Photo by Joel Sutherland on Unsplash
Choosing when is best to go on holiday to Orlando can be a bit of .a challenge. School holidays will be a nightmare, right? And the last thing you want to do is spend a fortune to get there and stand... and queue... in the heat.
Bearing in mind you probably want to do a couple of weeks, there are probably only two real options - unless you are willing to take your kids out of school. Having originally considered November half term for our break, with an additional week in term time, we wimped out. The young man is now at secondary school, and although we were tempted by the good weather and quiet parks expected in November, the guilt of taking child No 1 out of school when he already struggles due to his dyslexia, was too much.
So if you are not able to take kids out of school for your trip - the two best options are Easter and Summer Holidays but even within the summer, there are better and worse times to travel and it all depends on three key variables: Queues, Heat and Cost.
QUEUES
For a more detailed view on queues, crowd calendars are a great place to start. Crowd calendars give a prediction of crowds based on the school schedules of many of the biggest districts, holidays, ticket prices, and experience being in the parks at all times of the year. You can easily see busy/quiet times both generally, and specifically by the park, which is useful later when planning what to do when. After lots of research on which were algorithmically best, we used wdwprep school for Disney and Undercover Tourist for Universal (as wdwprep school doesn't cover Universal). There are crowd calendars out there that you can pay for, but we found these free ones sufficient, even with the"we're opening Star Wars early" bombshell for August 2019 which shook everything up a bit.
Easter Queues: Our holidays are now fixed for the first two weeks of April, which means a crossover with US holidays. According to the crowd calendar sites mentioned above, crowds begin to arrive from 3rd April, with a busy spring break from 5th - 12th April before declining slightly. At best during the holiday period queues are deemed 7/10 topping out at 10/10 on 11th/12th of the month.
Summer Queues: July is a month of heavy crowds, although according to WDW Prep School the parks are not as busy as they used to be and crowds can be as low as 7/10 (yipee!). The sweet spot of the summer holidays is August, where from the 10th of the month crowds move into moderate 6/10 before bottoming out at 4/10 between 24th to 27th.
WEATHER
Easter Weather: The weather in April is hot and sunny with average daily temperatures reaching as high as 28°C (83°F), the same as the peak summer month of July, with minimum temperatures of 15°C (53°F). Rainfall is fairly average, dipping to 61mm.
Summer Weather: For summer we considered August. August has high heat and humidity, with rain very likely. The average daily temperates are around 33°C (about 92°F) and you can't even rely on a drop in temperature at night with average minimum temperatures of around 23°C (about 73°F). As it's the rainy season, the average monthly rainfall for August is around 171 mm. Afternoon thunderstorms are very likely but are supposed to subside within an hour. It is also hurricane season.
COST
The final factor to consider is cost, and we found the cost of flights in August actually lower than those at Easter.
OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER
These might not be right up there with considerations for booking but it is worth thinking about the events taking place at different times of the year. For instance - Halloween begins in August at Walt Disney World!
OUR EXPERIENCE
We chose August, staying in the last two weeks of the month. All in all, we feel we made the right choice for us - but I prepared well. This is how it was for us.
Heat: It was very hot. We went with pre-bought cooling towels, cooling sprays and water bottles (Disney will give you ice water for free to fill your bottles). Nevertheless, in the first few days it was hard work and we were constantly filling up water and wetting cooling towels in sinks and water fountains. There was even some just tipping water from the water bottles over our heads. After a few days, though, we acclimatised and found ourselves coping better. The key thing was not to try to do too much and take advantage of air conditioning, so we ate at the villa or in restaurants over lunchtimes and ensured, above anything else, that we stayed hydrated.
Queues: Crowds seemed quite low. We booked all our fast passes at Disney in advance and did not queue that much for other rides, about 30-40 mins at an absolute maximum, apart from Pandora (2 hours) and Hagrid's Magical Creatures (about 3 hours in total but that a different story) - but even these times weren't that bad for these rides. We managed to ride everything we wanted, including those rides which are reputedly hard to get on. By the time we got to Universal (which we did the last four days of our holiday), it was really quite quiet and I'm sure that if we hadn't had fastpass tickets we'd have been fine (but I think we'd still get them next time anyway, simply because we loved the Hard Rock Hotel).
Rain: The rain was quite unpredictable and although we expected rain for an hour each afternoon we didn't get it quite so reliably. There were a few torrential hours that were highly entertaining for the kids but the rain did not stop play.
Lightening: Lightening was a different matter - but again I can't say that this bothered us enough to stop us from going again at the same time of year. All in all, we had 2-3 afternoons which were 'interfered with' as lightning was in the area and rides were closed but most substantially there was one evening at Hollywood studios which quite scared Minime. There is a short video of the rain below - my advice is that is heavy rain is forecast, get out of Toy Story Land as there is next to no shelter and our small foldable umbrellas did not cope in the slightest. On this day the evening show at Hollywood Studios was also cancelled, but as we had a fast pass we were given a free additional 'any ride' fastpass for the next day which worked well for us.
There was also a day at Universal where many of the big rides were on and off and on again due to lightning in the area. For us, this is where our Universal fastpass tickets came into their own, as even when people moved to other rides as outdoor rollercoasters were closed, we could still go straight to the front. You can read more about our fastpass tickets on the budget blog.
All in all, we were happy with August and thought this was a good time to go if you can cope with the heat and don't might risking storms. US schools having gone back means crowds are low. We would definitely choose this time again but would consider slightly earlier, arriving from 10th August so that there was more time for the kids to recover from yet lag on their return.
How much does a holiday to Orlando cost? you can find out here.
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