Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 1

My family and I have recently returned from our first trip to Disney World and I wanted to share our fun and some Best Practice for planning a trip to Disney World. This is the first of three entries which will provide a hopefully fun overview of our trip and how I applied simple Project Management techniques to ensure a successful vacation.

Tip # 1 - treat your trip to Disney World like a project! A Project Management colleague of mine, Steve Russo, wrote So ... You're Going to Disney World: How I learned to stop worrying and embrace the planning process, a great book about the Disney vacation planning process which I highly recommend.

Also I would like to acknowledge Jonathan Blake who used the Disney World vacation as a case study for a New York State Project Management Guidebook training session at the 2005 GTC-East, some of the concepts I borrowed for this article.

So here is the first entry of how I managed our Disney World trip using the standard Project Management Origination Phase.

Origination – Select your destination (Define where)
This is the project phase where you make your case and obtain everyone’s approval to select Disney World as the vacation destination. This sounds easy since I don’t know many 2 or 5 year olds who would not want to go to Disney World!

Seriously, there is a process to selecting your destination, given many other available vacation options, and deciding on initial project parameters. To facilitate decision making you want to develop a high-level budget and schedule. In our case we knew we wanted to visit Disney World but first we had to make sure it would fit within our vacation budget and during a time when it was not so hot we would end up as puddles on the sidewalk!

An initial decision is what time of the year to visit. Of course Disney World is open each and every day, but at this point you want to narrow down the preferred season and month for your visit. Steve’s book contains a very insightful chapter to help you pick the best time for your visit. We chose late December since the weather would be cooler and the crowds relatively smaller.

In determining the budget you need to consider at least four major components: travel, park costs, accommodations, and daily spending/extras.

First you need to estimate the length of your stay for planning purposes. We chose to stay for 5 days and 4 nights but you can select different durations and crunch the numbers for each different scenario.

Travel – In this case we had to determine if we wanted to fly or drive to Disney World. My preference was to drive, how else would the kids get to see Pedro’s South of the Border along the way? My wife had visions of National Lampoon’s Vacation and quickly convinced me that we had to fly. Once we made this decision it was quite easy to check some on-line sites to estimate roundtrip airline costs.

Park Costs – Again it is easy to identify the costs of passes from online sites such as Disney or Undercover Tourist. There are many options to choose from and we took the Park Hopper option so we could visit multiple parks each day, which we did.

Accommodations – Next you need to estimate your costs for accommodations. The first decision is if you want to stay inside or outside of the Disney World Report. We decided to stay in the Disney Resorts and of course there are many to choose from. We picked Disney’s All Star Movie value resort to help contain the overall project, I mean vacation, costs. Visit the Disney Accommodations site for all the options, keep in mind they offer different prices for the various seasons!


Daily Spending and Extras – At this point you need to estimate how much you will spend daily on food and souvenirs. At Disney World there are many options for eating and you can estimate process with a little research. The Undercover Tourist Disney Smart Phone web application shows menus and prices for all Disney World parks and some of the resort restaurants. This is a neat, free application and highly recommended if you have a smart phone.

There are endless extras that you can include to further enhance your Disney experience. In our case we selected three character dining experiences, a favorite in our family.

Estimate each of these components and make sure it fits within your budget. Is a visit to Disney World still looking acceptable? If so proceed directly to Initiation!

Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 2
Visiting Disney World with a Project Manager: Part 3