Vacation Planning for Florida/Disney (Tools included!)

Are you planning a vacation in the next year? Do you love planning? Read on! We have been planning a trip to Florida at Christmas since last spring. I am not a very spontaneous person and I absolutely love travel planning. When we decided to go to Disney World before Christmas I knew it would be a fun, but quick trip. We wouldn’t have time to do everything we normally do at Disney so I knew I needed to plan carefully. I decided to make up an excel spreadsheet; one of my favourite things to do. It’s all part of my accounting/perfectionist personality. I have attached two planning tools to this post that you might find useful if you are planning a trip to Disney World or anywhere else and want to plan in detail.

The first is a planner for mapping our your days at Disney. It will really help to fit in which parks are the best to visit on which days, when you want to schedule in special dining experiences and what transportation to use. I have not included a lot of specific information because that can change and will be based on your travel dates.

As you can see there are spots to track your meals, hotel name and location, plan your days, and list special events going on in the park. I found it extremely helpful to put the park crowd levels at the bottom before we planned where we would spend each day. I planned our meals after we decided which park we would be in and then planned our extra events after that. Even though we have moved things around a few times keeping it all organized in one place really helped me keep my sanity!

Here is the Walt Disney World Vacation Spreadsheet.

The next spreadsheet I prepared was to plan for the rest of our days either driving, staying in Kissimmee, FL or at my grandmother’s house. It’s a pretty open spreadsheet with the same basic options as the Walt Disney Spreadsheet. The only real difference is you take away the park information and add more hotel information in case you want relatives to be able to get ahold of you and you book your hotels in advance.

I added on an extra page sheet to this document to include a packing list of sorts. I’m not sure it’s any help to anyone since it’s based on our number of travel days and isn’t complete but I hope it’s helpful as a starting tool for you to make up your own. If you’re wondering what the “location prizes” are keep an eye out for another post on planning a road trip with children.

Here is the Vacation Planning Spreadsheet.

When I made our spreadsheet for our vacation I put these spreadsheets on about 4 days and labeled them driving days, days at Disney, other vacation days, packing lists and budget. You can make up your own budget easily by listing everything you need for your vacation in one column, the number of days you need it for, the totals and then add as many columns to the right to plan how your going to pay/save for it. This helped us make our payments to Disney on time and plan our savings for the trip.

I’ll post again soon on all the ways we saved for this trip and how we made it more affordable!

The links should start downloading the excel files as soon as you click on them. If not please contact me and I’d be happy to send you a copy of my spreadsheets.

Happy travels!