I am happy to say that taking a trip to the Orlando theme parks with teenagers requires less trip planning than it does with young kids! Forget laying out a detailed schedule for each day. Forget the websites that will literally give you a minute by minute itinerary. Forget any semblance of a tight schedule. Teens are different animals. Just plan the high level stuff and let them take it from there.
The high level details I did have to plan included where to stay, which tickets to purchase, and which park to visit on which day. That was it!
The where to stay and the ticket decisions were somewhat intertwined. I had been warned that Express Passes were a necessity to make your day enjoyable at the parks. But man, were they expensive! They more than doubled the price of the tickets and I just couldn’t stomach that. So we used a not-so-secret trick. We booked one night at a Premier hotel, a stay that comes with free Universal Express Unlimited passes (including both check-in and check-out days).
Universal Orlando has three Premier hotels – Loews Portofino Bay Hotel, Hard Rock Hotel, and Loews Royal Pacific Resort. All of them offer the same benefits and all of them are relatively close in price. We booked Royal Pacific, both because it was the lowest price for our date and because we were interested to compare it to the Polynesian at Disney, where we had stayed before.
We drove down from NC on a Saturday and booked the Royal Pacific for Sunday night because that gave us the express passes for our two park days – Sunday and Monday. But we still needed somewhere to stay Saturday night. I knew we’d be getting in at dinner time or later and would be checking out first thing in the morning so it didn’t make sense to spend a lot of money on a hotel that night. After briefly considering staying offsite, I decided it would be easier to transfer on Sunday morning if we were already on property. So I decided to book a value resort. There are only two options in that hotel class and they are both part of the same property, Endless Summer Resort. The resort has two sides – Surfside and Dockside. Dockside is a little bigger and has a few more amenities but it basically came down to a coin toss and we booked Surfside.
In terms of tickets, we used the Premier hotel hack to get free Express passes so the only remaining question was if we needed one park per day or more. And that proved to be a tough one! I agonized over this decision and didn’t make a call until the night before we left. I liked the idea of keeping our options open and being able to hop between parks to repeat a favorite ride or to ride the Hogwarts Express (which requires a two-park ticket). But in the end, the value just didn’t seem to be there to me. It was already going to be a very expensive two days and it didn’t make sense to me to tack on more money for benefits we weren’t sure we would use. So we settled on the One Park Per Day ticket.
The last decision was which park to visit on which day. This didn’t really make a huge difference to anyone so we just went by the crowd calendar. Luckily it was pretty straight forward and the two parks were recommended on different days. We visited Islands of Adventure on the first day and Universal Studios the next.
So that was it! We booked the hotels, bought the tickets, and decided which park to do first. From there, the boys took the lead. They decided which direction to head in each park, which rides to go on next, where to eat, and when to go home. It was great not to have to worry about those details ahead of time and to let them take ownership of their own experiences. I love trip planning in general but do not love Disney/Universal trip planning specifically so this was a huge win for me!
