Disneyland Step 6: Create your Touring Plans
So by this point, you should have your trip booked, your dining reservations, your packing thought through, and a general idea of what you’ll be doing each day in the parks. The final step in planning your trip to Disneyland is to fill in the blanks on that itinerary and get a lot more detailed with your plans.
Do you really need a detailed plan??
Maybe… If you’re still feeling anxious about how you’re actually going to navigate through the parks each day, which attractions you’re going to ride first, then I’d say yes. Continue reading to learn how to create a detailed ‘touring plan’ for your first trip to Disneyland. If this is your personality (I’m totally with you, by the way!) then Disneyland really isn’t a place for you to “wing-it”.
If you’re more low-key and normally like to fly by the seat of your pants on vacations you could probably get away with following a pre-made strategy from someone like Casey Starnes at disneylanddaily.com. She has various plans/ride lists you can follow based on what kind of trip you’re taking to the parks: little kids, big kids, starting in each park, etc. She’s done tons of testing to figure out what’s the best way to navigate through the parks, avoiding long lines.
But definitely have some sort of strategy - you have to remember that Disneyland is just a totally different kind of place than anywhere else. It’s super busy, crowded, and overwhelming. Deciding what to do and when to do it, can feel like a blindfolded drunken game of darts after you’ve been spun around in a circle 10 times… and did I mention your kids are there next to you having a meltdown… after you paid thousands of dollars for this trip??!!!!
Having (what may seem to you like insanely) detailed itineraries for your days in the parks will benefit you in so many ways. It will take the guessing out of your day, it will keep you organized, relaxed, and it will save you tons of time waiting in lines.
I wanted to tailor our plans a bit more than Casey’s plans, so the touring plans website was where we did this detailed planning for our trip. This website allows you to create a ‘touring plan’ for each day where you select the rides, restaurants, shows, etc. that you want to do that day. Then you select the ‘optimize’ button and it puts your selections in the most efficient order so you avoid as many long lines as possible.
This is so key – I’m not kidding, when we were there in May 2018, I didn’t wait in a line for more than 20 minutes the entire time! And if you’re not familiar with Disneyland, that is AMAZING. The website has an app too (DLR Lines), so when we were in the parks, I followed our plan on my phone. I could check off the rides when we completed them, and then re-optimize the plan and it would update the order of the remaining rides based on what was actually happening in the park that day.
I’m a planner, so this approach came really naturally to me. If you don’t have that kind of mindset just think about it this way: You just got off the Dumbo ride. What are you going to do next? Dad wants to ride the Teacups. Ben wants to ride the Carrousel. You look at the Disneyland App and see that the wait for Peter Pan is only 25 minutes. What should you do next??? Since we had a plan, this never happened. We trusted the plan and that it would get us to everything we wanted to do and in an order that would save us the most wait times. So when we hopped off Dumbo we just walked right over to Peter Pan, and that was it. No debate!
Disneyland is an entirely different place from 7:30am-11am and from 11am onward. The key for us each day was to really take advantage of those earlier hours and to be more flexible in the afternoons and evenings. Our touring plans went from 7am to 2pm at the latest, and in the afternoons we just went with whatever that day was giving us: pool, naps, staying in the park. In the evenings we had dinner reservations and 1 or 2 planned Lightning Lane rides.
Tips for Creating your Touring Plans
First, I want to warn that creating these plans takes a bit of fine-tuning. I’m not sure Touring Plans has completely adjusted to the post-covid/lightning-lane world. I still think these plans are useful, but I also have a lot of experience creating them as this is something I do regularly for the families I plan for. Another great reason to hire a (FREE) Travel Planner to do all this work for you!
In order to have access to the full Touring plans website you need to shell out $7.95 for a year of site use (if you own the most current book they’ll give you a little discount!). The website is a great source of up-to-date information about the parks: things like ride closures, crowd calendars, and special events that need to be updated on a regular basis. But their Touring Plan feature is the real gem – this feature is sort of hidden within the site, but here’s a direct link: https://touringplans.com/disneyland-resort/touring-plans/personalized
This part of their website will allow you to make specific Touring Plans or itineraries for each day of your trip. I had to play around with this step-by-step process a bit before I felt like I had a good handle on how it worked. The best way to utilize this feature is to try it out and create some mock plans. But here are my tips:
Pull out your General Daily Itinerary and use that as your guide: General Itinerary Chart – Blank
Make sure you enter the actual day you’ll be in the park – the website’s algorithms will calculate line wait times based on that specific day
I found it easiest to just make a plan from 7am to 2pm – it got confusing for me when I added in our afternoon rest time and tried to make a plan for the entire day. But if you’re planning on staying in one park the whole day make an itinerary that reflects that
The plans force you to pick one park per itinerary
Use my Ride Guide to get an idea of which specific rides you want to do each day. We actually approach the blue through red rides in that order, just to ease the kids into the really scary attractions at the bottom of the list (in red)
Be sure to select the ‘Rider Switch’ option if you’re planning on using it for a particular ride. This will allow for extra time within your plan to ride twice. If you have a child in your group who will be too short for the ride then definitely plan on utilizing the ‘Rider Switch’
Don’t forget to include any shows you want to take in
Definitely enter your lunch plans – roughly where you want to eat and when
But don’t worry about adding “Rest” or “Snack” times into your plan
If you’re planning on Lightning Lane then be sure to select that option on the final page
You can also tell the plan how fast you think you’ll be moving throughout the day – if you’re a slower crowd then definitely make that adjustment
After your plan has been created, you can go back and add attractions or shows if you feel like your plan isn’t robust enough
If you’ve picked too many attractions for your allotted time, trust what it says and edit down a bit
You can manually adjust the order of the rides within your plan, but I wouldn’t get to finicky about that. The beauty of the plans is that they are optimized for you based on what the parks are typically like on that day. If you veer off plan you can manage that from within the parks on that actual day
Now please marvel at these amazing plans! They tell you how long the wait will be, how long the ride itself will be, and how long it will take you to walk to the next attraction!! So amazing!!!! I know – I’m super geeky about this – but I can’t help it!
The first time we used these I spent way too much time manually adjusting the plans based on how I thought I wanted the day to go – this was a mistake and a waste of time. The key is to save that plan, and then manage it on your phone from inside the parks when you’re actually there. You can cross the items off, by selecting “Done!”, after you’ve completed each item and then reoptimize the plan. It’ll will give you an adjusted schedule based on what’s happening in the parks that actual day. So if you do things a bit out of order, you can just check them off out of order and re-optimize. Don’t forget your portable phone charger – this app and the Disneyland app really drain your batteries!
Finally, on the night before our last day, we created a new plan on the mobile App with everyone’s favorites that we wanted to do again. This was a great way to finish off our first adventure to Disneyland!
