Disneyland Paris has 2 parks: Disneyland Park and Walt Disney Studio Park. We spent 3 magical days visiting both parks and staying at Disney Hotel Santa Fe resort.
We have previously visited Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida and Tokyo Disneyland, Japan. We highly recommend Disneyland Paris especially when you are visiting with younger kids. The parks are big enough to keep kids entertained for a few days and the ride wait lines are not too bad.
We went in April 2023, by using the Disneyland app our wait times averaged about 20 minutes for most rides and 50 minutes for the popular rides. Our experience in Tokyo Disneyland (and stories from friends’ who recently visited) wait times there can be 150 minutes for just one ride! Our boys will go nuts if they must line up for that long!
PREPARING FOR DISNEYLAND PARIS
How many days?
If you are traveling with young children we recommend spending 2 full days at Disneyland Paris.
You can NOT buy tickets at the entrance so BOOKING is a must! When buying online you can choose between dated and undated tickets, with the latter being more expensive. You also can choose between a 1 park ticket or a 2 parks (park hopper) ticket.
One Park or Park Hopper ticket?
Each park has its own unique rides, shows and awesome shops. Disneyland Park Paris is the equivalent of Orlando’s Magic Kingdom Park. It has the sleeping beauty castle, popular rides including Peter Pan, Pirates of the Caribbean and the updated Star Wars Hyperspace Mountain. This park is where they have regular Disney characters parades and evening fireworks.
On the other hand Walt Disney Studios Park has a great Toys Story section with numerous rides, The new Avengers Campus featuring Spiderman WEB Adventure and Avengers flight force. Tower of Terror and Ratatouille: The Adventure. Currently they are building the new Frozen land!
Choosing just one park to visit is very hard. Both parks are right next to each other, moving from to the other is easy. For first timers we highly recommend a visit to both parks!
Also read: The Best Way to Overcome your fear of Disneyland Rides
Where to stay?
Disneyland Paris has 6 hotels to choose from ranging in budget. We chose to stay at a Disney resort for the convenience of free shuttle buses and proximity to the parks. Each hotel has its own theme. We picked Disney Hotel Santa Fe for its Cars Lightning McQueen theme – which our 3 year old absolutely obsessed with.
Also a big perk for staying at Disney Hotel is you get one extra hour before the park opens to the public. That way you can do the popular rides first before the wait time becomes too long.
Disney Express Luggage Service
Another extra service by Disney. If you arrive (from Paris or even Eurostar) by train at Marne-la-Vallée Chessy and wanting your luggages to be sent directly to the hotel, you can add this service from your Disneyland Paris app. The cost is €18 per person.
This service saves you from wasting time checking in to the hotel first. When arriving at the station you can leave your luggage, collect your park tickets and go straight to having fun!
Getting to Disneyland Paris
From Paris: Disneyland Paris is about 45 minutes from central Paris. You can take a taxi or organise private transfer. But if your hotel is near a train station, the easiest way is to use the RER A train. Stay until the last stop: Marne-la-Vallée Chessy and both Disney park entrances are right by the station. Train tickets cost only €5 for adults and €2.50 for younger kids, under 4s can travel free. The trains are frequent, not too busy (when we went), with plenty of room for luggage.
From the Airport: again you can take a taxi, organise private transfer or use the RER A train. A third, and probably best option is to catch the Magical Shuttle bus airport transfer (from Orly or Charles de Gaulle airport). The bus journey takes about one hour.
Arrive with Eurostar: If you’re arriving from London, there are direct services departing St Pancras international which brings you directly to Disneyland Paris in just under 3 hours.
WHILE AT DISNEYLAND PARIS
No more paper maps
Download the Disneyland Paris app!
The app is a fantastic! It has a digital map. You can plan which areas of the park you want to tackle first. It also shows the times for all the shows and parades both parks have to offer.
From this App you can also book hotels, additional tickets, character dining packages or even half board meal packages for during your visit.
Buy Premier Access?
The biggest change to Disneyland parks around the world is that there are no more Fast Passes. Long gone are the days where you can get free allocated time fast passes to skip long queues. Instead, the Disneyland Paris app will show you up to date wait times for each ride.
If you want to skip the queue you will have to pay for “Premier Access”. There are 2 types of these access: “Disney Premier Access Ultimate” – a 1 x time priority for all available attraction, or pick the specific attractions you want to ride with “Disney Premier Access One”. Both can be purchased via the Disneyland Paris app. Each Disney Premier Access is linked to a specific guest’s Park Ticket and cannot be transferred to another Guest.
Disney Premier Access Ultimate Passes 14-ride pass can cost up to €190 depending on the day you visit (categorised as a low, high or peak pricing day). While individual rides priority access averaging at between €14.
Get the Baby Switch card
If you have a child that’s not tall enough for some rides, one parent can queue up for that ride and at the end of the ride, ask the attendant for a “baby switch card”. That way the other parent can then show that card at the entrance, and go straight through to the Premier Access lane. This pass is valid for 2 people – so your older child can tag along again.
When travelling with toddlers…
Bring or hire a stroller. Hopefully they can nap on the stroller during the day. During this time we took our 8 year old on “bigger kids” rides.
Dine early or late
Most families will eat at the usual 12-1pm lunch time. All food outlets in the park gets busy at this peak time. Avoiding busy lunch time help you to get seats too!
Fully charged
Make sure your phone is fully charged. Maybe even bring a power bank. You will be checking your Disneyland Paris App a lot as well as taking plenty of photos and videos.
Prioritize your day
Do you want to do all the rides? Watch the shows?.. taking photos with as many Disney characters you can? Or maybe even just shopping and chilling? There’s something for everyone at Disneyland.
Our boys do not have much interest with the characters photo ops or shopping, so going on as many rides as possible was our priority. By the way, wait times for some characters meet (like Mickey) was more than one hour – yikes!
Don’t forget to save a good vantage point for the regular characters parade.
The evening fireworks show looks great – but we didn’t get to watch it. When we visited it was scheduled for a very late 11pm! To watch the fireworks you can “recharge” the kids by going back to a Disney hotel to rest and come back later in the evening using the free shuttle service (last shuttle bus at 1am!).
AFTER YOUR DISNEYLAND PARIS TRIP
Go through all your photos and hang on to those magical memories forever!
For other places we have visited, checkout our website’s travel Destinations section. We buy our travel essentials online via Ebay
