Walt Disney World (FL)

New Magic Kingdom Touring Plan For Parents With Younger And Older Children

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One of the most common touring plan requests we get is for a one-day Magic Kingdom plan that includes attractions for both older and younger children, such as Space Mountain and Dumbo.  It’s a difficult scheduling problem for one day, because crowds in both Fantasyland and Tomorrowland increase rapidly in the morning.  There are limits to how quickly you can obtain FASTPASSes for the headliner attractions, too, and certain low-capacity attractions such as the Magic Carpets of Aladdin, don’t offer FASTPASS at all.  We also assumed that families would be using the “child swap” option, so all the adults could ride without having to wait in line twice.  This complicated things more, but since we love a challenge, we decided to give it a shot.

We chose the two dozen most popular Magic Kingdom attractions with all age groups for our touring plan – everything from Jungle Cruise and Goofy’s Barnstormer, to It’s a Small World and Splash Mountain.  Then we ran a couple of different crowd scenarios through our touring plan software, and came up with four different plans to test.  We put out a request for folks willing to help test them over the busy Memorial Day weekend.  Among the crazy people who volunteered were J.L. Knopp from fabulous  Disney Driven Life blog (and occasional TouringPlans.com blogger), and Bernie Edwards, longtime friend of the Unofficial Guide and an actual rocket scientist.

Bernie, J.L. and family slogged through touring plan after touring plan, day after day. We tweaked the most promising, and they re-tested the new versions.  The overall best plan is now available on TouringPlans.com.

Here’s our new Magic Kingdom One-Day Touring Plan for Parents with Younger and Older Children.  Comments and suggestions are welcome.  Thanks again to J.L. and Bernie for all of the help!

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Len Testa

Len Testa is the co-author of the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, and has contributed to the Disneyland and Las Vegas Unofficial Guides. Most of his time is spent trying to keep up with the team. Len's email address is len@touringplans.com. You can also follow him on Twitter: @lentesta.

8 thoughts on “New Magic Kingdom Touring Plan For Parents With Younger And Older Children

  • This plan sounds great for our family. My 6 year old is tall and very adventurous, he wants to got on all the attractions. Is there a two day version of this plan??

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  • This looks like a great touring plan for our family! I’m 53 and my hubbie is 45, so that makes me the older child and him the younger. We don’t usually travel with our parents, though! 😉

    No, really, it sounds perfect as it hits all the attractions on my list except Hall of Presidents! That’s easily enough added.

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  • Thanks Len and Fred. This looks like a good fit tor us when we go with my brother’s family who have never been before. We are going to try to hit all the top attractions for them to experience it all. We will add in Hall of Presidents. Thanks for omitting Stich from thie TP! Love all the changes to the Crowd Calendar, Lines, etc!

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  • This plan looks great! My only question is where is the mid-day nap? You always recommend a mid-day break of at least 3 hours for families with young children, which we have followed with great success.

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    • Being one of the testers, there was no mid-day break on this plan. We didn’t run to each attraction. It was a pleasant pace, but the only breaks were when we sat down to eat.

      Reply
  • Just in the nick of time…leaving today and traveling with an 11 YO and a 2YO. Perfect!!! Trying out this plan tomorrow. EMH tomorrow night should allow the 11YO and an adult to ride the Mountains again.

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  • This came right on time. We are traveling with some friends in March. We have a 12, 10 and 5 year old. They have a 5 and 2 year old. We were trying to decide if should skip a water park for an extra day at MK. Now we don’t have to decide, we can do both.

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  • That actually looks quite good. We were touring on Memorial Day with a variation of that group. We had teenagers and elementary agers, as well as the adults, and we did a pretty similar version of that plan. We had pulled together several of the touring plans to make our customized one. We saw just about everything we wanted to see. That should be a very popular plan.

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