Tips for Park Hopping at Disney World
Walt Disney World guests who buy Park Hopper tickets and Annual Passholders can visit Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom all in the same day. This guide to Park Hopping shares important details, info & tips, and strategy. (Updated June 8, 2023.)
Let’s start with the latest update, or rather, non-update. Walt Disney World announced 5 major changes to improve the guest experience in 2024. This included bringing back the Disney Dining Plan, the pre-booking of Lightning Lane ride reservations, an end to park reservations for most guests, and more.
Not mentioned among the changes was an end to the current Park Hopping limitations or even moving forward the start time from 2 pm to something earlier. Disneyland has relaxed its Park Hopping start time on a couple of occasions, and we’ve been expecting and hoping Walt Disney World would follow suit. It doesn’t sound like that’s going to happen–at least, not yet.
It’s unlikely that the Park Hopping rules will be totally eliminated until Disney Park Pass reservations are gone for most guests, which will occur as of January 2024. Once that happens, it’s reasonable to expect that Walt Disney World will also roll back Park Hopper rules.
In our view, it feels like Park Hopping policies are going to change sooner or later. Just because nothing was announced now doesn’t mean it’s not coming. There’s still plenty of time for Walt Disney World to make more 2024 announcements.
With that in mind, we’ll start with basic info on modified Park Hopping at Walt Disney World for 2023. As implied above, Disney Park Pass reservations are still required for now at the first theme park you’re visiting each day.
Not only do you need to have a Disney Park Pass reservation, but you actually need to scan in at the turnstiles and enter your first park to “validate” and enable Park Hopping. Savvy as the decision might seem, you can’t book DHS but skip it and head to Magic Kingdom to loop Country Bear Jamboree all day. That requirement should be pretty simple for most guests to fulfill due to the next caveat.
You also do not need a reservation for subsequent parks that you visit. More accurately, you can’t book Disney Park Pass reservations for multiple parks per day. There also are no limits on how many parks you can visit when Park Hopping. It’s possible to do all 4, and it’s also possible to return to the original park you booked.
The only limitation with Park Hopping at Walt Disney World is predicated upon capacity caps. This means that, in theory, you could get turned away upon arrival after 2 pm if your destination is already hit its attendance limit. However, in reality this has only ever been an issue once–on Magic Kingdom for a few hours on October 1, on the 50th Anniversary.
Otherwise, Park Hopping has not once been restricted, including on incredibly busy days, like New Year’s Eve, Christmas, or Thanksgiving. It’s important to stress this reality because getting turned away is a common concern among readers, but it just has not been happening aside from the actual 50th Anniversary day, and even then, Park Hopping resumed after only a few hours of being paused.
If you’re still concerned about the capacity status of a park to which you’re considering hopping, the easiest way to find out is by calling Walt Disney World’s Park Hopping phone line at (407) 560-5000. We’d caution against simply asking random Cast Members inside the park you’re visiting–that’s not knowledge they’d have. (The bus stop Cast Members should know, though.)
The most interesting wrinkle to modified Park Hopping is that park-to-park bus transportation begins running each day shortly before to the start of Park Hopper hours.
In terms of transportation, options are car (yours or rental), ride share (Uber or Lyft), Skyliner gondolas, FriendShip boats, or Disney buses. MagicBands and/or tickets are no longer being scanned at the buses to verify whether guests are eligible to Park Hop, but you should know whether you bought Park Hopper tickets. (They cost more!)
When it comes to strategy, there are a multitude of different approaches. One is to “emphasize” Disney’s Hollywood Studios when making your Park Pass reservations. This isn’t really new advice, but the reason has changed.
This is because DHS has more high-profile headliners than any other park at Walt Disney World. Knocking those out early in the day can be incredibly advantageous, but only if you’re eligible for Early Entry. If not, you need a different strategy.
One such strategy would be booking EPCOT in the morning and Park Hopping to Disney’s Hollywood Studios in the afternoon or evening. There are a few reasons why this approach is advantageous.
First, a lot of guests who arrive for park opening get “burnt out” at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, since most of its popular attractions draw hour-plus wait times by noon. This leads to a mass exodus of guests around 2 pm and falling wait times for the remainder of the day. Because of this, the last few hours of the day tend to be especially uncrowded.
Second, if you spend the final few hours of the day at Disney’s Hollywood Studios doing headliner attractions, it’s difficult to also see Fantasmic. (This actually depends upon when you’re visiting–on busier days, Fantasmic has a second showtime that’s 30 minutes after park closing, which is a perfect way to extend your day at DHS and have the best of both worlds!)
The reimagined Fantasmic is fantastic and absolutely not to be missed. Accordingly, spending multiple evenings–or a combination or mornings and evenings–at DHS makes a lot of sense. (As is probably obvious from the forgoing, we are not fans of spending the hours of 10 am until 3 pm or so at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.)
Finally, due to the top-heavy nature of the attraction lineup mentioned in the first point, Genie+ return times are often in the afternoon and evening in Disney’s Hollywood Studios even if you start the day there.
As such, it can be a better course of action to start elsewhere, and book Lightning Lane reservations for DHS while at that other park. (For more info and answers to common questions, see our Guide to Genie+ at Walt Disney World & Lightning Lane FAQ.)
It’s easiest to Park Hop between EPCOT and Disney’s Hollywood Studios due to the Skyliner, boat service, and walkway between the two parks. Intuitively, this makes these two parks the perfect pair. While we love World Showcase at night, you aren’t missing much if you skip the EPCOT Forever fireworks.
We think starting your day at Animal Kingdom and bouncing to Disney’s Hollywood Studios for the afternoon and evening also makes a lot of sense. This is our preferred way to experience both parks, which also works well given normal operating hours. If you’re really ambitious, you can also do EPCOT during the middle of the day, or at the very end of the evening.
One great way to extend your day at Walt Disney World is starting out at Animal Kingdom (normally open starting at 8 am, which is earlier than any other park) and finishing at Magic Kingdom or EPCOT, which typically close at 9, 10, or 11 pm.
This works well because it’s easy to accomplish everything at Animal Kingdom in roughly one half-day, whereas many guests like multiple days in Magic Kingdom. (Although it’s not always possible due to operating hours and sunset times, we also love evenings in Animal Kingdom. The last two hours that park is open, lines are virtually nonexistent.)
Two nights in Magic Kingdom can be especially advantageous for seeing the Happily Ever After fireworks twice during your trip. While not as unique as the reimagined Fantasmic, this is arguably the best fireworks show that Walt Disney World has ever produced.
We absolutely love it, and recommend watching once from Main Street and once while fully “immersed” in Fantasyland. (See our Magic Kingdom Fireworks Viewing Guide for recommendations.)
Ultimately, we’re happy to have Park Hopping back, even if it’s not the totally normal version, which may never return. Even though we could easily spend a full day in every single park at Walt Disney World, there are a number of strategic reasons to do two parks in one day. For all of these reasons, we highly recommend buying tickets with the Park Hopper option–see our Guide to Discount Walt Disney World Tickets for money-saving tips and other need to know info.
This is especially true with Disney’s Hollywood Studios, which can be frustrating to do in a single day. Splitting it up into multiple mornings or evenings makes for a considerably easier and more enjoyable experience–and you can save a ton of time in lines that way. To a lesser extent, Animal Kingdom and EPCOT also can be conducive to half-day visits, albeit minus the same time-savings. Anyway, hopefully these updated Park Hopping tips provide you with more strategy to add to your “toolkit” for visiting Walt Disney World!
Planning a Walt Disney World trip? Learn about hotels on our Walt Disney World Hotels Reviews page. For where to eat, read our Walt Disney World Restaurant Reviews. To save money on tickets or determine which type to buy, read our Tips for Saving Money on Walt Disney World Tickets post. Our What to Pack for Disney Trips post takes a unique look at clever items to take. For what to do and when to do it, our Walt Disney World Ride Guides will help. For comprehensive advice, the best place to start is our Walt Disney World Trip Planning Guide for everything you need to know!
YOUR THOUGHTS
Are you excited to Park Hop once again at Walt Disney World? If you’ve been postponing a trip, does this move the needle for you, or do you still need more ‘temporarily suspended’ offerings back? Think this will have a ripple effect on anything else at Walt Disney World? What do you expect to come back next? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
What is your parkimg tips staying off site and park hopping? Should we uber or lyft instead?
We are planning to go to MK and Epcot on 12/30/22 and New Years Eve, respectively. We plan to get park hopper tickets to see the fireworks these nights after visiting other parks during those days. Do you see any capacity issues such that we may be turned away at MK or Epcot while park hopping?
I have park hopping tickets but one one day I want to go to Magic Kingdom from say 4pm, do I need to book MK that day or can I just turn up at 4 and go in?
Planned a trip for mid October! I purchased both full day tickets as well as a park hopper for our last day at WDW. I was thinking of doing full days at AK and DHS since they are the bigger parks and in my opinion have more popular rides. Then using the park hopper for MK and Epcot. Do you think this is a good idea or what two parks do you rec using the hopper for?
Everyone is different so it depends on what you want to do.
I absolutely love AK but I can’t think of a time I spent the whole day there. In some ways if you spend all day at any of the parks you won’t have enough time to do EVERYTHING. So AK there are fewer rides but you have both the Lion King and Nemo shows. Magic Kingdom has the most rides. If you plan to ride ALL the rides at MK then it will basically take all day, then everyone thinks of Epcot as only the countries but there are rides there some of which are very popular like Test Track and Soarin and not Guardians. Epcot also has movies/shows in the countries.
How is park hopping working with high capacity crowds over the last few months? We have a trip planned the week after Easter and I am nervous we won’t be able to park hop due to capacity issues. Thanks for the advice and the awesome blog.
Also wondering this.
We have booked reservations for December 1 through 9, 2022 and have reservation to stay on property. We have our park reservations and park hopper tickets; but our biggest concern is booking ADRs. We most likely will want to visit and book dinner in a park other than the one in which we have a park reservation for the day. What is the likelihood of park hopping being canceled; which would cause us to lose our reservation and credit card deposit? This of course was never a problem pre-pandemic.
Hey Tom and Sarah-
I’m just finishing up a 5 day stay with park hopper and Genie. (We were 1st timers from Oregon). We also were blessed to have early entry. However we would NOT have been well prepared without your many wonderful blog posts. THANK YOU for the many tips. We were able to do everything (by speed walking and park hopping) in the first 2&1/2 days of our trip. Then we repeated our favorite things at each park and had time to leisurely try new things we wandered upon, like Monsters Laugh Floor in which I was featured! Haha!
Here’s my BIGGEST STRATEGY TIP, in agreement with your encouragement to PARK HOP(!) especially for novices. We scheduled our park days and stayed as long as we wanted each day in park#1 but then hopped to the park we had scheduled for the NEXT DAY to get a really good ‘lay of the land’. (We could ‘see’ and therefore plan, how to make a mad dash to Remys or Mine Train or Pandora for example.)
Additionally, most evenings we were able to do several (sometimes ALL) of the most popular rides either with genie LL or standby. That helped us plan strategy for the next morning for what we wanted to repeat -which was encouraging and answered the ‘ is this 45 minute wait worth it?’ for those ride.
We didn’t do early entry EVERY morning and we didn’t stay in the park all day every day. We were able to have downtime and let our feet rest. However, we still feel like we got the hugest bang for our buck and it was because of YOUR HELPFUL advice. I’m so glad I found your site and followed your guidance. I do admit I probably spent about 15-20 hours reading and trying to digest your tips beforehand so we could have an excellent adventure…they were in my phone notes and I referred to them throughout the trip, too. We had an OUTSTANDING vacation-even with some thunderstorm rain out times.
I am now a fan!
As a note, it was just my college age daughter and I. So, we didn’t have a big group and it was easy to wiggle through crowds to maximize our time together at each entertainment or ride. We used our resort key for entry and Disney gift cards for purchases-super quick and EASY. We purchased memory maker and felt it was worth it for us. We liked stopping to get photos and they turned out great. My daughter will be making a scrapbook with the MANY pictures. BTW -I think the new parade in magic kingdom is phenomenal! THE FIRE BREATHING DRAGON blew our minds as did Harmonious and the Pandora banshee ride.
Lastly, we ordered everything we needed at the Walmart closest to our resort, as you suggested. We saved SOO much money and our drinks, snacks (& sunscreen!) were at our resort upon arrival. (So we only had to travel with carry-ons and backpacks!!) We took park snacks every day and ordered one ‘mobile order’ meal in each park in between lunch and dinner time as you suggested. Plus a yummy snack whenever we needed a break. I love your many cost saving tips. They really helped us. THANK YOUUUUU!
Would love to see your plan that you did with parks/hopping!
How far ahead of time do park reservations need to be made to ensure you get the parks on the days you want?
I am not a fan of Park Reservations at all despite how happy it makes WDW admin. In fact I cancelled my December 2021 December trip because of that and other restrictions and unavailabilties (eg dining reservations) one of the things I’ve enjoyed often at WDW is making a last minute decision to visit a park on the spur of the moment. Being limited to 2 pre-determined parks didn’t allow me to do
that so I just felt it was best to reschedule.
I’ve not even been checking on news at WDW but when I was interested again the status of Park Reservations was at the top of my list. And Tom your blog was the first place I came to. No one has more reliable info earliest and in greater detail than you do. Thanks very much.
This news of open Park Hopping is encouraging. I’ll keep checking back with you and maybe think about booking.
The 2:00pm park hop restriction is a management gimic to keep park guests in their park pass park. It can take two hours or more to park hop and Disney Genie will schedule venues after the 2:00pm park hop restriction to force guests to stay in the park pass park. Both the park hop 2:00pm restriction and the park pass need to be done away with.
We plan to do what you suggest – start at Animal Kingdom and park hop to DHS. Any chance you’ll have an itinerary with suggestions for that (esp. for not early entry folks)????? 🙂
Without early entry, you should definitely consider buying a lightning lane for flight of avatar if you plan to ride or expect a 1.5-3 hour wait. Also Genie plus will help you knock out some of your other rides there, (Na’vi and Safaris). Many rides will be walk on and you can use the remaining Genie plus selections for HS. You may consider using your first few genie selections at HS. Slinky dog dash would be one of my first picks, because they is one of the first selections to disappear across all parks. Then rides like Mickey and Minnie’s, tower of terror, rock n’ roller coaster, toy story mania (although you may be able to walk on a few of these at the end of the night). Hope these suggestions help. Also another suggestion that is sometimes helpful is the transportation to get from AK to HS. In the event the bus is taking awhile or there are insane lines, we have taken a bus to a resort that has skyliner access to HS (for instance if the bus was already present when we walked to the bus area) It may be the same time but sometimes it is a nice change of pace and I really enjoy the skyliners on a nice day. Enjoy your trip!
We went to Epcot one day and had a time constraint on the day we went to magic kingdom the other day. Lines were long all day at each park. We might have had 1.5 hours down time at Epcot waiting for the fireworks show. Park Hopper wouldn’t have worked for us. We would have missed a ride or two we wanted to go on. As it was for magic kingdom we did miss a couple rides because lines were 45-50 all day practically. We went president’s day week. Must have been a popular time.
Sadly, with all the new restrictions I will not be visiting the parks. I love Disney, but the restrictions have stripped the magic away. A friend just visited and stayed on the grounds and said the buses were so bad that she took an Uber to and from the parks. I don’t like the park reservations and park hopping restrictions. Plus, the prices are becoming ridiculous. I am a total Disney fanatic and feel like they have taken the magic out of the park and I won’t be going. So, sad over my decision.
That’s just how I felt and caused me to cancel my December 2021 trip. It was exhausting, complicated, regimented and disappointing trying to plan it. As you said it perfectly the Magic was gone for me. I’m hoping the new WDW leadership begins to understand what these restrictions mean to many loyal WDW lovers. I keep hearing that they love their Park Reservation system because it lets them schedule staffing better. Any thought on how their long-time guests fell? I’ve never heard that referred to at all. Hope they do and do all they can to bring some of our Magic back.