Booking your holiday to Orlando

How long you go for and where you stay all depends on what you actually want to do and your budget.

For this trip we are only intending on visiting Walt Disney World so we have booked to stay at one of the moderate Disney resorts for 14 nights. At the time of booking (May 2019) they were offering free Quick Service dining plan, a $200 Disney gift card, free Memory Maker and Magic Bands.

The others options we looked at were:

• Staying on International Drive for the two weeks.
• Spending 7 nights at Disney and 7 nights on International Drive.

On pricing these options up, staying on International Drive for two weeks saves about £2000 off the total cost. Spending 7 nights at Disney and then the remaining 7 nights on International Drive saves about £1000 off the cost.

The advantages of staying on the Disney resort were:

• Free half board available (although I’m told there are lots of restaurants on International Drive and eating out is fairly cheap),
• Extra magic hours on different days for different parks which are only available to resort guests.
• Free shuttle from/to the airport.
• 60 days access to FastPass+.

Other things to take into account is whether or not you want to spend two weeks at Walt Disney World? If you have older children or want to enjoy bigger rides/Harry Potter World then you’ll probably want to visit Universal Studios as well. Staying on International Drive would put you in a centralised location (plus most hotels there offer free shuttle to the parks).

If there is a large group of you going then you may want to consider renting a private villa and hiring your own car/minivan so that you can spend quality time together outside of the resorts.

Our little one will be 4 when we go which is why we have decided to save Universal for another year (I am already sure there will be future trips to Orlando) when she’ll get more out of it so you can expect to see a separate blog post regarding Universal in the future!