The Brad Hole

The past month or so has been hectic in a relaxing kind of way. We spent Christmas up in Seattle with Beth's parents, then just last week went to Walt Disney World for the WDW Marathon. This was my second trip to WDW, the first being on our honeymoon. This trip certainly wasn't any honeymoon. ;-)

Beth ranted a bit about it in her blog, but I'm so filled with hate that I'm compelled to regurgitate some of the more interesting points. First off, let me just say that if you're offering a limo service that picks guests up from the airport and deposits them at their hotel, I believe it is perhaps important to actually know where the fuck their hotel is, rather than drive around the greater WDW area looking for it. If you are reluctant to pull over so that your guest can pull out a map from his luggage with directions to the hotel, you may not be doing such a good job. For future reference. "A.J." at HappyLimo.com didn't have a clue.

Second, if you provide a service that sells park tickets and you offer to deliver it to the guest's hotel the day before they arrive, it helps to deliver it to the hotel that the guest is staying in. This can usually be done by reading the order that the guest places, but if that fails, it's often helpful to listen to the guest repeat the name and address of the hotel instead of continually repeating the wrong hotel back. Here, Central Florida Tickets and Travel let us down by managing to deliver it to our hotel roughly two hours (and several phone calls where we provided directions to the hotel) after we checked in.

Finally, if your hotel offers a "free shuttle" to WDW, do not be surprised if your guests are a bit put-off by a schedule that includes 2 early morning departures and nothing else.

All told, though, we learned a valuable lesson. Although it's cheaper to stay off-property in a non-Disney resort, you're really just gambling that that all the third-party companies that inevitably come into play are going to provide the level of service that you'd get from a Disney hotel. Our experience this trip, in stark contrast to our honeymoon stay on Disney property, has convinced us that the extra premium you'd pay by staying at a Disney property is worth the aggravation and hassle it saves.

That ranting aside, the trip didn't really go all that well. We arrived on Thursday afternoon, pissed away a few hours waiting for our park passes, then managed to squeeze in a dinner at Epcot just before closing. We spent all day Friday in the Magic Kingdom with Beth's parents, but Saturday was a complete wash. We started out by wisely switching our hotels from the Comfort Suites Maingate East to Disney's Port Orleans Riverside, so that ate up our morning. I should interject here that I was mighty impressed with the Port Orleans Riverside resort. It was far nicer than I was expecting for a very reasonable price.

Complicating things, Beth's mom was fairly sick, so we didn't do much that afternoon either. We caught Downtown Disney Saturday night, but Sunday morning was the start of the marathon. Beth's mom was feeling better, but now her dad was sick. So with those illnesses and Beth's exhaustion from the marathon, Sunday was also not overly productive. Monday was our last full day in Orlando, and we squeezed in 2 rides at Epcot in the morning and 1 at MGM Studios in the afternoon.

We left Tuesday afternoon, and as such didn't have time to do much of anything that morning except catch lunch at Disney's Beach Club resort. On the plus side, we still have 2 days left on our park passes, and I don't believe they expire so we'll be able to leverage that for our next trip. Given all the things we've learned to do (and not do), I'm pretty sure our next trip will be a rousing success.