Are you feeling overwhelmed trying to plan a Disney trip for a big group? Well, you’ve landed in the right place, friend!
We recently returned from a trip to Disney World that started out as just the three of us, but ended up including SEVEN additional family members! It was an absolute blast, and I highly recommend sharing the Disney magic with your extended family if you have the opportunity! Coordinating a trip for that many people was a little tricky, but don’t worry! I’ll share all my best tips below for how to plan Disney for a big group!
After canceling two trips in 2020, we booked a 2021 Spring Break trip at the end of last summer. My youngest sister was always booked to come with us. My other sister and her husband had been wanting to go to Disney World too, and when we found out our Spring Breaks overlapped (they’re both teachers, so it’s tricky to plan with them!) we decided to jump on it. We adjusted our trip dates a little, and they booked their stay overlapping with ours!
Then my brother-in-law’s sister decided to come too, so she and my youngest sister booked a room together. And then my dad decided to surprise my mom with a trip for her birthday! Altogether that’s 8 adults and 2 children (one 9-year-old and one 1-year-old). Whew!
It was tricky to coordinate, but I think it went really well overall! Everyone had a great time AND wants to go back! Win! Below I’ll show you what I did to make our BIG family trip to Disney World a success!
Link your reservations
Even though we all stayed at the same hotel, each family “unit” in our group booked their reservation separately. In order to make plans together (like dining reservations), you have to link everyone up. Once you know how to do this it’s a breeze!
You’ll find the Family and Friends List under My Disney Experience on Disney’s website.
When you click on it, it will take you to a list of people linked to you. Click on “Add a Guest.” There are a few different ways to add someone to your list:
The easiest way to do this is the middle option—Import from a Walt Disney World hotel reservation. You’ll need the reservation confirmation number and the last name of the person whose reservation you’re trying to link with.
Once you enter those and click “Locate Reservation,” it’ll find the reservation you’re looking for, and you’ll be able to send an invitation to link to the person. The other person will then need to log into their My Disney Experience account and accept your invitation. Then you’ll be linked!
Anyone you link to you will show up now in your Family and Friends list, and you can edit the list at any time. This will let you make plans together, such as advanced dining reservations, and get a boarding group together for Rise of the Resistance if that’s on your list of must-dos!
Make Advanced Dining Reservations
Right now, Disney World will let you make advanced dining reservations (ADRs) 60 days in advance. These are going to be for table service restaurants, which are of course going to be a bit more expensive than your standard grab-and-go or mobile order quick service. But we felt it was well worth it to have a dedicated time every day when we knew we would all be together to share a meal (and in air conditioning and able to take off the masks!).
It can be tricky to find places that will accept large groups for dining reservations, especially during the pandemic. Restrictions are lessening, so it might not be as hard now, but there were a couple of places we wanted to eat that did not have any reservations available for 10. For Tony’s Town Square and Via Napoli, we split our group into two parts and made reservations that were as close in time as we could get. (For instance, my brother-in-law would make a reservation through his account for 5 at 12:55, and I would make a reservation for the other 5 people at 1:00.)
If you do it this way, it can never hurt to ask if your groups can be seated near each other when you check in for your reservation! At Tony’s Town Square, they couldn’t put us near each other, which was a bummer. But when we checked in at Via Napoli, they were more than happy to give us their biggest table so we could all sit together!
We also ate at Chef Art Smith’s Homecomin’ and Oga’s Cantina, and both of these had reservations for 10 available. So it just depends on the restaurant!
Call Disney and let them know you’re traveling together
I had to wait on hold for a WHILE to get this done, but it ended up being so worth it! I can’t remember exactly which number I dialed, but here is a good starting point. Just tell the first cast member you talk to what you want to do, and they’re really good at directing you to the correct person.
Before you call you will need the confirmation numbers, names, and phone numbers for each reservation in your travel group. The cast member I spoke to let me know that she could put a “travel with” note on our reservation, which would let Pop Century know that we wanted rooms near each other if possible. This is never guaranteed, and I thought our chances were especially slim considering we were all arriving on different days, but Pop Century CAME THROUGH for us. We ended up with four rooms in a row (two even with a connecting interior door!), right in the middle of Pop Century Resort. It was a great location, and it was awesome to be able to just pop out of our rooms in the morning and meet up.
Check your expectations at the door
This is true for every Disney trip, but ESPECIALLY when you have a big group. We had so many different “stages of life” represented in our group—my parents, who are in their 60s; our family, with a 9-year-old and that has been to Disney before; my sister and her family, who hadn’t been to Disney since they were kids and have a toddler; and two twenty-somethings, who are pretty used to doing their own thing. 😂 We made it work, but it took some creative communication!
Before we went, I asked everyone what their MUST DOs were, and I got a handful of responses. Not everyone knew what they wanted to do because not everyone was familiar with Disney World. I tried to take everyone’s wants into account while I made our plans, and still some things completely backfired. But that’s okay! We were all flexible and let certain things go. Because of this, we still had a great trip. I would definitely go again, anyway! 😁
I hope you feel better equipped now about how to plan Disney for a big group! If you have any questions, drop them in the comments below! I’d love to see if I can help!
And if you’re wondering more about how to plan Disney World, check out all my tips and tricks here!
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[…] love Italian food, especially pizza. I was so excited when Via Napoli made the cut for our ADRs for our big family trip in March 2021. There were ten of us total—eight adults and two kids. We ordered from the […]
[…] with the apostrophe instead of the g). I was thrilled when we were able to get a reservation for our entire party of 10—that’s more difficult to find at WDW than you’d think! When we arrived, we were […]