We were at Disneyland in California this November and here are are my tips for making the most of Disneyland with a teen, tween and toddler. Yes, those are interesting ages for sure, but we had a magical time by an equal measure of good luck and research!
Make a plan
When I visited Disneyland 20 years ago with my parents, we literally just showed up at the park and looked up which rides to go to on the paper map. Gone are those days! You need to research beforehand about which rides everyone wants to take and make a list by priorities. We looked at videos on YouTube and the children made a list of rides that they wanted to experience to avoid wasting time and energy. We also made a list of foods we wanted to try while at the parks. Checkout my blog post here about how I ate halal at Disneyland.
Get Familiar with the Disney App
Download the Disney app and get familiar with it because you will be spending a lot of time on it while at Disneyland: buying tickets, showing tickets for admission, checking wait times, buying lightening passes, buying food etc. You will save precious time by knowing your way around the app beforehand.
Lightening Lane Passes
Highly recommend getting lightening lane passes and starting early in the day! This combination will help you maximize your time at the park and get on all your favourite rides. Book popular rides early in the day because by afternoon most of them even get full for lightening lane passes. For us, a huge benefit of the lightening lane passes was PhotoPass, which allows you to get professional photos taken by a professional around various points in the park. That means you don’t have to count on the kindness of strangers (not to mention their photography skills) to get memorable photos that will be treasures for life!
Rope Drop and Plan for a Mid-Day break
Rope dropping is the Disney term to be at the park even before it opens so that you can enter as soon as the “rope drops”. We were lucky to be staying at Disneyland Hotel and staying at a Disney hotel allows guests to enter the parks 30 mins early on specific days. Refer to the Disneyland website for exact days and timings. Due to thinner crowds we were able to do so many rides without any wait times. It also allowed us to get earlier lightening lane timings for our favourite rides! However, starting early means that you will need a break in the middle of the day. We would head back to the hotel for a nap for the toddler and downtime for the rest of us. That rest in the middle of the day, helped us power through till park close timings and enjoy the end of the day shows/fireworks.
Height requirements and rider switch
As part of our planning, we knew the rides Zayn could not get on due to height restrictions therefore we planned for Riderswitch which is an awesome concession for parents so that one parent can stay back with the younger kid and go back and enjoy the ride without having to wait in the queue. Usually you’re allowed to take the ride with one kid, but ask nicely and Zeynab and Hussein were able to enjoy most rides back-to-back as we did Riderswitch!
I’m sure more tips will come to me later but here were our top tips to make the most of Disneyland with a teen, tween and toddler! Have you been to Disneyland? Would love to hear your experience also!
Disclaimer: We were hosted by Disneyland, but all opinions are my own.