Disneyland Paris – Part 1 – Planning
I am getting ready for my first Disney adventure outside of the US. In fact, in only 14 days, we will arrive at Disneyland Paris! We are leaving in 5 days to head to France and will be spending a few days in both Nice and Paris before Disneyland Paris (more about those destinations in a future blog).
I thought I would spend the next 2 weeks giving you some noticeable differences that I have found already between Disneyland and Disneyland Paris. In case you didn’t know, Disneyland Paris has 2 parks which are Disneyland and Disney Adventure World (used to be Walt Disney Studios Park and was just changed on March 29th)! They also have a Disney Village which is like Downtown Disney.
Disneyland Paris also has many more hotels to choose from. In Disneyland, there are only the Disneyland Hotel, Pixar Pier Hotel and Disney’s Grand Californian. There are many other hotels around Disneyland Park, but these 3 are the only ones on property. In Disneyland Paris, there are 7 hotels! They are the Disneyland Hotel, Disney’s Hotel New York – The Art of Marvel, Disney’s Newport Bay Club, Disney Sequoia Lodge, Disney Hotel Cheyenne, Disney Hotel Santa Fe and Disney Davy Crockett Ranch.
Of course, for our first trip to Disneyland Paris, we are choosing to stay in the Disneyland Paris Hotel and one of the first things is that breakfast is included in our stay…we would NEVER have that in any of the US Disney properties.
We also realized that as soon as we booked our hotel for Disneyland Paris, we were able to book our dining reservations even though we were over 2 months out. In the US parks, you can only book dining 60 days in advance. That does hold true for Disneyland Paris as well if you book on the app, but you can call and book dining as soon as your hotel is booked. The downside of that is that our dining reservations do not show on the app for Disneyland Paris and there is no way to get them to show up.
We have already booked Walt’s for dinner, our first night which is right on Main Street in Disneyland Park and is a tribute to the life and work of Walt Disney. We also booked lunch for the 2nd day at Captain Jack’s – Restaurant des Pirates also in Disneyland along with the Steakhouse in the Disney Village for dinner.
So more to come on those and next week I will talk more about some of the initial differences for the parks and especially the ticket options!
