|
The Unofficial Guide Walt Disney World 2010 (Unofficial Guides)
|
| List Price: | $19.99 |
| Price: | $13.59 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details |
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com
45 new or used available from $10.80
Average customer review:
Product Description
- In 2008, combined Walt Disney World Resort© theme park attendance reached over 51 million, with the Magic Kingdom alone drawing over 17 million visitors. (Orlando Convention and Visitor Bureau)
- Despite signifcant downturns in the economy, Disney theme parks have maintained attendance rates and made gains in attendance at some parks.
- Walt Disney World Resort theme parks are rated best in the world. earning high marks for things outside of the traditional theme park experience. Epcot's International Food & Wine Festival, which takes place for six weeks every fall and showcases food from twenty-five countries, was rated by Forbes Traveler as one of the Best U.S. Food and Wine Festivals.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #1039 in Books
- Published on: 2009-08-31
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Binding: Paperback
- 912 pages
Features
- ISBN13: 9780470460269
- Condition: NEW
- Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
- Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Test Your Disney Smarts!
Amazon-exclusive quiz from author Bob Sehlinger
Amazon-exclusive content from author Bob Sehlinger 1. Select the time of year for your visit: Walt Disney World is busiest Christmas Day through New Year’s Day. Thanksgiving weekend, the week of Washington’s birthday, the first full week of November, spring break for colleges, and the two weeks around Easter are also times when visitation can peak at 92,000 visitors in a single day. The park is far less crowded during the off season, but be advised that the parks often open late and close early during that time. You can find detailed charts and info on the best times to visit in The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World. 2. Shape up: Visiting Disney World requires levels of industry and stamina more often associated with running marathons. As you plan your time at Disney World, consider your physical limitations. It’s exhausting to rise at dawn and run around a theme park for 8 to 12 hours day after day. Every Disney World vacation itinerary should include days when you don’t go to a theme park and days when you sleep in and take the morning off. Plan these to follow unusually long and arduous days. 3. Formulate your park plan: First-time visitors should see Epcot first; you’ll be able to enjoy it without having been preconditioned to think of Disney entertainment as solely fantasy or adventure. See Animal Kingdom second. Like Epcot, it’s educational, but its live animals provide a change of pace. Next, see Disney’s Hollywood Studios, which helps transition from the educational Epcot and Animal Kingdom to the fanciful Magic Kingdom. Also, because DHS is smaller, you won’t walk as much or stay as long. Save the Magic Kingdom for last; it’s the park that epitomizes Disney World for most visitors. 4. Create your touring plan: Which rides and attractions appeal most to you? What are you willing to forgo? Planning your day in advance can save you up to four hours of waiting time in line. We have developed a hierarchy of categories that will help you evaluate each ride and plan the best way to enjoy them all. For example, SUPER-HEADLINERS are the best attractions the theme park has to offer – and they usually have the longest lines. MINOR ATTRACTIONS are midway-type rides, small “dark” rides (cars on a track, zigzagging through the dark) and walk-through attractions—which can be a lot of fun, without the long wait. Remember that bigger and more elaborate doesn’t always mean better. See examples of touring plans (and create your own) in The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World. 5. Getting hungry?: There are three lessons to learn before you dine in the parks. One: Theme-park restaurants rush their customers in order to make room for the next group of diners. If you want to linger over your expensive meal, don’t order your entire dinner at once. Order drinks. Study the menu while you sip, then order appetizers. Tell the waiter you need more time to decide among entrees. Order your main course only after appetizers have been served. Dawdle over dessert. Two: If you’re dining in a theme park and cost is an issue, make lunch your main meal. Entrees are similar to those on the dinner menu, but prices are significantly lower. Three: Disney adds a surcharge of $4 per adult and $2 per child to certain popular restaurants during weeks of peak attendance, including Easter, Thanksgiving, and Christmas, and in 2009 every day from Memorial Day through July 4.
From the Back Cover
"Best Travel Series of the Year"
—Booklist
"A Tourist's Best Friend!"
—Chicago Sun-Times
"Indispensable"
—The New York Times
Five Great Features and Benefits offered ONLY by The Unofficial Guide:
1 Exclusively patented, field-tested touring plans that save as much as four hours of standing in line in a single day
2 New color section with practical information for your trip
3 More than 200 hotels rated and ranked for quality and value, including the top non-Disney hotels for families
4 A complete Dining Guide with ratings and reviews of all Walt Disney World restaurants, plus extensive alternatives for dining deals outside the World
5 Attractions rated and ranked for each age group; extensive, objective, head-to-head comparisons of the Disney and Universal theme parks
Customer Reviews
Most Complete Guide to WDW
The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World is by far the largest guidebook for the area. Weighing in at a whopping 850 pages, you would expect, or at least hope, that it would be the most comprehensive and informative of all the Orlando guides. To help readers decide for themselves, I've broken my review down into sections by subject so you can focus on what matters most to you.
Hotels:
Disney hotels receive exhaustive coverage with floor plans, rating on many factors such as room quality, noise level, pool facilities, value, and more. There is a lengthy write-up discussing each hotel including their strengths and weaknesses. They even provide guidance on specific rooms to ask for and which to try and avoid when you make your reservation.
For those hotels outside of the resort, the coverage is less exhaustive but still comprehensive. A map shows the location of well over 100 area hotels, there are charts grading them on room quality, overall ratings, and cost. Information is also provided on how long it takes to get to each Disney theme park from the hotel. Some of the better hotels get full write-ups.
In addition to coverage of specific hotels, there is general advice as well. A few of the topics include advice on how to get deals on your room, discussion of the pros and cons of staying inside the confines of Disney World Resort, and an explanation of how the Disney hotels are classified. All told, there are more than 175 pages devoted to accommodations and none of it is wasted. This is not only the best coverage of hotels for Orlando, it's the best I've ever seen in any guidebook.
Dining:
Full service restaurants all receive a full write-up with detailed descriptions and ratings for food quality, value, and an overall score. Brief summaries are presented for the places offering counter service. In addition to the opinions of the authors, reader survey scores are reported so you can see what percentage of readers liked that restaurant. This is extremely helpful and any place I've tried that scores well on both fronts has always been a winner. Note that all of the above is limited to coverage inside of Disney World. There are also recommendations for the some of the best restaurants of various types outside the resort and brief coverage of the options in Universal's City Walk.
Theme Parks:
Full coverage is offered for The Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Disney-MGM Studios, Animal Kingdom as well as Disney's water parks, Typhoon Lagoon and Blizzard Beach. Universal is also covered with Universal Studios and Islands of Adventure getting equally comprehensive coverage. Sea World is covered, but only briefly. Busch Gardens in Tampa is not covered at all. In fairness, no guide to Disney World offers detailed coverage of these two parks. You can purchase Beyond Disney: The Unofficial Guide to Universal Orlando ,SeaWorld and the Best of Central Florida (Unofficial Guides) for this information if you're interested in visiting one or both of them.
So what constitutes full coverage of all the parks listed above? There's general background and information followed by a map and advice on orienting yourself. And then there are full descriptions and ratings for every attraction in each park. Separate ratings are provided for a number of age groups to help you evaluate the potential entertainment value for your group. Live entertainment is covered as well as advice on where to watch fireworks and parades. Finally, there are the touring plans. These are detailed itineraries designed to help you save hours of waiting time by visiting attractions in a certain order. This is only necessary if you go during summer or other peak tourist seasons. But if you do, they can be invaluable.
One final word on the theme park coverage. This guide, and many others, provides detailed descriptions of each attraction. Think about how much you really want to know before reading these. If you haven't visited Orlando before, you can rob yourself of a lot of pleasant surprises by reading all of this material. I would recommend using the ratings and reading just enough to get a vague idea of the attraction but not to go further.
Misc. Sections:
In some respects, this is almost the best part of the entire book. It's hard to overstate how diverse the information presented in this book is. There are tips on avoiding/healing blisters on your feet, how to find cheap airfare, what time of year to visit, going with kids, going as a couple, advice for pregnant women, seniors, and much much more. Common activities like golf and shopping are also covered. It's almost endless... if you can think of it there's a good chance that it's in this guide.
To sum it up, the authors did indeed produce the most comprehensive and informative guide for Walt Disney World and the Orlando area. No other guide even comes close to providing this much detail. Indeed, the most common criticism of this guide is usually that it's too much information and some people find it overwhelming. If this is your first impression upon opening the book, I would recommend focusing on those sections containing the information you're most interested in and get to the rest when you feel up to it. If you are anxious to see more photos than the 16 pages presented here, you might want to pick up The Complete Walt Disney World 2009 (Complete Walt Disney World) (Complete Guide to Walt Disney World). It doesn't have anywhere near as much detailed information, but it's packed with great shots and beautifully presents the visuals of the area.
Good book; website subscription no longer included
I bought this book in preparation for an upcoming trip in May 2010. I chose this book over the plethora of other WDW guide books primarily due to the subscription to the corresponding website [...] that the previous editions have included.
Unfortunately, the popularity of the website has caused this model to no longer be financially viable. Purchasers of the new edition are instead given a special rate of around five bucks to join. The major foul that has occurred is that the very first printing states that certain aspects of the site, in particular the online crowd calendar, would remain free for purchasers of the book. This is not the case. This was an honest mistake, and hopefully it will be corrected in future printings.
Like any other tour guide, information and reviews are given for hotels, restaurants, and attractions. Reviews are given for establishments both on and off Walt Disney World property, though more emphasis is given to those on-property. Within the parks, the authors go as far as rating each attraction for specific age groups, which I thought was a nice touch. A handful of the rates stated reflect 2009 prices rather than 2010, but that is to be expected since the new rates were released only a few weeks before the guide went on sale.
The main draw that this book has over others is the inclusion of a handful of touring plans: these are specific orderings of attractions designed to minimize the amount of time spent waiting in line. The authors have invested a lot of time and research into these plans, and they seem to be rather effective. However, these plans are pretty hard-core, so if you don't have a type a personality or have no desire to be at the parks right when they open, these might not be as useful. Additionally, a much larger collection of these plans are available at their website, so a subscription there may be a better option if this is the only reason you would buy the book.
Plenty of maps and diagrams are included throughout the book, but only a limited number of photographs are included at the very beginning. I personally didn't find this to be a big deal, but it may be to others.
the Disney Bible
I'm planning our first trip to Walt Disney World this year and am a total planner. So naturally I've started brushing up with a bunch of Disney books, podcasts, websites, etc. This book is absolutely the most comprehensive must have book I've found. It will really answer any question you may have regarding the details of any trip. There is a page dedicated to each of the resort hotels (and some of the major hotels and vacation homes just outside the park), there are restaurant guides (including some outside of WDW), and information on some not Disney day trips. I mention these specifically because most other Disney books I've found limit their information to only Disney owned resorts and attractions. This was a great bonus! I love the customer feedback quotes/opinions they include - it gives both pros and cons for most things. I can only imagine the time and effort that goes in to preparing such a detailed planning guide!
I absolutely recommend this if you are a newbie like me and looking for some great information about the park. I also recommend The Complete Walt Disney World 2009 (Complete Walt Disney World) (Complete Guide to Walt Disney World) which give some nice tips and pictures. The Complete Guide is the book my son is most excited about because he loves looking at all the rides pictures and height requirements (he's hoping to be tall enough for the coasters by the time we go). This is the book we read before bed every night. Finally, check out PassPorter's Walt Disney World 2009: The Unique Travel Guide, Planner, Organizer, Journal, and Keepsake! (2010 version should be coming out in a few months).
