Tackling the parks

[Jalapeñomel]

How do you plan your day to be the most time efficient?

I realize there one bajillion blogs on this, but I’m so overwhelmed with planning, that I can’t sort through all the blogs.

Do you just look at a map, pick a starting place and work around a circle?

Rundown: Disneyland for three days, Wed-Friday spring break early April. We have droid reservations on Wednesday morning/Fantasmic that evening and hope to do Rise of the Resistance then Oga’s Cantina/Blue Bayou on Friday. Thursday we plan to do Spider-Man.

[mrsslocombe]

There's a lot of variables...how old are you kids, do you plan on being there the full day, are you getting Genie+, etc?

I don't have kids, so we tend to monitor the app and rush to whatever our priority rides are when the wait times are reasonable, which means we do a lot more walking than most people. Luckily DL is much smaller than MK, so even if you do decide to switch lands more often, it's not as physically demanding.

Personally, we choose our top 3 priority rides, knock those out first (unless the wait time is insane, then we wait until end of day), and then we hit whatever rides are in the land we happen to be in that have reasonable wait times. Then we move on to the land that has the most we want to do next. We avoid Fantasyland from about 12-5 because it's too crowded, so we either do it first thing in the day, or dinner time/after fireworks.

[Patsy Baloney]

I’ve never been to Disneyland, so I’m not sure how helpful my general strategy is. But I love Genie+ and feel like it has made park visits so easy for how we like to roll…just wish we didn’t have to pay so much for it!

We tend to identify our “must dos” and those help inform how we utilize our Genie selections. Then, we try to do the park in phases, so we don’t burn ourselves out walking back and forth to stuff.

So, for example, if we were going to EPCOT and had a reservation for dinner in one of the countries and my kids really wanted to do Guardians of the Galaxy, Test Track and Remy’s ride, I looked up which rides tend to “sell out” first on Genie+. So we’d grab Remy around the time of our dinner reservations, buy Guardians, and have our second selection later in the morning be Test Track. Genie+ selections now have a modify option, so you can play with the time, which is a life saver. Our plan for that day would be to hit the ball side of EPCOT late morning, early afternoon, just following wait times and what’s available on Genie+, and head over to the world showcase for our reservation and Remy later in the afternoon and evening, and probably stay for the night show.

Then, if we visit a park again, we’ll hit up anything everyone loved and wants to experience again, and do whatever we missed that wasn’t a high priority.

Our big thing is we hate feeling like we’re trudging back and forth. We definitely try to save our feet as much as we can.

[huskymom]

I like using the Touring Plans site for WDW but not sure if that applies to DL

[nsl]

Disneyland is so small compared to WDW this may be less of an issue than you think. After a half dozen WDW trips in as many years my family did Disneyland/California Adventure in 2021 and we were stunned at how little walking we did vs. a "typical" Disney trip. The biggest challenge was making our way through crowds on the paths, but we also went over Christmas so YMMV.

[nancybotwin]

We live local to Disneyland and go about once or twice a year, and you need very little planning to have a successful day there. We have done both parks in one day…with three days you should be able to do everything you want, more than once, at a comfortable pace.

[Jalapeñomel]

Ok this is helpful.

We went to WDW in august 2019, and it was crazy how much planning had to be done (my dad did it). So I guess I assumed we’d have to do this with DL, even if it’s smaller.

I’m glad to know it will be much less stressful! I’m not interested in zooming around to every ride.

[roo54]

I'd watch some YouTube videos on how to tackle the parks. Mammoth Club has great videos, and Molly is awesome. AllEars is also a good channel for teaching the ropes.