Making A Reservation Online VS Phone

After reading a few websites, and checking out a few travel reviews, Allison and I were prepared to get started on actually making reservations for our stay at Disneyland Paris.  One of the best sites that seemed to give a candid review of the hotels in the Disney Paris resort area is the Disney Tourist blog. Our first bit of research we focused on how important it was for us to stay on property VS staying off property.  Staying on property at Disney Paris has many of the same benefits that you get as staying on property at Disney World.  Proximity to the parks is the best advantage, since one of the hotels is actually part of the entrance to one of the parks.  There's also the extra magic hours, these allow you to come to the park early or stay late if you're staying on property.  The only real disadvantage is price, but since we're only staying at Disney for a few days, we figured it was worth the money.

We made a list of the hotels we wanted to stay at listing our preferred down to our least preferred.  Our first choice was the Sequoya Lodge, followed by the New York Hotel. We then went to the Disneyland Paris website ready to make our reservations.  The first thing we noticed about the site was that it doesn't really allow for any flexibility as far as staying at the hotel and getting tickets to go to the parks.  After a quick phone call we learned that if you're staying at one of the hotels the ticket is attached to the price of the room, and you can't separate it.  This is fine, most of the time, but if you're arriving late or have to leave early it might mean paying for a day at the park that you cannot use. So we adjusted our schedule, and proceeded. We managed to pick our first choice of hotel, the Sequoya Lodge, for the days we wanted, but every time Allison tried to pay, she got an error message.  The error messages were both nerve wracking and annoying, so Allison decided to call the reservation number to try and figure out what went wrong, this was the best decision of the night.

Allison called the reservation line and a lovely lady picked up the phone.  Allison explained the situation and instantly the lovely lady on the other end discovered that due to this error and our many attempts to fix it, we had booked the trip twice.  It took a bit of working through things over the phone, but it was fixed and our trip was locked down, but this wasn't the only part of the conversation.  While waiting for the mess to get cleaned up, the lovely operator went over some of the details of our trip with Allison on the phone.  She didn't really try to sell anything else, but instead gave us some valuable information. She informed Allison about all of the ride and park closures that would be happening while were there.  She also got into a conversation with Allison and managed to find out it was are anniversary trip.  She asked if there was anything else she could do to make our anniversary more special.  Allison told her that we liked extra pillows, which we do.

I'm not saying that we're going to get anything special when we get there, and there's no need really, but it was really nice of her to offer.  Allison actually stayed on the phone with the nice lady for a while, she was a fountain of information, and she really put us at ease about our trip plans.  We went from being fairly excited about this trip, to being really excited, all because of this lady on the phone.

Since the call we've received all of the notification that our problem has been fixed, and that our trip is ready to go.  After this experience my best advice to anybody planning a trip to Disney Paris is call to make your reservation.  The website is just not that great (either for reservations or for information), but the folks answering the phones are fantastic.  While the operators may answer the phone in French, many are multilingual, and so far all of them have spoken English.  Best of all, if Allison did try and communicate in French, they didn't stop her.  They would just slow down and let her practice her French.

Disney Paris An Overview

A little over a year ago I announced that our trip to Disney World was going to be postponed for a few years.  Just to bring you up speed Allison and I at the time lived in Greece and thought that we would be returning home soon.  As it turns out Allison got another assignment and we weren't going to be near North America, so we decided to push back our epic Disney World adventure till we got back.  Then, a few months ago it came to light that Allison and I would actually be really close to Paris France at the time of our anniversary, and we then thought it would be really cool to head to Paris Disney instead.  We did a bit of research, but only recently can we officially say that the trip is on.  So for the next few weeks' I'm going to write a bit about planning our trip to the happiest place in Europe.

If you're not familiar with the Disney parks in Paris, then today I'm going to bring you up to speed... or at least up to the speed that I am at.  The Disney park in Paris opened as Euro Disney back in 1992, but has since changed its name to Disneyland Paris.  The park was an absolute flop when it opened, and has continued to garner the reputation as being an economic failure.  Since I'm not an economist I'm not really sure if that's true, but as a tourist I can tell you that it's still open, and still updating attractions regularly.  Most people assume that the park consists only of one Disneyland like park, but that is also not true.  There are in fact two parks Disneyland Paris and Disney Studios.  There are also several Disney hotels (themed around American style locations) and a Downtown Disney place for entertainment and restaurants.

While the park doesn't have the history of Disneyland in California, or the sheer size of Disney World, it still seems like a pretty fun place to check out.  It has a few attractions that are unique to the Paris parks, and there are a few classic attractions found at other parks as well.  I assume that many of the attractions will be in French, but I also assume that they're going to try and bring in outside guests, so there'll also be a few things in English as well.  It doesn't really matter to us as Allison and I both speak French fairly well.

Our plan is to visit the parks in the spring for two or three days, this works with our Anniversary, as well as other plans we have in the area.  Since we don't live in Europe or North America, our planning is all going to be done from a long distance.  This is going to be challenging I'm sure, particularly with long distance charges and time differences.  Research wise I've found a few interesting websites on the subject of Disneyland Paris:

There's the official Disneyland Paris website.  It's OK, but lacks a lot of detail.

The best site I've seen is the Disneyland Paris Guide.  Other than the regular updates (the food menus are a few years old) I would say that this is a much better site to research your trip.  It's even more professional than the actual Disneyland Paris site.

Character Central is a great site for all the parks.  While it doesn't just focus on Disneyland Paris, it at the very least looks at it.

When you search the internet for Disney parks other than Disney World or Disneyland California, you really don't get much.  Maybe I'll change that, but probably not much.

As for videos online, I've come across one video that interested me, it's a copy of the official tourist promotional DVD from 2005:



So we're off an running, for the next few weeks I'll be talking a bit more about organizing our trip, what we expect, and what I've learned about this off the beaten path Disney park.