended up with the following ADRs/times:



The Wave dinner: 12/15 2 reservations of 8, 7:10pm and 7:25pm



Kona bfast: 12/16 1 reservation of 16, 8:45 am



Tusker House bfast: 12/17 1 reservation of 16, 8:25 am



Tutto Italia dinner: 12/17, 2 reservations of 8, 8:15 pm



Homecomin dinner: 12/18, 2 reservations of 8, 4:30 pm



BOG lunch: 12/19, 2 reservations of 8, 11:55 am



Cape May Café dinner: 12/19, 2 reservations of 8, 6:25 pm and 6:40 pm



WCC dinner: 12/20, 2 reservations of 8, 7:10pm and 7:15 pm



BOAThouse dinner: 12/21, 2 reservations of 8, 5:00pm



Not too shabby and it all took about an hour. Dsis and I were on the phone together so it made it pretty easy. We agreed to try to look for a later time for Homecomin, but other than that, we happy with our times.



Coming up next…..Flights:car::car:


123 Days to go:hourglass:hourglass
 


You are so far ahead of the game by sharing planning with your sis! We went with 17, disaster!!! Splitting up for part of the day, meeting for meals, all great ideas. Anxious to follow along!
 
Flights!!!


During the whole planning process, our whole group had been pricing flights to try to find the most economical price. We quickly found out that it is super expensive to fly from Houston to Orlando around Christmas time. My dad offered to contribute about 90% of the flight money. That was something that we weren’t expecting at all!!!:worship::worship::yay::yay::yay::thanks:



In Houston, we have 2 airports, Hobby and Intercontinental. Hobby is closer to most of our group, and mostly services Southwest flights. Ideal scenario is to find a reasonably priced roundtrip flight. Not only for the convenience, but also because of the 2 free bags. We weren’t opposed to going to IAH though, if the price was right. C is a huge fan of Spirit airlines, and we agreed that if the price was right, we would consider them too. C and I are both Rapid Rewards members and get their sale emails. We went back historically and noticed that all of their sales for the last year had Friday blacked out to and from Florida. Sigh…..this was going to be harder than we thought.



We had to get creative. :badpc::badpc:



Dsis found an awesome deal flying to and from Austin for $150 r/t on Allegiant Airlines. She presented it to the group and couldn’t get total buy in, so it was back to the drawing board. We decided to start looking at one-way flights. We kept being reminded that flying to and from Houston on December 15 and December 22nd is very expensive. LOL.



We called United and Southwest Group Reservations and got quotes for 11 tickets. We learned a lot about Group Reservations (including that Southwest charges the highest price for each ticket on that day) but ultimately declined. It wasn’t cost effective for our group.



In our search for one-way tickets, we found that Southwest was the cheapest going to Orlando on December 15 (under $200) but expensive ($350-$400):eek: going back on December 22. Then we found that United was the cheapest coming back (about $200) on December 22, but was expensive to go to Orlando on December 15 (about $300):eek:. These airlines also fly out of different airports in Houston. We played around with adding days to the front of our trip to get the cheaper sale flights, but ultimately, even with saving the flight money, we’d have to pay for the extra night at CBR or offsite and the savings wouldn’t be substantial enough. We also had to consider my nephew’s school schedule. We were left to decide between flying out of one airport and returning to the other or paying more than we were comfortable with.



We discussed the pros and cons over the course of a few weeks. We decided to go ahead and buy the one-way tickets on Southwest and United. C, H, and J planned to be dropped off at the airport for the trip, so the airports didn’t matter. For my parents, Dsis and family and I would park 2 cars at one airport and carpool in 2 cars the next morning to the other airport. Then when we return, we would take each other to get our cars. We ended up paying about $400 per ticket.:faint::faint: If we’re lucky, Southwest will lower the price of the flight and we can get some money back.:rolleyes1:rolleyes1:rolleyes1



On a fluke, we did a test run of this in mid-July and it went totally smooth. The airports are only about 20-30 minutes apart driving.


Whew, another big task was marked off the list. We had reservations, ADRs, and flights. All of the major stuff was done!!! Now to work on FP+ and day by day park plans.:drive::drive::upsidedow:upsidedow:upsidedow
 
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@DeterminedOne The main issue was that the return flight from Orlando was at 6 am. And Dad, he was against the whole thing, saying that he didn't want to drive (or ride) 2 1/2 hours to/from Austin. I'm sure, in hindsight, he is kicking himself.:headache::headache::headache:
 
Sounds like you guys did a lot of thinking ahead of time and looked at every option available. We had to add an extra day on at the beginning of our trip to get a great deal on Southwest. Luckily I found a 3 bedroom villa in Orlando for the one night for the add on so it was worth the extra day.

I hope you and your family's our safe and you experienced minimum damage in the hurricane. Thoughts and Prayers with everyone effected.
 
Joining! You're doing great booking for so many people which is NOT an easy thing! I've had to book for 11 and 15, dining and FP's are not fun to do lol

I wonder if Disney didn’t drop the Free Dining until the afternoon on purpose.
LOL, oh they dropped FD right before 5am, you got lucky later in the day getting through and having it available for that many rooms! The construction there helped it not book up too fast, too.

When we began actually making plans for this trip, we decided that we wanted to switch it up and eat at some new places
This is what we do; sometimes we stick with a couple of our favorites and always throw in new places :)

Pretty much everyone decided, we’ll just eat with you guys. Cool….works for us!!!:smooth::smooth:
Ah, makes it much easier!

Looking forward to reading more, the parks are so pretty when you're going :santa:
 
As most of you can imagine, it's been a crazy week for us in Houston.:faint::eek::faint::eek: None of our group experienced any damage from the hurricane, floods, or tornadoes. We all got very lucky, since we all live in different areas of the city, but each very close to areas that were hit hard. Needless to say, I haven't been doing much planning recently. Our FP + date is coming up on October 15th, so we have to get going. I expect to have an update soon :goodvibes:goodvibes:goodvibes
 
We are from Houston too, didn't get flooded,just the surrounding streets which made it hard to get out. Our fast passes our also coming up on October 8. We just got an email telling us Chef Mickey is going to be moved to the convention center, we go at this time of year to celebrate our only grandchild's birthday and she requested Chef Mickey for her 9th birthday celebration. We haven't decided yet to tell her what has happened or should we just go with the flow and just celebrate being able to take her there.
 
We are from Houston too, didn't get flooded,just the surrounding streets which made it hard to get out. Our fast passes our also coming up on October 8. We just got an email telling us Chef Mickey is going to be moved to the convention center, we go at this time of year to celebrate our only grandchild's birthday and she requested Chef Mickey for her 9th birthday celebration. We haven't decided yet to tell her what has happened or should we just go with the flow and just celebrate being able to take her there.

Glad to hear you guys are safe. Sounds like we will be in the world at the same time.
 
How awesome!! The complications of planning for sooo many people are crazy! I just came back from a trip with a party of 8. The stressful part was that it was the other family's first trip and everytime I asked for opinions, they felt they didn't know enough to know what they wanted. So they asked me to decide for them. Of course, when we get there, I discover excitement over certain rides that were NOT IN THE PLANS! Oh well, I adjusted as best as I could and we had a wonderful time. It was much harder changing up FPs and ADRs for such a big group though. And I admit at times I got frazzled although they all kept telling me not to change things up and that they would just go with whatever. Oh well - it was an incredible time that I will cherish forever :)
 
@Tea4Alice Glad to hear your family is safe!!! :goodvibes:goodvibes I heard about Chef Mickey's being moved from the end of November through December. I guess it depends on whether or not your grandchild is more into the characters at Chef Mickey's or the location. I personally love Chef Mickeys for both the location and the character and would be super bummed about the move.

@elaine amj Thank you for the reminder that it's all worth it. Some of our group is that way also, but I hope our plan is loose enough for spontaneity, but detailed enough for everyone to have a great Disney experience.

On a side note, a cold front came into Houston today and I am hoping this is the type of weather we have in Disney in December. Highs 85ish, Lows 65 ish:cool1::cool1:
 
So, since Hurricane Harvey pretty much ruined any Labor Day plans we may have had—even though we didn’t have any plans LOL:laughing:—we decided, why not have a Disney Fast Pass planning meeting?::yes::::yes:: We wanted to discuss Child Swap, Park Strategies, Fast Passes. We also wanted to reiterate about how the dining plans works. We’ll have to revisit that again LOL. Because of the current traffic issues in Houston (crazy commutes), DSis came over about an hour and a half early. We went over our game plan, and started figuring out park strategies for each day. We also tried to pre determine which FP we would try to get for which days. In the midst of this, we realized that our FP date is October 16th, not the 15th. Don’t know how we ALL messed that up—I mean, it’s in the little Disney planning booklet and everything.:faint::faint: I'm glad we caught that. I created an itinerary spreadsheet to outline our park days and ADRs. During our meeting, we referred to the Fast Pass + ride tier chart in the Fastpass + Frequently Asked Questions sticky on the Theme Parks Attractions and Strategies board here. If you haven’t checked it out, you should. It's super helpful. We printed it and made height notes for the kids in our group to figure out who could ride what.


We began by discussing Child Swap for the twins’ parents, H & J, and explaining how it worked. Then, had the discussion about whether or not to bring car seats. We didn’t plan on renting a car and would be exclusively using Disney transportation—we will see how that goes LOL. We went over the dining plan again because we have 2 OOP ADRs at different points during our stay and we wanted to make sure that no one tried to use DDP credits for an ADR that is planned to be OOP. Our last ADR is at the BOAThouse, which is a DDP Signature 2 credit restaurant, so it would be a total mess if anyone had to pay for this meal OOP because they didn’t have any credits left. We discussed Fast Passes and what rides everyone would or wouldn’t ride. Everyone seemed to be okay with every ride since Disney isn’t really heavy on the extreme thrill rides, although H wanted to make sure we knew that he didn’t even want a sprinkle of water on his shoes. Okay :cool2::rolleyes2:rolleyes2:rolleyes2. His wife, J, quickly overrode that LOL.:rotfl2::rotfl2:



My parents didn’t come to the meeting, because, we know them, they don’t care LOL:confused3:confused3. Just let them know where they need to be and at what time. My dad mentioned that he wasn’t waiting in any lines over 30 minutes, but wanted to ride all the headliners. Yeaaaaaaaaaaaaa, :rolleyes1:rolleyes1we know that’s not going to work so we’ll be adding him and DMom to the same fast passes as the group. We expect them to be in and out, miss meals, etc. He also notified us that he would be unavailable on Sunday Dec 17 in the afternoon because the Steelers play the Patriots :rotfl: I should mention that DF, Dsis, and I are HUGE Steeler fans. :worship::worship::worship::banana::banana::cheer2::cheer2:



I’ll share our daily park plans in a day or two. I need to organize my written notes. :blush:



100 days to go!!!!!!party:party:party:
 

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