# 77 Final Checklist for Disney World

[00:00:00] Dana Stanley: We just got back from Disney World this week, which I'm very sad. I'm actually a lot sadder than I usually am to be home. I feel like by the end of a Disney World trip, I'm usually ready to be home and in my own bed, and kind of exhausted. But even though it was a full six days and a pretty hectic travel home day, I'm pretty bummed.

[00:00:28] Dana Stanley: Like, I'm kind of craving going back, which is very unlike me

[00:00:36] Dana Stanley: And from this trip in particular, I have a lot of episodes coming, including a full review of the Grand Floridian Villas where we stayed, if it's worth it, the things I liked, the things I did not like, um, and then just episodes, individual episodes on new things that we experienced that I think will be helpful for you going to Disney World if you've been maybe debating things.

[00:01:07] Dana Stanley: Um, I have an updated dessert party for Magic Kingdom coming, and then just new dining experiences. Maybe you're torn about bringing kids or not, like the afternoon tea at Garden View Lounge and Beacon Barrel. I'll also have an episode of everything you need to know about the Bluey Experience, the Bluey and Bingo's Wild World in Animal Kingdom

[00:01:36] Dana Stanley: Now, I am the kind of person that unpacks immediately, like as soon as I walk through the door, which in this case, we got home at like 4:00 in the morning, so it wasn't immediately. It was as soon as I opened my eyeballs the next day. I like to just get everything out of the suitcases and put them back and do all the laundry.

[00:01:59] Dana Stanley: So while things are still fresh in my mind of the trip, I'm trying to work a little bit backwards. So I was thinking about

[00:02:13] Dana Stanley: So I was thinking about the time right before our trip, like the day before we left

[00:02:28] Dana Stanley: That doesn't really fall under the category of packing or, like, a packing list. Because yes, I have a packing list. I've had close to the same packing list for probably, like, six years, to be honest. But what I wanna talk about today is the stuff in the days right before you leave, the stuff that doesn't really make it onto, like, any spreadsheet or list, and that I find myself doing right before we leave, and it kinda takes up...

[00:02:54] Dana Stanley: And it kinda gives me a little bit of anxiety because it's those things of, like, I feel like I'm missing something, or I feel like I'm not, like, super prepared. This trip came up really fast. And I've come to realize that a lot of how my travel day feels is just how prepared I feel. And there's just a bunch of these last-minute things that come up

[00:03:19] Dana Stanley: There is for sure a version of, quote, "feeling prepared" that comes down to having like your actual set plans for the parks and things laid out in an orderly fashion, and that could be your packing as well. But I feel like these are the things that you can't touch, like they're not really tangible, and they don't really have anything to do with your park plans per se, or like your lightning lanes or your dining or any of that.

[00:03:44] Dana Stanley: So if you've got a trip coming up or you're like me, I want you to stick around because I'm going to walk you through exactly what was on my mind this time, plus a couple of things that maybe weren't on my radar until this trip in particular.

[00:04:05] Dana Stanley: Formal intro

[00:04:09] Dana Stanley: So A little bit more context before I get into this list is that this is not a packing episode, and it's not the kind of checklist where you're gonna, like, print it out and laminate it and, like, stick it on your wall. It's just more of, like, the small, slightly annoying tasks that I do right before a trip that keep me from, A, forgetting anything, or B, using up too much brain power, like, right before we leave, like the night or the morning before we leave, or worse, the day that we get there

[00:04:50] Dana Stanley: Because obviously you've heard it before of a lot of my content is just planning ahead of time so that once your trip is... So then once you're in the thick of your trip and you have all of the kids and everyone's asking you questions and maybe it's hot and things are going wrong, you do not have a spare second to think things through like you normally would at home And these little tiny things that you think like, "Oh, I'll just do that right before we leave," they really add up.

[00:05:27] Dana Stanley: They add up for me. And when I actually sat down and thought through them before the trip this time, I did feel a lot more prepared than just leaving it to the last minute like I usually do

[00:05:45] Dana Stanley: So the first thing, and this is one that I've been doing for a very, very long time, and you've heard me say it before, about ordering groceries, diapers, whatever you may need through Instacart to your resort ahead of time But this is something that I don't want you to be ordering this the day before you leave.

[00:06:12] Dana Stanley: And you can use a lot of different delivery services. This is why in particular I like Instacart is because I can schedule it in advance. And there's kind of two things that I'm thinking about when I do this. Number one is I do not want to be placing, like, a food order and using my brain, like, the day before we leave or right before I get on the plane and I'm in the airport to get the timing right

[00:06:46] Dana Stanley: I just want everything to be... I just want everything to show up to my room once my room is available

[00:06:57] Dana Stanley: The other thing that I didn't really think of when I did it probably the first dozen times is choosing your replacements for things. So because I I like to schedule the time window for delivery pretty much while we're in the air flying I think that's kind of the perfect timing. I love getting off the plane and getting a little notification that my order was delivered.

[00:07:26] Dana Stanley: But then if something went wrong and the order was missing, I still have time, I still have a little bit of time before we get there to correct it, which has never happened by the way

[00:07:42] Dana Stanley: But if you don't choose your replacements or, like, your substitutions beforehand, you could run into, like, not having diapers or not having milk just because you didn't have the time or you were rushing to choose those substitutions. It sounds like such a small annoyance, but it's a lot of the reason why I like to do it early.

[00:08:06] Dana Stanley: I just go through and take my time, choose my replacement items while I'm, you know, sitting on my couch with no pressure instead of trying to make a call about what type of, like, store brand applesauce I want if the one I want isn't available. Like, it's so dumb, but

[00:08:28] Dana Stanley: I think when people think of like just, "Oh, I'll Instacart it," it seems so easy and it's saving you so much time. But like if you're a mom and you do that often, you know, it actually takes you quite a bit to place an online order

[00:08:45] Dana Stanley: So I'm gonna do this literally like the week before we leave. I'm going to schedule it for the day we get there preferably while we're flying

[00:08:59] Dana Stanley: And the detail that you need to know if you haven't done this before is that your resort will hold your cold and/or frozen items for you. So you will be charged $6 to the room for them to hold it for you. And that's actually just $6, like, for the entire order, not per bag. So it's really not a bad fee at all.

[00:09:23] Dana Stanley: And then once your room is ready, you can call down and have it brought to your room. So it doesn't matter if it gets there earlier than you get there. Your thing's not going to melt or get warm. The only time this wouldn't work is if you ordered alcohol or, like, a certain cough medicine where you need to show ID to the driver for them to drop it off, which by the way, like, if you were there and wanted to schedule it that way, you can order, you know, a bottle of wine and keep it in your room if you wanted to But I generally just avoid that so I don't have to be there Now, even with all of my planning and my little Instacart list that I have that I pre-schedule, sometimes I still forget something.

[00:10:17] Dana Stanley: Sometimes I still forget something. It's usually something really random. So on this trip, it was my son's, like, sippy cup, and this is so niche and random, but when he was a baby, he would not drink from a bottle. He would not take a bottle, and it was very hard because I was breastfeeding and I couldn't even leave him for, you know, to go get my hair done.

[00:10:42] Dana Stanley: He would not take a bottle. So my friend suggested a certain kind of sippy cup. It looks like a honey bear. So it's a plastic little honey bear with a very specific straw that doesn't al- that doesn't let a lot of milk through. And even though he's two years old, he still drinks his milk at night in that sippy cup And I've brought it on the last, like, four trips, and I completely forgot to pack one for some weird reason this trip

[00:11:23] Dana Stanley: And this is something that you cannot get, you know, on Disney property. It is a very strange item. Um, he would not drink his milk at night with a regular straw and a cup when I tried to give it to him, and lo and behold, they had them on Amazon. So just a reminder, yes, try to remember anything specialty that you need to bring

[00:11:50] Dana Stanley: But a lot of medicine and diapers and Band-Aids and things will be in the gift shop of your resort, in the marketplace of your resort. But for those, like, really random things, like a sippy plastic honey bear, you always have Amazon The second thing for my last-minute things that are always in the back of my brain until the very last minute is to download all of the apps to my phone that I know I'm going to be using on the trip that aren't super obvious, like My Disney Experience, which you're using for months and weeks and days before the trip anyway.

[00:12:32] Dana Stanley: Because it happens more than I think that these apps that maybe I only use in Disney and I don't use them every day, they get offloaded to the cloud if you haven't opened them in a while, and then I'm redownloading them when I actually need them, and sometimes there's things that you have to be logged into, and then I can't remember my password, or there's apps where you need a payment method, and my payment method isn't in there anymore, and it is a huge pain when you're in the middle of something or in a rush and you're trying to do all of that.

[00:13:06] Dana Stanley: So there's three apps that I remembered to do this right before a trip, and sure enough, they were-- and sure enough, some of them were offloaded, and the first one is WeatherBug, and this one is really key, especially in the summer and fall months

[00:13:25] Dana Stanley: WeatherBug is a free app that tracks lightning in the area in real time. And it really turns out that this matters a lot more than, like, the general weather app that is on your phone would. Because the pools at the Disney World resorts will actually close when there's lightning in the vicinity. I don't know the exact mileage, but what I do know is that WeatherBug's lightning detection, they call it Spark, and it tracks lightning strikes in real time.

[00:14:01] Dana Stanley: Like, and you'll see a map right where you are around Walt Disney World with, like, different proximities of how close they are. Like, little circles of, like, it's this close and then it's this close. So it's not a generic radar app giving you, like, a sense of where the storms are coming and which direction they're going.

[00:14:24] Dana Stanley: It's built around, like, a minute-by-minute lightning proximity

[00:14:32] Dana Stanley: And the parks are drawing from this same data to make their calls on closure Which means it is very handy to have this app and check it before maybe, like, you get all the kids ready to go down to the pool. Maybe you can see how the lightning is striking and if it's getting closer and closer, because this has happened to us so many times of, like, I get the floaties on the kids and their sunscreen and everything, and we get into the pool, and they, like, just get soaked.

[00:15:08] Dana Stanley: And they say, "Ooh, lightning in the area. The pool is closed, and you'll have to, and you'll have to leave, like, the whole area

[00:15:18] Dana Stanley: And this is going to happen a lot to you in the summer, especially in the afternoon and late afternoon when sometimes it's not raining, but there's lightning. And they won't close the pools for rain. You can swim in the rain, but if there's lightning, they will close the pools And if you're staying at a Skyliner resort, so Riviera, Caribbean Beach Pop Century, Art of Animation.

[00:15:46] Dana Stanley: You'll definitely want this app on your phone because they will pause the Skyliner as well when there's lightning in the area The second app I had to re-download was Lyft. So just like Uber and Lyft, L-Y-F-T, that Lyft And I don't really use Lyft unless I am in Disney World. Uber is usually like my go-to ride share, but Lyft is the app that you're going to need if you want to book something called a Minnie Van, like a Minnie Mouse van.

[00:16:19] Dana Stanley: These are ride shares driven by Disney cast members, and they only run between the Disney resorts and the parks, excluding the Swan and Dolphin The reason I sometimes want to book one of these or have the app ready with my payment method is if I'm getting somewhere that requires like two different legs of transportation and I don't want to deal with the logistics of it, even if it's free.

[00:16:48] Dana Stanley: So for example, on our last trip, I paid to take a minivan from the Grand Floridian to Epcot, which on paper seems stupid because I could have taken a free monorail ride. So you can go from the Grand Floridian to the Ticket and Transportation Center, get off, and then take another monorail from the Ticket and Transportation Center to the front of Epcot.

[00:17:14] Dana Stanley: And if you can tell even just by the way I mapped that out, I didn't wanna deal with that the morning of our Epcot day, and the minivan felt like a small splurge. I think it came out to be like $43 plus the tip. It was worth it for that situation Because we were able to just go right from the Grand Floridian to Epcot.

[00:17:40] Dana Stanley: It came with two car seats already installed. The cast members are always lovely and safe and helpful, and there are TVs playing Disney cartoons, which makes it just like a pleasant ride. Like, the kids are quiet and happy instead of, you know, being a little bit more stressed out.

[00:18:06] Dana Stanley: But my actual point of bringing this up in a, quote, "last minute checklist" is sometimes you need to decide this option last minute. Maybe you are going to a park or a resort where you have a reservation. Let's say you're going to Topolino's for breakfast and you are not staying at the Riviera. You thought that you would have time to maybe take the Skyliner or walk to XYZ and go to Epcot and take the Skyliner, whatever the situation may be, may be, and now you're running late.

[00:18:41] Dana Stanley: It may be worth it to just open the Lyft app and call a minivan really quick But if you're deciding this last minute, you're already late. Now you're downloading the Lyft app for the first time, adding your credit card, setting up an account, and it's a real pain to do in that moment. Much easier to have it ready to go before you've left your house

[00:19:07] Dana Stanley: The third thing, which is only really specific to if you're flying, and I honestly forget this always, like until the night before except for this trip I thought about it ahead of time, is remembering to download things to your kids' iPads for the plane. So not just shows, which may be obvious, but like the actual game sometimes.

[00:19:28] Dana Stanley: Once you open the game, let's say it's like a coloring app, you need to download the page for them to color using wifi

[00:19:42] Dana Stanley: So maybe it's your kids' favorite app, like my son and actually my middle really like a game called Saigo Mini World and the app will open, but then the individual games inside have to be downloaded ahead of time

[00:20:03] Dana Stanley: So just try to do this while you're home, not at the gate when you suddenly remember and then you're trying to connect to like airport Wi-Fi. Just do it in advance

[00:20:20] Dana Stanley: Item number three on my list is something that I feel like the internet has been telling people not to do, and it kind of frustrates me. But something that I like to do ahead of time is to make sure that I set up my online check-in at the Disney resort. But I have seen content around that you should skip the online check-in and just show up to the front desk instead because you might get a room upgrade.

[00:20:50] Dana Stanley: I guess the theory being that it puts you, like, with a real person who could be swayed or have a better chance of giving you an upgrade. There is no evidence for this at all. It doesn't track with how the room assignments actually work, which is just automated and based on availability, not on whether you checked in online or, like, talked to a person.

[00:21:18] Dana Stanley: So what I actually like to do is both. Because we are usually staying at a deluxe resort, nine times out of 10, there is a cast member standing at the door welcoming you in and says, like, "What's your last name?" And they're essentially also... They're essentially double-checking you in. So I like to do the online check-in with any requests that I wanna do ahead of time one less thing to think about and deal with and then when we physically arrive and the cast member greets us they know that we are there And that's not really, like, a strategy or anything.

[00:21:58] Dana Stanley: I have not gotten an upgrade from doing this. You're just letting a human know that you've physically arrived. But I don't think that it is, like, charming someone or, you know, saying that it's a special occasion or anything. I do think it might help your room get assigned faster if it hasn't been already, but I don't even think that's necessarily true.

[00:22:29] Dana Stanley: I've had my rooms ready at all different times of day, staying DVC or non-DVC. I just don't think it really matters. I think it comes down to the day that you're checking in, how crowded it is, the availability, when the rooms are being cleaned, at different stages of being cleaned. Just so many factors. So do the online check-in from your My Disney Experience account ahead of time

[00:23:10] Dana Stanley: The fourth thing I do is actually finalize our park days by going through anything I've saved on Instagram over the past few months. And I will say up front that I am not like a viral snack person. I just don't gravitate towards that. But every so often there will be like a drink or an activity that is seasonal that looks genuinely good to me, and I'll save the reel or the post or the Disney Parks blog, whatever, without thinking much of it.

[00:23:46] Dana Stanley: And then it just sits there in my saved folder doing nothing. And when I come home, there's like nothing worse than I'm like cleaning up my saved files and seeing like, oh, I wanted to try that thing, or just genuinely forgetting until you're home So I'll just take five minutes, go through my saved posts, and kind of cross-reference it against the parks where I already have, you know, my park plan.

[00:24:14] Dana Stanley: I might just add a little note of like, "Oh, there's a slushie that Story might like at blankety blank."

[00:24:23] Dana Stanley: Not very revolutionary, but it is something that... But it is one of those last-minute things

[00:24:37] Dana Stanley: While I'm on my phone doing that, I will also just take a few minutes to screenshot

[00:24:47] Dana Stanley: to screenshot, like, big reservations or big confirmations in the My Disney Experience app. I have never had a problem with something going missing or, like, service at Disney when I talk to guest relations, when I talk to guest services. But I don't expect everything to be perfect all the time. So, so I like just having kind of like that proof.

[00:25:16] Dana Stanley: I also have, like, emails obviously of reservation confirmations and my resort confirmation, but I like to have screenshots of them and just put them in my notes folder and drop them in a notes folder on my phone. That way everything's together. I'll also screenshot my Lightning Lane sometimes. I don't know.

[00:25:36] Dana Stanley: I'm just like, what if the app just, like, deleted them? Where would they go? I at least would have, like, a screenshot to show someone if something happened

[00:25:50] Dana Stanley: The last and final thing I'll do last minute-- The last and final thing I will make sure to do before we leave for Disney World is to just confirm that someone is picking us up at the airport and getting us to the resort. So for us, this was Away We Go, which I'll leave a link in the show notes. I love them.

[00:26:14] Dana Stanley: But it doesn't really matter how you're getting to your resort, Mears, a minivan, limo, whatever, make sure that it's confirmed that they have, you know, your flight number in case you're delayed, you're not worried about that while you're in the air. If they're going to be, you know, leaving you behind, they will track your flight for you.

[00:26:38] Dana Stanley: Leaving you behind, that they have the correct amount of people

[00:26:46] Dana Stanley: So that as soon as you land, you are on your way. None of the things on the list on their own are very, very, very important or like dramatic. Like, I don't think anybody's trip is go- like I don't think anybody's trip is ever going to be ruined by any of these or like an app that they forgot to pre-download, but they do add up.

[00:27:11] Dana Stanley: And what I've noticed over the last few trips is that I feel a lot better being the version of me who does all this like days before instead of the night or morning of. I'm a much calmer person

[00:27:29] Dana Stanley: So to just wrap everything up of what I just said, and I'll try to link any of the apps or things that I reference in the show notes for you

[00:27:41] Dana Stanley: But that's placing my Instacart order ahead of time, downloading the apps that I need before I need them, checking in online to my resort checking my Instagram saves and screenshotting any big confirmations, and confirming my transportation from the airport to my resort. Next episode, I am sitting down with my friend Maryanne.

[00:28:11] Dana Stanley: She's been on the podcast before, so make sure you come back for that one And after that, I'm going to be going hard into just a full recap of this trip and everything new that we experienced with some reviews. So I will see you next week