Pre Planning a Trip to Disneyland Paris

In this week's episode, Jared shares how he pre-planned his trip to Disneyland Paris and some important things to consider. 

Transcript

0:00

In this week's episode of A Dryer Dose of Disney, Jared shares his plans and research for his families first trip to an international Disney park. Intro Music Welcome to this week's episode of a Dryer Dose of Disney. I'm your host, Jared dryer. And today we are going to be talking to you about our first international trip that we have planned. We've done our pre-planning and we're going to walk you through the steps that we took and help educate you guys on what we found and give you some of the tips and tricks that we identified along the course of planning this international trip for the first time, for us going to an international Disney park and we've had so much fun pre-planning this has been so exciting and we want to share it with you now, of course, we haven't even gone on our trip yet. So we're going to walk you through what we've looked at and what we know so far. And obviously we can't say how well this stuff. Has all worked out and tell, actually we do the trip and we come back. And when we do, then we will update you and give you more episodes on the parks that we visited, give you tips and tricks for those parks, as well as the food. And we'll just talk to you about our general experience and what we recommend and whether or not the flights were great and the whole nine yards with all that. So that'll be coming up in the next couple of months because we're actually not traveling until June. And it is currently now just the end of February here in 2024. So we've got a little bit of time like we talked about on some of our. Our previous episodes. We're going to be doing the series on international Disney trips. And you may have more space between episodes as this happens. Just because we can't do these all back to back. So we're going to be doing these as they come available and then we'll be filling in the gaps when we can with episodes like Tiana's Bayou now opening up at Disney Orlando this summer. And we'll be up there this summer. So when that comes out, we'll update you on that and the new ride, as well as any other changes that happen out in Orlando. And we'll still be going there this summer, like we normally do. So we're going to have a lot of fun doing these episodes as we talk international, as well as peppering in some other ones, but you're not going to get these episodes. Each and every single week. So if you listen to last week's episode, we talked to you about what to look at when you're, pre-planning your trip. And this week we're going to go into actually what we're doing for a specific location. Now, I haven't told you yet where we're going. I'm not going to spoil the surprise yet. I will. And just a couple minutes here. But I do want to start out by talking to you about we did get it narrowed down to two locations. And we talked about these two locations I use the phrasing for these two locations quite a bit, and those are Paris and Tokyo. So those were the two locations that we wanted to go to. First, we were the most interested in, and it's for a variety of different reasons why we were interested in these two episodes. But the reason that we like these two locations are. Paris, obviously we want to go see the city of lights and we'd love to see the Eiffel tower as well as all the other historic landmarks there. And it's a shorter flight from the us than it is to get over to Asia. That's something that someone in our group is concerned about. So we wanted to make sure that it was a pleasant experience for them. And then when we looked at Tokyo Tokyo has got Disney Sea, which is our number one park that we want to go to in the world. We've heard so many amazing things about Disney Sea, we definitely want to go check that out. Some day. So we've been talking about going to Tokyo as well, just because we think that'd be a really cool culture to go see and to go visit. So those were our two choices that we had. And if you listen to our last episode, we did talk about planning and looking at school schedules, looking at weather, looking at all of those things. So in the end, I, and I'm going to give it away a little bit with my shirt here. If you can't tell I'm wearing my Indiana Jones RSV LTS shirt. We are going to go to Paris and I'm super excited about going to Paris because they have the Indiana Jones. A rollercoaster ride there, which I've never done. And so I'm very excited about that. But we really had a lot of factors that contributed to this, and I think it would help you guys, if you guys knew about what factors we considered, because you may be looking at the same thing. When we looked at the two locations and we compare things like holiday schedules that are out there, school schedules that are out there and what was coming for each of the parks, it actually made our decision really easy because we knew we had time this June to travel. And we're also looking at possibly going sometime in October. Because in Colorado we get a fall break in October. So we're trying to say, okay, if we're going to put these two into those two positions, Which one would be better. And why. And as we started looking at it, what we found is in Tokyo, they actually have the opening of fantasy Springs, which is located at Disney sea opening in the beginning of June. So if we took our June trip, To Tokyo. We would be there within just a couple of weeks, a fantasy Springs opening up. And as you guys know, anytime, a new section of the park opens or new rides, or even a new park itself. It is crazy busy at that point in time. So we said, okay, that may not be the best time to go. October may be better. Once things have settled down. And then when we were looking at school schedules, we found out in France, they actually go through the month of June in school. So they don't get out until July. So we said, Hey, the kids are all in school. That's going to be an even better time to go to France. It'll be nice and warm. So let's do France on our first trip. It's the shorter trip and we can try it all out and see how it goes for our family. So we're real excited to be planning our trip to Paris. So the first thing we wanted to decide when planning a trip to Paris is how many days do we want to go? Now we knew when we flew out that we'd be flying the red eye from Newark New Jersey. And I'll talk about the airline that we chose here in just a few minutes, but when we are flying out of New Jersey to. Paris. We knew we'd be flying, the red eyes. So we'd be flying overnight. We'd get in at about noon, local time in Paris. And we didn't want to plan anything for that day. We knew we'd be tired. We'd be jet lagged, our goal for that day. Is to survive as long as possible because we'll just be so wiped out. But to stay up as late as we can. And not 10 o'clock midnight or anything like that, but if we can at

least stay up till eight or 9: 5:57

00 PM. Go to sleep. Then by the time we wake up like normal we're on their schedule and everything should be good. But our plan was we'd love to do three park days. Of course we want to see the Walt Disney studios do a full day there. We want to do a full day at Disneyland Paris, but then have that third day where we can go back and forth, maybe ride some of the rides we may have missed or ride our favorite rides again, and just really experience that. So we knew we'd want three days on the ground. And so we wanted to do one day in Paris. Where we could go see the Eiffel tower, we could go see all the historic monuments and artifacts around the city. And they've got a really cool tour through Disney that we're going to be doing that on. So we'll talk about that here in just a couple minutes. I love art and I love seeing just these famous works of art that you've all seen in all the books. And, or through your education. And so I want to go to the Louvre as well. So we're very much looking forward to spending our time in Paris and having about four or five days on the ground and I'll explain, that here in just a couple of minutes, how that's going to work but was really thrilled when we were researching it and pricing it out. That Disney actually helps organize a lot of what we wanted to do that made our trip planning a lot easier. And a lot more efficient and I'm sure to an extent we're probably paying a little bit more, just doing it all through Disney versus trying to piece it all together. But at the end of the day, when I'm going international and I don't know the land and I don't know the layout and I don't know what I'm supposed to be doing, it's a lot easier when you just plan it all through a company like Disney and they make it real easy for you and they help coordinate all your transfers and your bus rides and your shuttles and all that. So that's what we absolutely loved when we were planning it. So we started talking about, okay, how much is this going to cost? How are we going to price it out? And we started by looking at flights and you can see I've got my screen pulled up. I've got us. If you're watching us on YouTube, I've got us on the dryer dose of Disney. Buzzsprout page who hosts our podcast. So if you're listening to us on the podcast, We're on the host page right now. And I had this up because I didn't want you guys to be spoiled where we were going yet, or to see the stuff I was going to show you and why not? You get to look at our cool logos that we have for the podcast. And for the, I can do this all day tip of the day, . But when we were looking at flights, We started looking at, where can we go from Denver directly to Paris? Does that work at all? Which United does have a flight to do that? Just to throw out some numbers for you, we priced it all out. A round trip. Tickets are just over $2,000 per person in coach flying direct from Denver to Paris. And we talked about, do we want to upgrade our seats or whatnot? And I. I threw out some numbers to my wife and we looked at it and like first-class was over $5,000 per person round trip. And we just said we can't afford to do that. We're not going to spend 15 to$20,000 just in our flights. Let alone, we haven't paid for our luggage or anything yet, though. I'm sure if you pay for the high end tickets, it's all thrown in. But we didn't want to spend that much money. So then I started looking at other alternatives. And did some Google searching and I found some alternatives that you can actually fly from the coast. And as I mentioned earlier we're going to be flying out of Newark airport. We found that if you fly from there, there's an airline called French Bee. That does direct flights from Newark to Paris. And these direct flights were a lot less expensive. We went through the whole site and kind of found out exactly how it all works and the best way I can compare it to a domestic airline here. It's kinda like frontier. We have frontier here in Denver. That's not an airline. We fly a lot just because you have to pay for everything individually. French. Bee is kind of similar to that. So you can go through and you can book their best rate, which is going to be about four to $500 one way. So round trip would be just under a thousand dollars. I, and then you can add onto that your, food, your meals. You can change your seats and get your seat assignments and do all that kind of stuff. We figured at the end of the day, this is going to save us a ton of money. It's going to actually cost us about half of what it would have cost us to fly United, to fly French Bee. And it's easy for us to get to New York because of Southwest and that we have the companion pass. And I've talked about that on some of the other episodes that we really like Southwest airlines. I use a Southwest credit card. The link is down in the descriptions below it. I'm not just saying that to get more miles for myself or anything, but I'm saying it because when we use that Southwest card, On things like Disney and all of our trips it adds up really quick. And then we earn the companion pass. So if you're not familiar with Southwest airlines, you can earn a companion pass, which means you can name a person who will fly free every time you fly on Southwest. So for our family, I've named my wife as our companion. And so anytime I buy tickets for my daughter and I, my wife flies free. So we're immediately reducing the cost there, but to get to that level, you have to earn points. And so we have tons of miles. So we have tons of points, which means that most of our flights are free. Anyways. And the cool thing is because of that companion pass. We're only using points on two people out of the three. We don't have to use it all in all three. So our point redemption levels. Our slower, meaning lower we're redeeming fewer points because we're only doing it for two people instead of three. So we really liked Southwest. So we said, Hey, we can get to New York real easy on Southwest and probably for free with our miles and the companion pass. So we'll fly ourselves to New York and then we'll hop over to Newark airport and then hop the French B over to Paris. And that's going to save us about $3,000 right there. So we've never flown French B. I did do a lot of research on French B just to make sure that they were reputable at a good airline and. They are a discounted. Economy type airline that has lower price tickets. So a lot of people say they don't have the business select. Laid down seats or anything like that for the red eye. But they're just a normal type airplane where they have what's called 3, 4, 3 seating. So you have three seats next to the window on one side, four in the middle and then three on the other side next to the other window. So pretty wide airplane. But they do 3, 4, 3 seating, and it's just a normal coach type airplane. Now up in the front of the plane, they do have a upper-class section that does have more leg room. It has leg rests. You can lean the chairs back a little bit further. And we'll talk about that in just a second, because we are able to upgrade into that for almost nothing at all. It was really inexpensive to upgrade, but. We went through the site, French B I booked everything directly there. And the reason I recommend that, and we talked about this. A little bit on the last episode. Was because I read a whole bunch of really bad horror stories of people flying, either French, B, or some other airlines, and they booked it through a third-party site. And you guys are all familiar with those third party sites that offer discounts or try to get you the best rate. And what happened was they didn't get a seat assignment, and then their families were split up or it didn't pay for their luggage. And so then they got to the counter and had to pay a lot more money for their luggage because they booked through third party. And it just was a really unpleasant experience. So I always recommend this was our tip of the week. Last week is you always want to book directly through the company. And so we did, we went through French B, we got it all set up. They do have three fair level. So they have a basic one. They have a smart one and then they have a premium one. The smart one includes your luggage. It includes a meal and stuff like that. So that's the one we did and it still came out to about half of what we would have paid on United. Then when we went through, our luggages are included and then we went and were able to select our seats. And I was able to click those better seats up in the front of the plane with more leg room. And the leg rest and all that. And it only costs $35 each way. And I figured for a seven and a half hour long flight, eight hour long flight, it's totally worth it. Get the bigger seat, more leg room. I get the leg rest. You can stretch out a little bit more than you can in the back of the plane where you're all crammed in. Totally worth it. So we're looking forward to flying French B out of Newark, and that's going to go into Paris directly for us. And again, it's going to save us a ton of money, so I recommend wherever you're going to go. So whether you're going to Paris or you're going to go to Tokyo or one of the other Disney parks check out the prices when you're flying from like LA San Francisco, New York, Washington, DC area, and then down, even into Florida. So Miami and Orlando, and just see if you can find discounted or lower price flights. And then a book through those sites. But next. We went to the Disneyland Paris site to start booking our trip and to figure this part of it out. And I just loved the Disneyland site. It is so easy to use. It's very familiar just because it looks and feels so much like the actual sites here in the U S for Disneyland and Disney world down in Orlando. But basically we just went through and we just picked out some dates. And I'm going to just throw out some dates. So let's say you went late June. You, arrived, let's say on Sunday, and then you did your four days on the ground in new. You left that next Friday. And we're going to do all hotels. And because there's three of us, I will do it. Just like there's three of us. And when you go through, they give you just you're searching here. They're going to give you the full selection. But they do some really cool things with Disneyland Paris that you don't get here in the us, which is nice. And that is right out of the gates. When you look at these, you can see that you're going to get your five nights. You get six days of parks and you can go to either parks. So it's like a park hopper that is automatically included in your stay, which is really awesome. You don't have to buy your tickets separate and you get tickets for every day that you're there. Now, if you remember. A few minutes ago, I was saying we're flying the red eye we get in at noon. We're probably not going to want to go to the parks on the first day that we get there on that Monday. And the reason we're probably not going to want to go to the parks then is we're just going to be way too tired. Now we may go to their Disney village area, which is similar to downtown Disney or Disney Springs and go check all of that out. But we're probably not planning on going into the park and less we're wide awake and just really want to do it on the first day that we get there. But we get tickets for every single day. So even the day that we go into Paris and we get back, let's say we come back in the evening and we want to go watch the fireworks or the light show. Cause they do a really cool one there with drones. We can do that. We can pop in and go see that show. If we want to do it on the day that we're leaving and flying back home to the United States, then we can go that morning and go check out the parks and go, maybe ride a couple more rides. So I really love that feature that you get tickets the entire time. You're there. You don't have to buy anything extra and that's all included. And then you can see here, obviously the Disneyland hotels, they're five star. This is their top ones, the closest to the parks. The prices, for the five day started about $6,000. It drops down to 4,000 at the art of Marvel hotel. Newport bay club goes even lower down to three Disney. Sequoyah lodge is at 2,800 Disney hotel, Cheyenne 2,700 and Disney hotel. Santa Fe is at 2,800. So these are your two and three star hotels. And then obviously top of the lines up here at the bottom of the page, if you go all the way down, you do have the Davy Crockett ranch, which is like the. Outdoor camping that they have in Orlando, where you're in cabins, you're a little bit more isolated and then they have their good neighbor partner hotels down here at the very bottom. If you wanted to click through and show those. But they have a lot of good hotel selections. You can click through, look at all the pictures. And see what's all there, but just for argument's sake, we're just going to go down here to. We'll pick the Disney hotel, Cheyenne. And go forward because I want you to see what this experience is and where you get some options. So you get to select your room type and where it faces. We're not going to change much there. You can get accessible rooms as well as suites if you want it to, but we're going to skip that for right now. And then you get into these options that you have. So there's a lot of different options where you can get breakfast every single day. And you can go through discover that and add that to your package. You can get the half board where you get the restaurants in both the hotels and the parks, but you get breakfast and lunch or breakfast and dinner. So you basically get two meals a day through that. Or you can get the full board where you get everything, you get all the meals every single day, and that's going to cost you about $120 a day, which if, you compare it to the restaurants that are there, where you're paying it's 60, 70 bucks a person. And then you're getting all three meals. It's not too far off. It's actually pretty close. So it's not a bad thing to add. If you want to now keep in mind, this will be for each day. And I think you can go through and select which days you want. Because like I said, you may go to Paris one day and say, no, we'll take care of ourselves that day. But you do get the meal plans. You get to chance to add all of that, to your ticket here. If you want. Then go forward. You get a lot more options here, so you can do. Luggage service. If you take the train, which we are not, we're actually going to do this magical shuttle service, and this does both airports in Paris. So the orally or the Charles airport. You can get this bus service that will pick you up at baggage claim and they will take you to the parks and drop you off at all your hotels. And then likewise, they will also bring you back when it's all time to go. They have a whole schedule for all this. It's super easy. Actually found the schedule online. I already downloaded it. I've got it on my phone. So that way, when we're at the airport or we're getting ready to go back to the airport, I know what time these buses are going to come by and where they're going to be at. And it should make it really easy for us to get to the airport. So they do the magical shuttle service. Definitely something I'd recommend buying. This was not expensive at all. In fact, for all three of us, for both trips combined, it was like 80 bucks. So definitely something I would do. That's going to be cheaper than an Uber or a taxi even, and it should be easy to find. Cause it's a big red bus. You can add things like your birthday dessert. You could add photo pass. Now here's one thing that's a little bit different in doing PhotoPass. And Disneyland Paris through the setup like this. Is, this is for your entire party. So in the states, you know that when you do PhotoPass, you do it by person. So you you may only do it for one person, which is our recommendation. Don't buy it for everyone. Only buy it for one person. But when you do it here, it's the whole party and it was 80 bucks for the week. Not bad. We went ahead and purchased. PhotoPass just because we want to have those memories when we get home and we don't have, we don't want to have to worry about it. We want to just all be taken care of. Then you can go through and you can do your character dining. You can plan all of that. And even though it says, discover, you can go in and book these things and add them to your ticket here, you can see the tickets accumulating over here on the side. You can do your breakfast with the Disney characters. So here you can add to Disney premier access, ultimate, which is their version of genie plus lightning lane to your tickets. It is a little bit more pricey, but it is for the entire time that you're there in the entire day. So you can go through and take a look at those options as well, but you can add that here. And then here's. My favorite part is you can add experiences beyond Disneyland Paris and for us traveling from the United States, not knowing Paris, not knowing France and not knowing exactly where to go or what to do to have these options by Disney really made our planning a lot easier. So you can go do the Royal Versailles in Paris. You can do the hop on, hop off, which is what we're going to do. This is the big double Decker red bus that drives you. Around Paris, they've got maps for you where you can see where you go. You go to 10 different stops. They take you to basically all the Paris landmarks from Notre Dame, the arc de triumph, the Eiffel tower. You've got the Louvre museum and you can hop on and off as much as you want. So basically you can ride it around when you get to a stop, you get off and you can stay at that stop. Say for an hour. And these buses come by every 10 minutes. And so you can go hop on to the next bus that comes by or in an hour when that one's there. And it will just keep going in that same loop. So you get a chance to see all of these cool things. We're going to do the hop on, hop off so that way we can see these sites and experience some of them. The Paris essential tour does the same thing. It does the hop on hop off, but you can also do the riverboat because there is a river boat that will take you up and down the river. And then Eiffel tower lunch and cruise where it's just specific to the river and the Eiffel tower. So you get some really cool options here through Disney, but it makes it real convenient when you can book these tours. Through Disney. And then as you research it, you realize, Hey, I can see the majority of the city here. I can go through and get this all set up and Disney will take care of the rest. So it's really easy. Okay. Once you get all that stuff set up. I'm going to click the next button here. Then you go through, and then now you're going to start filling out all of your information. You can start filling out who you are. You can create an account if you haven't done that. And then you're going to go ahead and pay for it. Once it's all done, if you download their app. So like in the United States, you have a Disney land app and you have a Disney world app. They have a Disneyland Paris app, and it's really cool because your phone. Already knows what language you speak. So I downloaded it. It's already in English for me, so everything I can read it's not in French, which I'll be honest. I was a little worried am I going to get into this app and not know where I'm going and not know what everything says. I know it's all in English for me. And as soon as I got in and put in my information it pulled me up and said, Hey, you have a reservation. Here's all your cool stuff. You can add your dining reservations to this. You can add all these extra ad-ons and you can do that all through the app, just like you would here in the states. So they've made it really super easy. So when we're thinking about our trip to Paris, we know we've got our flights taking care of our transportation to the Disney resort. Our hotels done, our park tickets are done. We can take care of all of our meals if we want it to. You saw that there's options there we have PhotoPass we have all those cool ad-ons. We have our Paris tour with the hop on, hop off bus already, all planned. We picked a day that we're going to be doing that. My wife and I have already started talking about, okay, during that day, which ones do we want to get off the bus for? And actually walk around and take photos, see do stuff. And then which ones do we, are we okay? Just riding the bus and seeing, and taking a photo from the bus. So we've already started planning all of that out and we are so excited for this trip. The only thing that is left. And I mentioned this at the beginning is we just need to plan how we're going to get to New York. So we need to make sure we get there in time for our flight. And then when we come back to Newark airport, actually, it's a New Jersey though. It's right across the The river there from New York city. When we come back, we'll need to find a way then make sure that we've got a flight to get back to Denver. Super easy to get that all planned. We may actually even stay a day or two in New York just to see New York a little bit more and have some fun there. But we're real excited about this trip and we get to see a new foreign country. We get to do the Disney parks and we get plenty of time there. So with that, we can also keep in mind, you're not locked in like the reservations. We can go to these parks when we want, but let's say because we did plan three days on the park. Plus we have a half day before plane leaves. If one of those days, we said, Hey, we just want to hit a couple more rides on the day that we fly out. We have an extra day, we can go back into the city. We can go do that. We can schedule those things back through Disney. If we wanted to. Add a tour. If we wanted to, or we can just take a taxi and go back into the city and go do what we want to. do. So we have a lot of options, a lot of flexibility, and we are so excited to go to Disneyland Paris. So that's how we planned it. I walked you through the sites. I told you about the airline that we're taking. After this. Obviously our next step is to go on the trip. So we'll be doing that here in a couple months, and then I'll be giving you updates on each of the parks. What we liked. We'll talk about the hotels. We'll talk about the foods. We'll talk about the city of Paris. So we may have multiple episodes coming out at that point in time. And then we'll start planning. Our next trip for Tokyo is where we'd like to go next, hopefully in the fall. So we'll see if we can get that plan this year as well. And I'll start getting you guys educated on what we learned about Tokyo. So with that, we hope you have a magical week. We hope you're having a great time planning your next vacation, whether it's domestic here in the U S to California or Orlando, or if you're going to be going to one of these international parks, we wish you the very best. And we'll talk to you guys next time. Bye. Bye. Exit Music