Planning Your Disney Itinerary: Park Hopping

The Park Hopper is an option guests can add to their park tickets, allowing them to visit more than one park per day. This add-on does cost extra, but can add a lot more flexibility to your itinerary than the regular park tickets.

The big advantage of the Park Hopper is that you don’t have to commit to a park for the whole day. If you really love spending the morning at Epcot, but want to watch Wishes at the Magic Kingdom as many times as possible (like me), then you can do both. Our family enjoys the Animal Kingdom, but because it usually closes quite early, we love having the option of visiting it in the morning and going to another park in the evening. Sometimes our favorite rides and our favorite places to eat are not in the same park, so we enjoy having the option of doing both in the same day.

When making your day-to-day plans, the possibilities with the Park Hopper seem endless – you could visit all four parks in one day, if you wanted! But you may not want to be that ambitious. When we used the Park Hopper, we planned our days in two parts – a morning park and an evening park, with an afternoon break in between. This made our days easy to plan as we mix-and-matched morning and evening destinations however we wanted, without needing to make sure that our dinner reservation was in the same park as the one we wanted to visit at rope drop.

The Park Hopper also offers some flexibility on the fly. When we visited over Memorial Day weekend, we went to Hollywood Studios during Star Wars Weekends – while it was fun, it was packed, and after doing a few rides we retreated to the less-crowded Animal Kingdom for the afternoon. That evening, we went to the Magic Kingdom for some rides and our favorite fireworks show. If your plans change mid-trip, or a special event takes you by surprise, the Park Hopper is a great tool to have.

Is the Park Hopper a must for your trip?

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Elizabeth lives in Kansas City with her wonderful parents and sister. She enjoys long walks, happy thoughts, and Disney magic! Elizabeth first visited Disney as a child, and when she prepared to visit Walt Disney World as an adult, she foolishly thought she may have ‘outgrown’ Disney. Happily, Elizabeth was proven wrong. After planning a second trip to Walt Disney World, Elizabeth is now her family’s go-to resource for Disney. She even has her own blog, planningformagic.com, with advice on how to plan your next Disney trip. Someday, she even hopes to be an Authorized Disney Vacation Planner. Elizabeth’s Disney wish list is a mile long, so she’s always ready to plan her next Disney adventure.

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