Yesterday marked the return to the Walt Disney World theme parks for us during an Annual Passholder preview. While we’ll have a lot more content to bring you as we dive down into each experience, we wanted to give a high-level first impressions post.

The Walt Disney World theme parks are getting ready to open during a pandemic, and at a time that is particularly hard for the state of Florida. Florida has become the hotbed of the nation when it comes to COVID-19, but Disney is going to continue with opening anyway. As a matter of fact, the state of Florida announced the highest single-day death count due to COVID-19 on the same day that Disney welcomed Annual Passholders back to the parks. This is a fact that can’t go unmentioned and unconsidered when making a decision on whether or not it’s a good time for your vacation. The goal of this post is to bring you along with us as we visit the theme parks for the first time since they closed back in mid-March and give you an idea of what you can expect to experience when you decide to return.

Arrival Experience

We’ll start at at the beginning with the arrival experience. As we’ll see throughout this post, Disney has paid attention to detail when it comes to implementing safety procedures.

Instead of opening up the theme park parking lots hours ahead of open, Disney has opened the parking plaza about an hour before official park opening. This is something that we’ve thought about, with flashbacks to earlier this year when we would often find ourselves in a group of guests waiting for bag check to open at Disney’s Hollywood Studios to get a Rise of the Resistance boarding group. Scenes like the one below of masses of guests waiting for hours for the theme parks to open should be a thing of the past with new arrival experience procedures.

By not opening up the parking plaza until an hour before the park opens, Disney is ensuring that while guests still might arrive more than an hour before park opening, they’ll be waiting in their cars instead of massive, shoulder-to-shoulder crowds.

Once the parking plaza opens, Disney pulses groups of cars to the parking lot, ensuring that the amount of people exiting their cars and walking to the temperature screenings isn’t excessive. Disney is also changing their parking procedures to park every other spot to ensure guests aren’t immediately within 6 feet of each other at the start of their day.

Disney parks cars every other spot for enough rows to ensure that when they backfill the empty spots, there are no guests still left in their cars from the original wave of parking.

Guests will then need to walk to either the main entrance of the park, or for Magic Kingdom the Transportation and Ticket Center, for a temperature screening. Parking lot trams are not operating at this time.

Every guest in the party must have a temperature below 100.4 degrees to enter the theme parks. If a guest has a temperature above that, they will be asked to undergo a secondary screening after they have had time to rest and drink some water to ensure that the high temperature isn’t just due to overheating from the hot Florida summer.

For guests traveling to Magic Kingdom, Disney has put social distancing procedures in place for Monorail and Ferry Boat. For more on each form of transportation, check out our earlier posts:

• Monorail Safety Procedures and Social Distancing
• Ferry Boat Safety Procedures and Social Distancing

Once you arrive at the main gate to the park, social distancing markers are in place to ensure a safe entry to the park. It’s worth noting that Disney will not be using the fingerprint scanners at park entry, a procedure that we told you how to bypass before the parks closed.

Entertainment

Outside of the safety procedures, one of the biggest changes that guests will notice is the lack of character meet and greets. Disney has discontinued in-person character meet and greets for the foreseeable future, but they have introduced multiple character cavalcades that run throughout the day to give guests a socially distanced glimpse of characters.

The whole point of getting rid of parades and nighttime spectaculars is to prevent crowding. If guests know that the parade begins at 3pm, they’re going to line the streets an hour or more ahead of time. In order to get a great view of Cinderella Castle projections during Happily Ever After, sometimes you’d have to devote two hours of waiting. That simply won’t work in a socially distanced world.

To adjust for that, Disney is running unannounced character cavalcades and socially distanced character encounters throughout the day. There is no schedule to publish, but in our experience there were cavalcades available to watch along the normal parade route roughly every 30-45 minutes, if not more frequent throughout the day. We noticed that the cavalcades were more frequent in the morning hours, so if you want to encounter a lot of characters on your next visit to Magic Kingdom, hang out along Main Street USA and the Hub in front of Cinderella Castle for viewing.

If you want to see characters outside of the cavalcade, we found the Main Street USA Train Station to be busy throughout the day with rotating characters ready to pose for a socially distanced photo.

While you won’t be able to meet with the characters when you visit Walt Disney World next, we think that the cavalcades and socially distanced interactions are a good compromise. If you’re a big character meet and greet person, you’ll likely be disappointed that you can’t meet with them like you traditionally would, but we found the vast majority of guests enjoying the interactions that were offered.

Attractions

With characters as one major element to a Disney theme park visit, attractions are another major pull. The vast majority of attractions are operating, but with strict social distancing protocols in place. Here’s a look at what the attraction experience will be like when the park opens to guests tomorrow.

Perhaps the most controversial addition hasn’t been the stickers that prompt guests where to stand, but the plexiglass hallways found throughout some of the attraction queues. Here’s a look at Big Thunder Mountain Railroad.

More plexiglass hallways can be found at Seven Dwarfs Mine Train.

Other attractions don’t utilize any plexiglass at all like Peter Pan’s Flight.

For the actual ride, some attractions are allowing you to have your own ride vehicle where social distancing isn’t possible, and other attractions will skip rows to ensure that a traveling party can stick together, but there will be social distancing between parties.

Of course, the attraction experience is the same as you love and remember, with the social distancing probably making it a much more pleasant experience.

Here’s a look at the Haunted Mansion, where guests walk right through the foyer and stretching room, with no pre-show experience. We found this to be the most interesting operational change at Magic Kingdom, so here are a few photos of what it’s like.

We’ll briefly discuss wait times with the huge caveat that it is all subject to change as Disney ramps up theme park capacity. Overall, with limited capacity, we found the wait times to be unbelievably low. While some posted wait times reached 60 minutes, we found that we rarely waited more than 20-30 minutes at most. Seven Dwarfs Mine Train was an actual wait of 10 minutes, Peter Pan’s Flight was a walk-on, and wait times across the board were extremely low. This might be the experience for guests visiting in the opening weeks, but we wouldn’t count on waits being this short come fall.

We plan on writing a series of articles to help you plan your visit and monitoring wait times will be a big part of that, stay tuned.

Dining

Dining at Disney World is one of the few places that you can take off your mask during your whole vacation. We’ll talk more about masks in a bit, but let’s talk about the dining experience first.

Both Table Service and Quick Service options are available, with Quick Service limited to mobile ordering. Within restaurants, tables are socially distanced or marked off as unavailable for use. Capacity is limited within the restaurants.

We’ll talk more about dining in a future article, but the main takeaway is that you must use the Mobile Order service within the My Disney Experience app to pick up most Quick Service options.

One thing that we found incredibly difficult yesterday was getting an ice water. Some locations wouldn’t even serve ice water without a food mobile order like when we stopped by Cosmic Rays Starlight Cafe. We were directed to nearby water fountains, which felt like an unsanitary option during a pandemic (even with enhanced cleaning).

Wearing a Mask

As you likely know by now, every guest 2 years old and older are required to wear a mask at Walt Disney World. There’s no way around this – masks are uncomfortable. We’re having a particularly rough stretch of warm weather in Central Florida, with the “feels like” temperature hitting 100 degrees at the warmest. This would be unpleasant in the best of circumstances, but wearing a mask is uncomfortable.

That said, wear a mask! Wearing a mask is not only one of the posted park rules, but a contract with society that indicates that you have respect for others. We won’t delve too deep into the mask debate, but there really is no debate at Walt Disney World.

We want to take a moment to applaud the Cast Members for their enforcement of the mask policy. Disney Springs has always presented a difficult environment for enforcement, which left us with little confidence that the theme parks would be better, but we were very impressed with the enforcement of the mask policy by Cast Members. We will also say that we were impressed with the other Annual Passholders for not only wearing a mask 99% of the time, but wearing it correctly. We hope the trend continues in the coming weeks as more guests visit the theme parks.

We saw instances where Cast Members turned guests away from the main entrance due to wearing a neck gaiter, and instances where Cast Members reminded guests to cover their nose with their mask. We even saw an instance where the vice president of a theme park got into a loud “educational” conversation about the theme park mask policy with a guest wearing a bandana.

While guests must wear a mask while on the attractions, there are Relaxation Stations where you can take off your mask while staying socially distant.

Park Cleanliness

In addition to social distancing within the queues, Disney is constantly cleaning high touch, and high traffic areas. Disney is also cleaning the ride vehicles every two hours.

We felt that the park, in general, was very clean. Hand sanitizers were present at the load area or entrance to attractions, and available for guests to use at the exit to attractions. While we actually preferred the method used by Universal Orlando where their Team Members would actually disperse hand sanitizer to every guest before they load the attraction, having the option is better than nothing. We didn’t notice a lot of use of the hand sanitizer and hope that Disney considers having Cast Members disperse hand sanitizer to each and every guest.

Our Thoughts

Honestly, we feel conflicted about a return to Walt Disney World. There is no doubt that the missing elements that typically define a Disney theme park visit like parades and fireworks removes a lot of the magic from a visit. That said, we think that Disney is going about as far as they can given the fact that we are in the midst of a pandemic and a very concerning surge in COVID-19 cases in Florida specifically.

Our initial advice is that if you’re planning a first visit or only visit once per year or every other year, now isn’t be best time to return. That said, if you’ve “been there and done that” at Disney World, and you’re comfortable with the risk of returning to a public space, this could be a nice time to visit. With crowds (initially) lower than we’ve seen in years, and fun character cavalcades filling in for more traditional entertainment, there is still plenty of fun to be had at Disney World.

Our advice and opinions will continue to evolve as we see more operational changes and understand more about how crowds will react when the theme parks open to the general public.

As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com for the latest Disney Parks news and photos. We’ll continue to bring you news and photos, where possible, through the Disney Parks closure due to Coronavirus (COVID-19) and will resume our normal coverage once the parks reopen to guests on July 11th!