Editorial Standards: How We Research and Check This Site

This site gives planning advice that costs people money if it is wrong. A closed ride, a stale price or a date that moved can waste a day of a holiday somebody saved a year for. So it is worth setting out how the information here is produced and checked.

Who writes this

Two people write this site: James Burfield, who runs it, and Megan Burfield. Both have visited Walt Disney World in Florida and both go back regularly.

That is the whole of the claim. Neither is a former cast member, a travel agent or an insider of any kind, and we would rather say so than imply an authority we do not have. What the site does have is its own measurement: the posted wait for every tracked ride at all four parks, recorded every 30 minutes and published rather than estimated. Full profiles are on the authors page.

We are not a travel agency, we do not sell tickets, and Disney does not pay us. This is an independent, unofficial guide with no commercial relationship with The Walt Disney Company.

What we cover, and what we do not

We cover park guides, ride detail, height requirements, ticket and Lightning Lane strategy, itineraries, seasonal timing and the hard-ticket events.

We do not review individual restaurants dish by dish, and we do not rank hotels we have not stayed in. Where we have not been, we say so instead of writing it up from a press release.

How facts get checked

Dates, prices and opening times are confirmed against Disney’s own listings before a page goes live, and the source is linked at the foot of the guide with the date it was retrieved.

Pages carrying time-sensitive facts show a Verified date. That is the day a human last confirmed the specific figures on that page, not the day the file was edited. If the verified date is old, treat the numbers as indicative and check with Disney.

On top of that, an automated audit crawls the whole site every week and flags four things: claims whose date has passed, statements that contradict each other across pages, attractions asserted to exist that nothing else supports, and structured data that disagrees with the visible text. It reports; it never rewrites. A person makes every correction.

Where the data comes from

• Ride wait times come from the queue-times.com API, with attribution on the wait times page.
• Weather comes from the Open-Meteo API.
• Prices, dates and opening hours come from Disney’s own site and official announcements, linked on each page.
• Our tools (trip calculator, height checker, ride and park recommenders) run on data we compile ourselves and maintain by hand.

When Disney has not announced something

A lot of Disney planning content states things Disney has never confirmed, because a guess reads better than an admission. We do the opposite and label it.

Where a date, price or lineup has not been published, the page says it has not been published, says when it usually appears, and gives the most recent confirmed figures labelled with their year. We would rather be less useful today than wrong in a way that costs a reader a booking.

What we will never do

• Invent an attraction, a date, a price or a narrator lineup to fill a gap.
• Present last year’s prices as this year’s.
• Publish a press release as though it were our own reporting.
• Let a commercial arrangement change a recommendation.
• Quietly delete a mistake. Corrections get made and the page’s verified date moves.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, tell us through the contact page and we will check it against Disney’s own source and fix it. Factual corrections are made to the page rather than buried in a comment.

Advertising and affiliate links

The site carries advertising. Where we use affiliate links, they will be disclosed on the page that carries them, and a commission never changes what we recommend or how we rank anything. If that ever stops being true, this page changes first.

Trademarks

Disney, Walt Disney World, EPCOT, Magic Kingdom, Hollywood Studios, Animal Kingdom, and all ride and character names are trademarks of The Walt Disney Company. We use them descriptively to write about the parks. This site is not affiliated with or endorsed by Disney. The official site is disneyworld.disney.go.com.