3 Disney World Mistakes We’ve Somehow Convinced Ourselves Are Normal

A lot of people online ask a very simple question when considering a Disney vacation. Perhaps it’s so simple that we’ve managed to overcomplicate the answer, which, if you’ve spent any amount of time in a Disney planning Facebook group, you know is one of our greatest collective talents.

“What’s the number one mistake to avoid when planning a trip to Walt Disney World?”

There are probably a hundred answers I could give you. Don’t over-plan. Don’t under-plan. Don’t book the wrong resort. Don’t forget your dining reservations. Don’t wear brand-new shoes unless you have a personal vendetta against your feet. Don’t try to cross Magic Kingdom at 2:00 in the afternoon in July and expect to arrive looking like the same person who started the journey.

Those are all reasonable pieces of advice.

But the more I think about it, the more I believe my answer is something entirely different. Truthfully, it’s a multi-part answer, and I think it may surprise you coming from someone who has spent nearly a decade writing about how to plan Disney vacations.

Years ago, a Disney vacation started for me long before we ever reached the gates of the Magic Kingdom. It started at home with a countdown in my head. There were no countdown apps or elaborate itineraries living on a phone. I just knew how many days were left until we piled into the minivan and started driving south. When that day finally came, I remember being almost impossibly excited.

Fourteen hours in a minivan should have been miserable. Actually, as an adult, I’m fairly certain it would be considered some form of punishment. But as a kid, it was wonderful. Every highway sign meant we were getting closer. Every gas station was another checkpoint. Eventually you’d start seeing palm trees, then Disney signs, and suddenly that kid who had spent a day folded into the back of a minivan like an improperly packed lawn chair had all the energy in the world.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t thinking about whether we were getting our money’s worth. I wasn’t checking wait times. I wasn’t wondering whether we’d picked the perfect resort or ridden enough attractions to justify the price of admission.

I was just happy to be there.

Somewhere along the way, I think a lot of us lose a little bit of that. Perhaps that’s actually the biggest Disney mistake worth avoiding.

1. Growing Up a Little Too Much at Disney World

I know this sounds bizarre, but bear with me.

Think back to your first visit. If you’ve never visited Walt Disney World, think about the first time you went somewhere truly special as a child. We all have those memories. You get in the car, travel several hours and spend most of the journey giddy with anticipation. By the time you finally arrive, you can hardly stand it. I remember eagerly awaiting the day we’d leave and working through that countdown in my head because, of course, this was pre-internet and pre-countdown apps. Man, I’m getting older by the paragraph here.

As a kid, you cherished those moments without needing to understand why.

People sometimes treat childlike joy as something we’re supposed to grow out of as adults, and I couldn’t disagree more. At some point we’re apparently expected to become very serious people who discuss interest rates and lawn maintenance and pretend we’re not excited when we see a monorail. I’m not particularly interested in that arrangement.

I think we all take things far too seriously sometimes, myself included. I’m not talking about planning — how bizarre would that be coming from the travel-planning guy? I’m talking about what happens after you arrive.

We have a tendency to turn a Disney day into a checklist. We need to ride this, eat here, make that reservation, see this show and somehow fit everything else into the spaces in between. Then, if we don’t accomplish enough of it, we start feeling like we didn’t “get enough done.” We can turn a vacation into a performance review remarkably quickly.

Imagine telling that kid in the minivan any of this. He wouldn’t care. He’d just want somebody to open the door and release him into the Magic Kingdom.

There’s something worth borrowing from that perspective as an adult. Let yourself occasionally walk through the gates without needing every hour to accomplish something. Roam around. Take the long way somewhere. Ride something because the line looks short. Stop because something smells good. Sit on a bench for ten minutes because you like the bench. There doesn’t have to be a strategy behind the bench. Every day becomes a little adventure again when you’re not constantly measuring it against what you thought the day was supposed to be.

Sure, act like an adult — or a modified version of one in my case — but don’t take everything so seriously. Yes, Disney is expensive. Little-kid you typically didn’t have to pay for it all, which admittedly gave him a tremendous advantage in the carefree-living department. But once the trip is paid for and you’re standing there, do your best to set that aside.

Be present.

Walt Disney World isn’t something that’s particularly easy to rationalize on a budget sheet. That’s a difficult reality for someone who spends his working life thinking about numbers, marketing and whether something produced a measurable return. I’m not sure what the measurable return is on standing in front of Cinderella Castle eating something shaped like Mickey Mouse.

I’m also increasingly convinced that’s the point. There’s something incredibly freeing about having no real agenda beyond enjoying what you get to experience.

If you haven’t visited recently with a child, I’d encourage you to do so at least once. Yes, I’m the same guy who will happily write an entire article about experiencing Walt Disney World without kids. Both things can be true. I’ve never claimed consistency as a core competency.

Watching a child experience these parks is an amazing way to recalibrate what you’re seeing. They’ll become fascinated by something you haven’t noticed in years. They’ll want to ride the attraction you walk past every trip. They’ll find something hilarious that you barely even registered. You’ll spend six months planning the vacation and discover their favorite part was a duck near the castle.

That’s probably good for us. Sometimes kids remind us what we used to see before we learned to look at everything like adults.

2. Believing the “Right” Resort Will Make the Trip

This one is difficult for me because I’m a huge proponent of staying at Deluxe resorts, and I genuinely believe your resort selection can be one of the most pivotal parts of a Walt Disney World vacation. I truly do. However, I’ve also come to believe that we sometimes give the hotel itself a little too much power over whether a trip is going to be special.

I look at resorts as part of the overall experience. Each has its own perks and little intricacies that people grow attached to, but we all value different things. I may prefer staying at the Swan and Dolphin because I can save some money, ride a boat to EPCOT and walk around the BoardWalk every night that I can during a visit. You may get that exact same feeling stepping onto the Skyliner at Pop Century. Neither one is wrong. More importantly, you’re going to create memories at either one.

I’ve been doing this for nearly a decade now and have been in the unusual position of hearing countless stories from guests staying everywhere from Value resorts to Club Level at the Grand Floridian. The price of the room rarely predicts the quality of the story they tell me afterward.

That’s worth remembering.

Don’t convince yourself that you need to blow your budget to experience the Disney vacation you’ve imagined. Go have dinner at the resort you’ve always wanted to stay at. Walk around the grounds. Sit in the lobby for a while. Grab something to eat. Watch the fireworks from a dinner table you’ve never watched them from before.

Nobody at the Grand Floridian is going to tackle you because you’re sleeping at Pop Century. Just don’t try to leave your car there for hours! That might end poorly. Who knows? Maybe someday you’ll stumble into the right discounted rate or life will change and that dream resort suddenly makes sense. But you don’t have to postpone enjoying it until then.

The hotel room doesn’t define the experience nearly as much as we sometimes convince ourselves it does. You’ll remember the people you were with, the ridiculous conversation you had walking back to the room, the unexpected thing that happened that afternoon and the night you stayed out much later than you planned.

Those memories don’t ask what room category you booked.

3. Forgetting to Be Present

I know this one may be a hot-button topic, but bear with me one more time.

We live in a world where almost everything we do involves a phone, an app or the next scroll. Maybe I’m simply 100 years old at heart. Honestly, it’s quite possible. Give me another decade and I’ll probably be sitting on a porch complaining that nobody writes letters anymore.

But Disney has always been one of the places where I’m on my phone less than almost anywhere else, and those trips have become some of the most freeing weeks on my calendar. For those who don’t know me, I work remotely. I’m certainly no stranger to technology — you’re reading this on a website, after all — and I actually love a lot of it. I just don’t particularly love what it can do to a Disney day.

These parks have always been at their best for me when I’m actually present with the family or friends I’m experiencing them with. I wasn’t always very good at that, either. It took quite a bit of reflection for me to get back to this point.

I still carry a camera sometimes, but there’s something wonderful about showing up with little more than a phone in your pocket and a water bottle and simply seeing what happens. Disney has become increasingly dependent on technology, so completely avoiding your phone isn’t particularly realistic. You might need it to order lunch, get into your room, find a wait time, make a reservation and, at the rate we’re going, possibly operate the monorail by 2030.

But I’d encourage you, even if only for part of a day, to stop tracking every wait time and trying to optimize every minute.

Just be there.

When I manage to do that — and I’m still bad about it myself sometimes — something interesting happens. I listen to the conversation with my family over dinner a little more closely. I get more invested in the weird little conversations that happen while standing in line. I notice things I would have otherwise walked straight past. I laugh more. At the end of the day, I usually remember more of it, too.

It’s almost as if the less effort I put into maximizing every minute, the more those minutes actually seem to matter.

I was chatting with a friend recently when something hit me. Somewhere along the way, I think we’ve forgotten the value of simply sitting on a front porch and talking to the people in our lives. Maybe that’s my Kentucky showing, but there’s something to it.

Nobody sits on a front porch because it’s efficient. There’s no attraction at the end of it. You don’t earn anything. Nobody hands you a medal because you successfully sat there for forty-five minutes. You just sit and talk. And somehow those conversations become the stories you repeat for years. Disney isn’t all that different.

Some of the moments I’ve remembered the longest weren’t the things we planned six months in advance. They’re conversations at dinner. They’re stupid jokes in an attraction queue. They’re walking around the BoardWalk late at night when we probably should have gone back to the room an hour earlier. They’re the things that happened between everything we thought we were there to do.

Those moments are remarkably easy to miss when you’re busy looking for the next one.

The Biggest Disney Mistake Might Be Missing the Trip You’re Already On

I think back to that kid in the minivan sometimes.

He didn’t know what the room cost. He didn’t know whether we’d made the optimal dining reservation months earlier, and he certainly wasn’t refreshing an app looking for a shorter wait time. He just knew he was going somewhere he loved with people he loved.

Maybe adulthood doesn’t require us to lose that. Maybe we’ve just gotten very good at burying it underneath schedules, responsibilities, budgets, emails and all the other things adults apparently decided were important while nobody was looking. We should plan. We should make smart decisions. We should absolutely try to get the most out of the money we’re spending. I still believe a little thoughtful planning can dramatically improve a Walt Disney World vacation.

But once we’re there, perhaps the best thing we can do is loosen our grip on all of it.

Stay at the resort that makes sense. Put the phone away when you can. Let an afternoon unfold differently than you planned. Take the long way back. Sit somewhere for no particular reason. Talk to the people you’re with. Buy the ridiculous snack. Laugh at the dumb joke. Watch the duck.

Every once in a while, try to see the place through the eyes of that kid who spent fourteen hours in the back of a minivan and somehow thought every minute of it was worth it because of where he was going.

After all the planning I’ve done, all the resorts I’ve stayed in, all the articles I’ve written and all the ways Walt Disney World itself has changed, I keep coming back to something surprisingly simple. The biggest mistake isn’t choosing the wrong resort, missing a Lightning Lane or failing to squeeze another attraction into the last hour of the night.

It’s becoming so focused on having the perfect Disney vacation that you miss the one you’re already on.

Maybe the goal was never to have the perfect Disney vacation. Maybe it was to come home with a few stories worth telling on the front porch.