Hello everyone! As you may know, on my last trip to Disney World there were a lot of us, 9 in total. This post has been a long time coming because I learned so much on our trip! Today I’m sharing five tips for traveling to Walt Disney World in large groups!
a quick refresher
I thought I would quickly refresh your memory with our group. There was me and Ethan, my parents, my sister, her worker, Ethan’s parents, and Ethan’s brother. Plus for two days we were joined by my friend Hayley! Of the orginal 9, 4 people had never been to Walt Disney World before. We stayed at the Polynesian in 4 different rooms in the DVC studios.
1. Someone needs to be the planner
You may probably already know that in our case, I was the planner. I made most of the decisions, made all the dining reservations and fastpass+ reservations. I had planned where we would be on what day, and some general things we were going to do. I definitely took input when it came to making reservations, but it was really easy for one person to be in charge of it all, and I had no problem with that. Planning is fun for me! It helps to get me excited, and you probably know how excited I was for this trip 🙂
2. Set expectations for the group (the plan)
I always made a point to let everyone know the general plan, even if it meant saying the same thing to everyone. Our group was fairly easy-going, and this way everyone knew what to expect. Our schedule wasn’t set in stone, but we did have things that we wanted to do, Fastpass+ reservations already, and made plans for some come back times with the pass for my sister. When you are travelling in a large group (and just going to Disney in general) it’s impossible to do everything. Even more so in a large group. I went in knowing that we couldn’t do it all, so when it took a while to get around, I wasn’t disappointed.
3. it’s ok to split up
This is probably the most important thing! It’s really hard to walk around a busy park in a large group. A lot of times we would walk a little, stop, wait for everyone to catch up, then keep walking. As you can imagine, it took us a while to get anywhere. Because we were with people who didn’t know their way around, we didn’t split up until later in the trip. But once we did, it was nice! We waited until the end of the week to do so, and this way everyone had been to the parks already and knew their way around enough to split up.
4. have a method of communication
This was especially important for us because we are in Canada, so we don’t want our phones to be roaming while we were in the parks. This meant relying on Disney’s wifi which could be spotty, but it worked for us. We made sure we could chat through iMessage, Facebook messenger, and could get a hold of everyone somehow.
5. pick meeting times all the time!
Every single time we split up, (even at night) we picked a meeting time. This way everyone knew how much time thy would have and could work accordingly. In the mornings we always met in the same spot, but we generally saw each other around the resort before we headed to the park. Some people in our group took a little longer than others to get ready, so they knew when they had to be ready. Through the week when we eventually split up, we would pick a spot where everyone knew, and met at a certain time there.
If you’d like to hear a little bot more about our experiences, check out the video below!
I definitely learned a ton travelling with so many people, so I hope you’ve enjoyed some of these tips! If you have ever traveled with a large group, what advice would you give? Let me know in the comments!
Thank you so much for reading!
