Disney Comments from the Peanut Gallery

I believe my husband Anonymously commented on my last Disney post, and so those of you do not miss it, here are his notes:

Additional Notes
Get you MDE (My Disney Experience) account set up on the Disney website as soon as you make your hotel reservation. This is the online tool for booking everything (Dining, FastPass, Online Check In, Magic Bands, and Tickets)

Dining Reservations can be Made 180 days prior to your Arrival Date for up to the first 10 days of your vacation. Online Reservations open at 6AM, Phone reservations open at 7AM. Online is easier to use. Make sure you have your MDE account and credit card all set up in the system, it will make this process much quicker. As stated in the Blog, Be Our Guest, Cinderella's Royal Table, O'Hana, Askerhaus, Chef Mickey, Victoria & Alberts, Fantasmic Dinner Package and California Grill may get completely booked within hours of the 6AM booking time. Some of the early days of your vacation may already be booked before your window opens, but there is usually availability at the end of your vacation. Also, if you want to get an 8AM breakfast reservation in the parks (most park restaurants open at 8AM) for a day when they open at 9AM (Most parks open at 9AM except for Extra magic Hours that open at 8AM), so you can be first in the park, these spots go quickly at all breakfast places in the parks.

Microsoft excel Hint - enter your arrival date in an excel spreadsheet, then in another cell, calculate that date - 180, and Excel will display the date you can start making reservations.

Look into and do the Fantasmic dinner package, especially if you are on the meal plan. It gets you a meal and premium access to fantasmic at Hollywood studios, which guarantees good seats for a great show, that you would otherwise have to line up for 1.5+ hrs before the show to get comparable seats.

Park Schedules are posted prior to the 180 day mark, so plan your parks then, but be forewarned that park schedules often change about a month or 2 before you arrive. Normally hours get extended based on the volume of bookings, also evening extra magic hours often get extended from 1hr to 2Hrs. Morning Extra Magic Hours almost always stay the same and are only 1Hr.

When planning which parks on which days, consult an online "Disney crowd calendar" Google it, several will come up. The predict which parks will be least crowded each day, and usually do a good job. Some of this planning is counter intuitive. You may look at the park hours and say, "hey look Hollywood studios is open late and has magic hours, lets go there that day", the same logic that makes you think this, makes every other person planning there vacation think the same thing, so all the sudden you have extra late hours and magic hours to spend in lines with every other person in the world, when another park may have been completely empty where you could have done twice as much in half the time. These crowd calendars explain all this backward logic for you.