My 5 Best Tips For Doing EPCOT and Magic Kingdom in the SAME DAY

My job has me spending a lot of time in Disney World trying to figure out how to make a perfect day.

Quincy, Fry Bucket, and Emma in Magic Kingdom

After all, Disney World is expensive and the amount of stuff you need to know (and want to do) can be daunting. Recently, we had the perfect day at both EPCOT and Magic Kingdom in one day! Now, I’m sharing my 5 best tips for doing both of these parks in one day!

Before we dive-in, you can see our full experience of park-hopping between Magic Kingdom and EPCOT by watching our video right here!

But let’s talk about those tips!

Doing both Magic Kingdom and EPCOT in one day requires a Park Hopper add-on to your ticket. Park Hopper add-ons are $65 per 1-day ticket, $75 per 2 or 3-day ticket, and $85 per 4 to 10-day ticket. Remember that currently in Disney World you cannot park hop until 2PM.

1. Choose where you start your day carefully.

First of all, you want to choose where you start your day carefully. In some cases, it might be best to start your day in the park that opens earliest and end your day in the park that stays open latest. Most of the time, EPCOT and Magic Kingdom open around the same time but Magic Kingdom stays open later. So, you may opt to start your day at EPCOT.

However, that might not always be the right choice! We recommend starting in the park that you have more ride priorities in. Rope drop, the first hour or two of the park being open, is a very valuable time to ride a lot of rides so you might be able to knock out more attractions in your starting park.

Additionally, Magic Kingdom and EPCOT both offer incredibly popular Virtual Queue attractions with TRON Lightcycle / Run and Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind respectively. Only those with a valid park reservation get to try to join the queue at the first opening, 7AM, and only those in the park get to try to join the queue at the second opening, 1PM (before park hop time).

On most days, this means you’ll only be able to join the Virtual Queue for the park that you start in. On rare occasions, the 1PM drop might stay open past 2PM but that’s a gamble. To ride both Guardians and TRON in one day, your safest bet is to Virtual Queue one and purchase the Individual Lightning Lane (skip the line for a date based fee) for the other.

If one of those rides is more of a priority than the other, we recommend starting in its park so you get two chances at the Virtual Queue!

2. Eat at off meal times.

A day between both Magic Kingdom and EPCOT will be packed. There are a ton of rides across these two parks and the parks are huge so you’ll probably be doing a lot of moving from place to place. And you know what that means? You’ll want snacks!

We recommend eating at off-peak meal times during such a jam-packed day! If you stick to snacks during peak breakfast, lunch, and dinner hours and then eat your bigger meals between those classic meal times, you’ll find shorter lines and shorter waits for your food.

A dining reservation is also something to consider for your day, but it has pros and cons. On the pros side, it can provide a nice break from a hectic day and give you some stability in your schedule. On the other hand, it can be a bit of a time suck and may even get in the way of some last-minute plans you want to make. And that brings us to our next tip!

3. Keep an eye on your reservation times.

Going into a Disney day you can have a lot of reservations. Maybe you have a dining reservation or you booked an Individual Lightning Lane time — not to mention any extra experiences or if you’re using Genie+! Now, if you’re lucky, you might have some wiggle room on reservations to move them around but more often than not, something can be set in stone.

Make sure you’re not double booking yourself! On our perfect day, we accidentally purchased our Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind Individual Lightning Lane directly on top of our reservation at Rose & Crown Dining Room. This meant we had to go speak with a Cast Member at Guest Experience who was able to help us luckily, but that’s not always guaranteed.

Make sure you know your schedule and don’t accidentally double book yourself or worse — flat out miss a reservation you were looking forward to.

4. Leave plenty of time to travel from park to park.

That last tip kind of feeds into this one. Make sure you have plenty of time for travel! It might seem easy to just hop on a monorail from Magic Kingdom to EPCOT but the reality is that that trip can take anywhere between 30 minutes and an hour.

We recommend always alotting an hour for any travel time between parks — especially if you’re heading to a reservation. To get from Magic Kingdom to EPCOT, you have to take the monorail or ferryboat to the Transportation and Ticket Center and then transfer to the EPCOT monorail.

We actually park-hopped twice on our perfect day and got lucky with the trip taking about 25 minutes each time. This could happen, of course, but plan for the worst case scenario. You never know when Disney transportation could get delayed!

5. Pace yourself!

And perhaps our most important tip is to pace yourself! This is a big, big day with a lot of walking. And, this is Florida, so it’s probably going to be hot. Make sure you’re drinking a lot of water — more than you usually would. Quick Service spots have free cups of ice water but I love bringing a reusable water bottle to make sure I’m staying on top of my hydration.

Beyond that, take breaks as you need to! A dining reservation might serve as a break but that also might mean finding a nice shady spot or some AC and taking a breather. Trust us, there’s nothing worse on a Disney day than overheating and overworking yourself — especially if you’re trying to make it all the way to park close!

With these five tips, you should have a whirlwind day exploring two of Disney World’s most popular parks! Stay tuned to AllEars.Net for more!