The easy way to make your park touring plan
The easy way to make your park touring plan
Guess what? Most of the work has already been done for you!
Shortcut tips to make a solid plan with minimal work
Hi everyone,
As promised, I’m circling back to the topic of park touring plans this week. (ICYMI, here are some reasons why touring plans are important).
A park touring plan can be as simple as a list of attractions you want to see, or as complicated as a minute-by-minute spreadsheet. It’s all up to you & how detailed you want to get with it.
I have started this post about a dozen times
So this is the part where I admit I have written and erased many, many words about how to make your touring plan. It is a very deep-dive rabbit hole that cannot be explained in a five-minute newsletter. And today is not the day for a full tutorial about how to make your plan.
Do you want a full tutorial? That’s a different project, but let me know if you think I should do it. Here’s a poll:
Let someone else do the work for you
Here is the really good news: detailed, tested, touring plans already exist for all the major theme parks. You can follow them just as written, or make a few tweaks, and have a fantastic experience with very little advance effort.
Where should you look for plans? One great place to start is with my top go-to websites, all of which have reliable park touring itineraries. Use the each site’s search bar to find suggested touring plans.
You will need to make some decisions
Most of the pre-designed touring plans have specific goals in mind. For example, here’s a link to the touring advice on Disneyland Daily. When you get over there, you’ll see options for touring with big kids, little kids, using Genie+ or not, and more. You will have to decide which plan suits your situation the best.
What’s Genie+? Read this post for a quick overview.
I recommend reading through a few of the options to see which plan best fits the style of your group. Sometimes looking through these itineraries will lead to more questions. Should you pay to skip the line? Just how far will you be walking on a typical day? So don’t wait until the last minute to choose your plan.
You can get unlimited instant custom touring plans for less than $20
The best twenty bucks you can spend on your Disney or Universal vacation is a subscription to TouringPlans.com.
Actually, I should probably dedicate a future newsletter just to the amazing tools you’ll find on that website - but let’s start with the thing that they are literally named for.
TouringPlans will make an automatic, customized touring plan for you - based on your exact preferences. You select your park, date, and all the things you want to see, do, and eat, and their system will magically create an optimized touring plan.
The advice from TouringPlans is based on an incredible database of past park crowd levels and wait times. Through the magic of computer algorithms, all this data can be distilled into your perfect park day.
Get your customized touring plan on-the-fly
Besides the website, TouringPlans also has apps for Disneyland, Disney World, and Universal Orlando. If you’re a paid subscriber, you can run the same touring plan optimizer right from your phone.
I have used this hack several times, when my planned first attraction wasn’t running at park opening and I needed to figure out what to do right now. It’s an incredibly powerful guide to have literally in your back pocket.
How to save a few bucks on your TouringPlans subscription
TouringPlans is the publisher of the Unofficial Guide Books, which I always recommend for anyone planning a trip to one of the major theme parks. The guides have a TON of useful information, and include a bunch of suggested park touring plans. Plus if you own an Unofficial Guide, you get a discount on your TouringPlans subscription.
You can find the Unofficial Guides at most any bookstore or your local library. If you want to show your support for Go Informed, click here for Amazon links to all the Unofficial Guides.
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