After more than 30 years of visiting Walt Disney World, you’d think we’d have it all figured out by now. And honestly, most of the time we do. We know the crowd patterns. We know which dining reservations are actually worth the hassle, and we’ve rope dropped more times than we can count.

And yet, we still find ourselves making the same mistakes trip after trip. These aren’t first-timer blunders but rather bad habits that we keep falling back into even though we know better. Consider this our honest confession. Here are the Disney World bad habits Heidi and I still can’t seem to shake, no matter how many times we visit the parks.

1. Booking a Sit-Down Restaurant Every Single Night

This one starts at home, 60 days before we ever set foot in a park. We open the My Disney Experience app at 6 AM, and suddenly we’ve got a table service reservation for every single night of the trip. It feels like smart planning in the moment — responsible, even.

But here’s what actually happens during our trip. We’re having a perfect day at Magic Kingdom. The weather is great, and the crowds are lighter than expected. We have the whole evening ahead of us. Except we don’t, because we have to leave to go back to our hotel, shower, and get ready for that
Topolino’s Terrace – Flavors of the Riviera reservation we made months ago.

Inevitably, we end up cancelling at least one or two of those reservations every single trip. All that planning, and then we’re scrambling to cancel before the window closes so we don’t get charged a no-show fee.

We’ve gotten better about this, but it’s still one of our biggest Disney bad habits. The approach that actually works is picking a few restaurants per trip and booking only those when our window opens. Everything else stays flexible.

2. Going from Rope Drop to Close

We’re going to Disney World. Might as well make it count, right? Even in the heat of summer, when we tell ourselves that we need to take a midday break, the pattern never changes.

We woke up at the crack of dawn and took advantage of our Early Entry resort perk. We rope dropped Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind, and got a head start on all the other park-goers. The morning was great. By midday, the lines are starting to build, and we know from experience that heading back to the resort right now — resting for a couple of hours and coming back refreshed for the evening — would make the rest of the day dramatically better.

But Soarin’ just dropped to a 20-minute wait, and we might as well get Starbucks at Connections Cafe too. Before you know it, it’s after 3 PM. We’re hot and tired, but it doesn’t make sense to leave now. So, dinner and Luminous: The Symphony of Us feels like a death march to the finish line. Or even worse, we’ve still got our Deluxe Resort Extended Evening Hours perk!

The midday break isn’t something we’ve ever regretted when we’ve actually taken it. We just always seem to let FOMO get the best of us.

3. Not Taking a Rest Day on Longer Trips

If skipping the midday break costs us one afternoon, skipping a rest day entirely on a longer trip costs us the back half of the whole vacation. The idea of spending a day at Walt Disney World not going to a park feels like a failure. You’re paying for park tickets. You’re here. You go.

But by day four or five, it catches up to you — early mornings, long days on your feet, heat, noise, overstimulation — and the park days start feeling like a chore instead of a vacation. You’re shorter with each other. The waits feel longer. The things you love about Disney start feeling like a checklist of things to do.

A rest day in the middle of a longer trip resets everything. Sleep in. Actually use the pool. Eat an unhurried meal somewhere on property. Do absolutely nothing. It sounds counterintuitive, but the park days on either side of a true rest day are almost always the best days of the entire trip. After all these years, we still have to talk ourselves into it — and it usually ends up being a half day at best.

4. Defaulting to a Deluxe Resort

We love a Deluxe Resort. The theming, the location, the ability to walk to a park or hop on the monorail without thinking about a bus schedule, Extended Evening Hours — these are all extremely valuable benefits and certainly reasons to book a Deluxe Resort.

But why do we keep booking the Grand Floridian, the BoardWalk Inn, or the Wilderness Lodge, if we’re spending the entire week leaving for rope drop and getting back exhausted at midnight? More times than not, we end up using the resort for nothing beyond sleeping. At that point we’ve paid two to three times what a Moderate Resort would have cost us for a hotel we saw mostly in the dark.

The honest question we’ve started asking ourselves before booking is how we actually plan to use the resort on that specific trip. If we’re doing early mornings and late nights every day, park hopping, and running on adrenaline the whole week, a well-located Moderate Resort delivers 90% of the same trip. If we’re planning a slower pace with some resort meals or an evening on the BoardWalk, then the Deluxe option makes sense.

5. Not Using the Hotel Amenities

And even when we do plan for a slower paced trip, we still somehow manage to barely use any of the resort amenities — which brings us to a bad habit that applies no matter what resort category you’re staying in.

Disney resorts feature great pools, bars and lounges, a variety of dining options, immaculate grounds, and plenty of activities for the whole family. But still, we end up using our hotel mainly for sleeping. On our “rest day”, we usually end up at Disney Springs instead.

The pool? We walk past it every morning and every night and the entire trip goes by without either of us ever getting in. The movies under the stars, the campfire programs, the activities — we almost never do any of it.

Don’t be like us. Regardless of whether you book a Value, Moderate, or Deluxe resort, be sure to check out the full list of your resort’s amenities and activities, and actually use them. After all, you’re paying for them.

6. Buying Lightning Lane for Every Park, Every Day

And our Disney World bad habits continue. Take Lightning Lane — a Disney add-on that’s worth the splurge, and also something we consistently overspend on.

This one feels like proper planning every time we do it, which is exactly why it’s so hard to break. We have a great day at Magic Kingdom with Lightning Lane Multi Pass — the day flows, we hit everything, it’s worth every penny. The same value applies in Hollywood Studios. With Lightning Lane Multi Pass, we’re able to ride all the attractions with significantly less wait times.

But it isn’t always worth it. Lightning Lane Multi Pass pricing is dynamic and costs $15–$35+ per person per day depending on the park and date. For a family of four on a five-day trip, this can add up quickly on top of everything else. On a slower crowd day at Animal Kingdom or EPCOT during a festival, you may not need it. These parks have fewer attractions, so if you’re willing to wait in line, plan for rope drop, or maybe spring on a Lightning Lane Single Pass, you can absolutely tackle everything.

On high-demand days at Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, it almost always pays for itself before noon. On slower days or at the other parks, don’t just buy Lightning Lane Multi Pass assuming you’ll need it.

7. One More Ride Syndrome

And while we’re on the subject of rides, this is another Disney World bad habit that we’re definitely guilty of.

The classic version: it’s 9:45 PM, the park closes in 15 minutes, everyone is exhausted, and the smart people are already leaving, but TRON Lightcycle / Run is kind of on the way out. We can squeeze in just one more ride before we leave. Now it’s after 10:30 and we’re waiting in a long line for a bus with other people who made the same choice and won’t be back at the resort for another hour. Only to start the whole process again tomorrow morning.

But honestly, the late-night version of our “one more ride” syndrome is only half of it. We’ve done this at noon before dining reservations as well. Yes, we have a Yak & Yeti reservation in 40 minutes, but Expedition Everest has only a 30-minute wait and is nearby. And there we are in the queue even though we already rode once this morning.

The only thing that helps is putting the phone away after that pre-determined “last ride”.

8. Checking the App Instead of Actually Being There

Even if the My Disney Experience app does derail our plans from time to time, the bigger problem is what it does to our attention span.

We are both completely guilty of it. We’re managing Lightning Lane windows, constantly refreshing wait times, mobile ordering. We’re downloading our ride photos and posting them on social media. And then we realize we walked through all of Galaxy’s Edge with our eyes tied to a screen. We have to frequently remind ourselves to be present in the moment and actually enjoy what’s going on around us.

We try our best to reserve checking the app while we’re waiting in line and then put it away so we can enjoy the immersive queues. Disney World is magical — and expensive — shouldn’t that deserve your full attention?

9. Crisscrossing the Park Chasing Wait Times

Keeping the phone in your pocket is easier said than done, though — especially when you want to make the most of your days in the parks.

So, what happens when you see a short wait time? Here’s how it usually goes for us. We’re in Tomorrowland for Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin and our Lightning Lane window for Space Mountain opens in 30 minutes. Our plan was to stay in the area, but then we see that Big Thunder Mountain Railroad has dropped to a 20 minute wait — the shortest it’s been all day. We can make it! So, we race back to Frontierland and all the way back to Space Mountain. After Space Mountain? Back to Adventureland for Pirates of the Caribbean!

By the end of the day we’ve walked twice as far as necessary and spent hours hustling between rides instead of just enjoying them.

Planning with geography in mind rather than just wait times is the approach that actually helps. Cluster your morning in one section of the park and stay there until you’ve covered it. When you’re booking Lightning Lane selections, think about where those return times will actually put you relative to where you’ll be — a 45-minute wait for something nearby is often better than a 15-minute wait at the opposite end of the park.

10. Skipping Shows and Character Meet-and-Greets

All of this focus on rides and wait times points to a broader bad habit — one we’ve been guilty of for most of our Disney-going lives.

We are ride people. Always have been. Shows and character meet-and-greets were filler between the things we actually came for. That was the wrong attitude to have, and it took us longer than it should have to figure it out.

Festival of the Lion King is one of the best live entertainment experiences in Walt Disney World. Finding Nemo: The Big Blue and Beyond is a full theatrical production. Villains: Unfairly Ever After and the Frozen Sing-Along Celebration are fun and air conditioned shows worth catching.

And character meet-and-greets. We have stood in a 45-minute queue for a ride we’ve ridden a dozen times and walked right past a character meet for someone we’ve never actually stopped to see. Yes, these character experiences are fun for adults too.

11. Not Mobile Ordering Until We’re Already Hungry

And finally — one that has nothing to do with rides or shows, and everything to do with the fact that we apparently never learn.

Mobile ordering has existed at Disney World for years. We use it regularly. We know exactly how it works. And we still fail to plan ahead. This is how it plays out: it’s noon time, we’re hungry, all the quick service venues are busy.

We’re always so focused on what we’re doing and racing from one attraction to the other that we forget to order ahead. The shift that actually works is ordering before you’re hungry. Plan what you want to eat for lunch in the morning and put in the order. When your pick up window arrives, click to prepare your order and it’s ready when you arrive. It’s one of the simplest wins in the parks, and we still manage to miss it more often than we should.

Bottom Line

Thirty-plus years, several trips later, and we’re still working on every single one of these. The honest truth is that Disney World is very good at encouraging all of them — the app makes overspending feel like planning, the wait times make leaving feel impossible, and the sheer energy of being there makes rest feel like a waste. But knowing these bad habits is half the battle. Maybe one time we’ll actually spend a whole day at our resort and enjoy the pool.

Comments

Are you guilty of any of these Disney World mistakes too? Leave us a comment below to share your Disney World bad habits.