Florida For Family Of 3 - October

[Muskythedog]

We are looking at booking our holiday for next year shortly, and looking at Florida in October, it's our son's last year of junior school next year so really it's the last time we want to take him out of school and avoid the extra costs involved in going during term time. We are looking at probably going fly/drive with Virgin from Manchester for 10 nights. Never been to Florida before, and unlikely we will be able to afford it again any time soon so we need to make sure we get things right.

We know the flights, accommodation (apartment) and car hire will be around the £1,200 mark each - plus we are working on around £1,000 in total for the parks. What we are struggling on budgeting for is the food and/or other expenses (petrol etc) - now I realise it's a 'how longs a piece of string' type question, but anybody have any ideas what we should be working on for this? After checking trip advisor and other forums estimates vary from £50/person/day to around £200. We don't really drink and don't have any elaborate requirements for food so would be happy with burgers/pasta/BBQ type food in the main and also happy to make an odd meal or breakfast in the apartment.

Does anybody have any other suggestions/comments/input that may help us please?

thanks

[Muskythedog]

Brilliant, thanks for all the replies. Will have a closer look this afternoon.

[Muskythedog]

Right thanks for all the suggestions, had a good luck and we have come up with the following:

4th October for 10 nights (comments taken on board about even 14 days not being long enough but due to holiday entitlement from work and other commitments this is the longest we can stretch to).
Hard Rock Universal Hotel, standard room only.
Orlando Flexi Ticket Plus (2 adults, 1 child)
Decent enough Virgin flights from Manchester,
Price £4,100

Now the price we have at the moment is from Travel City Direct (£4,400+ direct with Virgin) and includes car hire. We are thinking of knocking this off and getting about on the transfer bus and taxi, saves us the hassle of driving and extra/over cost of insurance. Does anybody have any thoughts on these please?

Going to do some proper shopping round to nail the price down now we have a good idea of what we want.

[Muskythedog]

RicksAlfas said:

Has the OP booked a car yet?

Not as yet! We have booked though basically what we said:

10 Nights Hard Rock Hotel, Manchester - Orlando direct early October with Orlando Flex Plus tickets (3 adults as over 9 year old counts as adult for these). In the end Virgin hight street store just about matched the price of Travel City Direct (got it down to £3,900 compared to £3,850 from the website) so for the extra £50 we have booked with the high street - we get some extra check in benefits booking with them and also a 'real person' to speak to about things.

We've already booked our seats for both flights, closing the back row on the upper deck of a 747-400 - think this is £150 well spent. Probably also going to pay a little extra for the Virgin V lounge for the outbound flight.

For the car, going to either book something closer to the time or see how get on with the transfers (just about all the parks we want to go are Universal and all have transfers from the hotel) - if it's not working after a day or two we will hire a car when out there if we haven't don't already.

As advised earlier on the thread we are going to put together a timetable for the trip and aim to go to the parks early on in the day for the first few days, allowing a couple of rest/pool days for recovery. Going to spend plenty of time on the Dibb website looking at food - noticed theres plenty of suggestions depending on your budget, so should help to keep the spending in check.

We are thinking of doing the swamp/airboat tours - hire the car and spend some time there. Has anybody done this or got any other recommendations on non theme park stuff to look at doing if we get time?

Thanks for all the help so far.

[Muskythedog]

bakerstreet said:

Didn't think you could book your seats until three months before the flight. I've just booked with Virgin to fly on the 30th of September and this is exactly what I was told., so I'm interested to know how you did this when the seat reservation system isn't open yet. If you have, then I will be speaking to Virgin tomorrow.

Trust me, you need to book a car. Several people have told you to do it on this thread and you will get spanked on the price if you decide to do it whilst you are there. We only paid £188 for a 'small SUV' for a week. My guess is that would be double if we did it there and then and there would be no guarantee that we would the size of car we needed.

Ref booking seats, clicked on this link from my confirmation email:

https://book.virginholidays.co.uk/yourbooking/?cm_...

Filled in my details and went from there. From what I can tell the pre-booking of seats is free if you wait until 90 days before the flight, but we took the option to pay extra £25 per seat for the privilege. Got an email confirming the change and it;s showing up on my online credit card statement so must have gone through OK.

[Muskythedog]

Just had an email from Virgin advising of a change of a couple of hours from 12:15pm to 10am, now it doesn't seem a massive issue but in order to make life more comfortable we're probably going to have to stay over in the airport now rather than getting up before 5am in order to leave plenty of time to get there. Sent them an email complaining in a hope of getting either a bit of money off to cover it or possibly get the V lounge thrown in. Anybody have any experience of anything similar?

Also, to those offering eating advise - what chance of us finding a fairly 'authentic' BBQ joint and/or Triple D style diner near International Drive?

[Muskythedog]

Sheepshanks said:

That sounds like they've cancelled the later flight that day. What date are you going?

Normally the earlier flight is a bit dearer as people prefer to get there before it goes dark, and it arrives first of the UK flights so you get through Immigration quicker. The Virgin flights are OK, but any interaction with their customer service will likely end in (your) tears.


Not sure on the food question - there's a whole bunch of choices but I'm not that familiar with the I-Drive area.

At the risk of you tracking me down and burglarising me, 4th October. Cost me nowt to send an email so it's a shot to nothing and secretly as you say it's probably a better flight apart once we actually get to the airport.

[Muskythedog]

Sheepshanks said:

I was asking as we're going 29th Oct, but I picked a Saturday as less chance they'll cancel one of the flights that day. At that time of year I think most days there's only one flight anyway.

It's a bit North of you, near Universal, but as a reference point, is this is sort of restaurant you had in mind: http://bubbalous.com/ (Kirkman Road one for you)

That BBQ place looks just what we're after.

[Tony Angelino]

Right just to update the thread, 2 weeks on Tuesday we will be off and away. I decided to hire a car, went with a Mustang (unfortunately "or similar" as we wanted to collect the car from or close to the Hard Rock Hotel and choice from anywhere other than the airport was fairly limited) for a few days. Going to put together a bit of a itinerary but basically it will revolve round doing the theme parks early morning before returning back to the hotel pool for the afternoon and then parks again most evenings. Still thinking about doing the dolphin thing at discovery cove.

Got ourselves one of the Landry cards for a cheap meal or 2, and seen as it's my birthday when over there we get another $25 added to the card so it's a bit silly to not have one. If nothing else we can use it at Bubba Gumps.

Planning on doing a bit of shopping, not a great deal, and the Orlando International Premium outlet seems to be the best one given what shops/brands we want. Managed to get lucky and buy my dollars off a mate who came back from Vegas and dropped $3k on his last night and didnt want the hassle of selling them back or taking a poor rate, and seen as it was pre Brexit we've got a fair few dollars for our spends.

Anybody have any last minute tips that a family with a 10 year old boy should make sure they don't miss? We have all tickets, bar Disney for the full 10 days.

thanks

[Tony Angelino]

Thanks lads, been a long time since we've been away and it's taken for ever to save so really looking forward to it now.

Regarding the Dolphin Swim we're probably going to go for it, not really looked very deeply but I'm struggling to find pricing - even the Virgin site doesnt show it as far as I can see.

The gaming place looks good, may also check out the Kennedy space things too.

[Tony Angelino]

yellowbentines said:

He might enjoy an airboat ride if it's not on the itinerary already? We've been here, a slight detour on the way to the East coast http://www.airboatridesatmidway.com/

What about kayaking? We are also away in 4 weeks and plan trying this out http://www.grandelakes.com/resort-activities/Eco-T...

Yes we looked at the airboat rides - not this particular one but something very similar. Think due to time it's going to be either this or the Dolphin swim. As has been said above it's not particularly cheap but $750 gets us all our snap for the day as well and seen as we are budgeting $200 per day for food and spend it's probably worth the stretch.

Nice problem to have, deciding which to go for!

[Tony Angelino]

Challo said:

We are off next week and have the main bit planned. Been before so we are not worried about Seaworld or Discovery Cove. A friend did the Dolphin swim before but im not sure its worth the money. You go at a set time, normally 5 or 6 in a group and the dolphin does jumps and tricks round you, then you take it in turns to hold the fin while they take you 5-10 metres back to shore. Discovery Cove in general is ok but I wouldn't pay extra for the dolphin swim.

If you are going to Universal Studios & Islands of Adventure make sure you get the park2park ticket as you can then use the Hogwarts Express to go between the to parks.

We are visiting a Giraffe Ranch, Kennedy Space Centre, and also doing a swamp tour on an airboat which will be cool.

Also take a look at the Mall of Millenia which is worth a wander round, plus you have the 2 main outlets as well.

Thanks. Been thinking and were probably going to give discovery cove a miss due to us only been there 10 days and it being a bit on the pricey side. We've got universal tickets for the whole trip but not sure about if we get the hog warts tickets. Thanks for the tip will look at that.

[Tony Angelino]

Here at the moment, great week for our first trip to Florida!

[Tony Angelino]

B'stard Child said:

Ouch - that could have worked out better!!!

So far it's been great! Parks almost empty yesterday (Seaworld) and today (Islands of Adventure & Universal) walked onto almost every ride other than Hogwarts express. Walmart was mental though yesterday with no water or bread left.

Under curfew now (as of 10pm) until Saturday 7am, packed a bag just incase.......

[Tony Angelino]

Half past 5 here now and all good. 4am this morning glued to rolling news channels and it had taken a slight turn towards land and it looked for a while like it could be a direct hit only for it to move back out to sea again and not actually come over land so we got away pretty much unscathed. Have to say the hotel have been fantastic, keeping us informed all the time, changing restaurant menus to buffet only to make sure everybody got fed (hotel rammed, we've actually had people from the coast evacuating to here) and putting on entertainment for kids (loads of films on big screen) and for adults too (live music and a dj). It's made us appreciate how important it must be to be in a decent hotel if something like this does strike cos we would have absolutely shat ourselves had we been in a villa somewhere left to fend for ourselves.

I watched the storm as it passed through about 9am from our 6th floor room and you couldn't hear a peep from it and we probably underestimated how bad it actually was because when we went outside (at least under the veranda as far as we could) we appreciated just how strong it was.

Curfew lifted now and talk of city walk been open from 6pm but we'll just have some snap in hotel and have an early night ready to blitz the parks tomorrow nice and early refreshed after our rest day.