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Should you Fly to Disney World in 2022?

Are you trying to decide whether to drive or fly to Disney World in 2022? It’s a struggle we’ve always faced when it comes to planning our next Disney vacation. Here’s a breakdown of how flying may be a better bet when it comes to getting back to the parks!

We’ve broken the benefits and disadvantages of flying into three different categories that affect our trip: Time, Money, and Experience. Hopefully, this will help you make an informed decision about how to get to the Disney Bubble!

*This post contains affiliate links, meaning we get a commission if you decide to make a purchase through our links, at no cost to you.

Time

Depending on where you call home, flying can be a huge time-saver. For example, Google says that our drive to Walt Disney World is over 14 hours from our home in the Houston area, for a total of 28 hours of driving! This means that we will also need to arrange for meals and a hotel for at least one night. Keep in mind our conservative estimate of 28 hours is prior to time spent on any potty breaks, stops through the McDonald’s drive thru, sightseeing, or overnight stays!

But don’t be fooled, flying is not without its drawbacks! We try to leave home about three hours prior to our flight’s departure on both legs of the trip. Then, we spend about an hour either navigating the Magical Express or the drive home. That’s 8 hours total of non-park time, not including the 2.5 hour flight time! Altogether, our family spends 13 hours somewhere between destinations on a Disney trip.

Because not all of you live in our guest room (We don’t have one- sorry.), these figures will vary widely depending on the airports you have near you and how far your drive would be. Compare your time figures for your family- the results may be shocking!

This next point lays somewhere between the time and money categories. Because we work in the service industry, both our time and our finances are limited. We can recapture two days when we fly, allowing us to return to work a day earlier to “restart the paycheck machine.”  It’s a reality most Americans face, but life’s not all bad- we’re planning a trip to Disney, after all! Some trips we use the time to work, but lately we’ve started spending one day relaxing outside of the parks and one day at home nursing our “Disney hangover.” IYKYK.

Money

Money is usually the biggest and most impactful factor when we make decisions about our trip. We want the most magical bang for our buck! For the purposes of this article, we’ll be discussing flights and figures from the Houston, Texas area. 

We are huge fans of Southwest Airlines, but there are other budget airlines like Frontier and Spirit that can offer better rates, if your travel dates are more flexible. We love a good travel hack with Southwest, but again, for the article, we’ll discuss their basic, retail priced offerings. Hold onto your purse strings!

Nonstop flights (a must for us) from Houston’s HOU to Orlando’s MCO are $217.96, or $871.84 for a family of four. We also spend about $50 in airport parking. These rates are based on a five-night, Sunday through Friday trip, 11/7/21-11/12/21. This brings our airport route to $921.84.

Disney World is 984 miles from my neighborhood. If a typical car can get 15 miles per gallon, and the average price of mid-grade gas is currently $3.41 per gallon, then gas would cost $447.39 for the roundtrip journey. (984 miles x 2 trips, 1,968 miles/15 miles per gallon, 131.2 gallons x $3.41 per gallon = $447.39) If you can get a hotel night for $100 each night and eek out on $50 in food during the commute each way, you’ve just added $300. Remember airport parking fees above? You’re avoiding those, but you’re now paying $15 for each night your car sleeps in the Pop Century parking lot, for a total of $75. (5 nights x $15 fee = $75 in parking fees) Luckily, if you are a resort guest, you do not have to pay again to park at each park. 

For those of us keeping track, flying cost us $921.84, and driving cost us $822.39. 

Now that we have a baseline difference in cost, we can start to see how our other two categories impact that roughly $100 difference.

Experience Getting To Disney World

It’s harder to assign metrics to experience. Often people say the adventure is in the journey, not the destination. In the case of a Disney vacation, I beg to differ. One year, we stopped at Pensacola’s white sand beaches en route to Disney World. They are absolutely lovely, but I still plan yearly trips to Disney and not to Pensacola. 

You may have caught that nonstop flights are a must for our family. My kids are now 6- and 8 years old, and I love them dearly. Now that I’ve been consistently taking them to Disney for four years, we have pretty strict expectations of how they act in an airport and on an airplane. Even though getting through the airport is almost routine for us, I still get super anxious about them staying close to me in the airport, and I still worry about one of them causing us to ground the plane and getting arrested due to some meltdown over the wrong shape of fruit snacks. Unlikely. But the stress is there. Strangers. Security. Misplaced luggage. Finding the terminal. Being on time. It’s a lot. 

Now we can compare the experience of flying to driving 14 hours with kids. With Disney on their brains. I’d much rather track and entertain kids for 7ish hours than field 14 hours of questions about how much longer until we’re there. Anyone who has ridden in a car with any kid anywhere, anytime, knows what I’m talking about. I’ll let you place a value on that.

We also love flying because we feel like we’re getting our vacation started sooner. We are also able to have a park day on arrival day because we aren’t exhausted and tense from driving. 

Finally, you might ask yourself how you want to spend your time on transportation. Would you rather be white-knuckling the steering wheel during that time, or would you rather be scrolling through Instagram? I’ll take the scroll any day, but that’s just me. I don’t like driving, my husband is a horrible navigator, and I get carsick when I’m a passenger. In other words, I’m a real delight to have on a road trip!

Experience Getting Around Disney World

At the time of this article in 2021, you are able to ride Disney’s Magical Express from the airport to your Disney resort at no charge. Once you arrive at your hotel, you are able to navigate the parks via internal transportation at no extra cost. This includes buses, the Monorail, the Skyliner, and ferries for some hotels. 

Beginning in 2022, Disney is ending its Magical Express program, but you will have other paid options like Mears Connect, a shuttle service that previously provided Magical Express transportation. While they have not yet posted pricing for 2022, we wouldn’t expect Mears to price out families on what will most likely be their most popular route.

If you prefer a faster route, you can always use rideshare programs like Uber and Lyft. Just be sure to request the type of vehicle that can accommodate all your luggage and family members!

Disney has also contracted an upcoming high speed train station. It has designated Disney Springs as the hub where resort guests will then be routed to their hotels. The completion date of the train station has repeatedly been pushed back, so we wouldn’t anticipate it opening it any time before 2023.

When it comes time to bussing between the parks, we rarely wait over 20 minutes for a bus, with the average being somewhere around 10 minutes. When compared with driving your own vehicle, we consider the time spent on internal transportation a wash. Once you tabulate the time spent hiking through the parking lot, time spent waiting for a parking tram, time spent figuring out the road system and checking in with the fee booths, the difference in time is negligible. It’s also worth mentioning that there is no parking at the Magic Kingdom. Rather, you will park at the Transportation and Ticket Center (TTC) and then still ride internal transportation to the Magic Kingdom.

Instead, we focus on the experience of transportation within the park. For one, we enjoy having adult beverages while on vacation. While we’re not necessarily “tying one on,” we still don’t want to climb behind the wheel and get on the road with our family and your family. We encourage everyone to drink responsibly and plan ahead if you’re going to be sipping your way around the World Showcase at Epcot!

It can be a blast being chauffeured on vacation! In fact, the Skyliner was one of our kids’ favorite rides! [See: cardboard box theory.] Disney transportation is an experience in and of itself. We also enjoy hopping on the Monorail to visit different resorts, and we don’t have the opportunity to ride a ferry where we’re from, so both end up being novel experiences for us!

Finally, I don’t enjoy driving at Disney World. The signs are fun colors, but that’s about where the fun ends for me. If you make a wrong turn, it carves out precious time from your family’s vacation to backtrack and right the course. Don’t even get me started on backseat drivers! Tensions can run especially high if you’re trying to make a reservation or to make rope drop at the Magic Kingdom. *Breathes heavily* Even when we have our car with us, we leave it parked at the hotel and take the bus system.

I hope this article has been helpful! There’s a lot to consider when choosing how to get to Disney World. This is just based on our experience, and while we usually choose to fly, there are a lot of merits to just about any method of getting to Disney! How do you like to get to Disney World and why? Let us know below in the comments!

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*The WDW Lists is not affiliated, associated, authorized, endorsed by, or in any way officially connected with The Walt Disney Company.

Are you trying to decide whether to drive or fly to Disney World in 2022? It’s a struggle we’ve always faced when it comes to planning our next Disney vacation. Here’s a breakdown of how flying may be a better bet when it comes to getting back to the parks! We’ve broken the benefits and…