Disney World meet-up - Need feedback and looking for your thoughts!

Planning a Disney World photo walk meet-up! I’m going to be in Orlando, Florida and I plan to schedule a meet-up for June 27th. My thought is to have a scavenger hunt to photograph a variety of Disney items from a scorecard with different points awarded based on easy to harder to find items. At the end of the day, we would have some kind of award ceremony.

I have a couple of questions that I’d like to get your thoughts on…

  • Disney Springs/Resorts vs a Disney park? So that there is no need to have a park entrance ticket, my initial thought is to leverage Disney Springs and/or the resorts for the photo walk?
  • What is a good time to start? 9am or 10am?
  • I’m thinking to have an official end of 5pm or 6pm with an optional group dinner afterwards?
  • What kind of meet-ups have been done in Disney World before?
  • Do you think a scavenger hunt photo walk would be interesting?

Please let me know your thoughts. #LocalGuidesUSA

@TraciC I would love your input!

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Hi @Denise_Barlock ! Oh, I was so excited to read about this until you got to the date; I personally can’t make it as I have to be in NYC that weekend but I hope to be there the following weekend!

I definitely think going with Disney Springs (which has TONS of businesses) is the way to go, but also, you can get close to the parks themselves and see even more by leveraging the monorail or new Disney Skyliner. There’s so much to see at the various resorts and while there won’t be holiday decorations up around that time, they’ll still be dressed up with lots of places to go. I personal recommend taking the monorail or Skyliner to get more of the flavor of Disney. I think start time is up to you but would recommend 10am as traffic before then will be crazy for folks coming in around that time to work and the parks and inevitably, people will be late. :slightly_smiling_face:

I recommend picking a quick service restaurant (which has price points for all meals) to start at in one of the resorts (like Polynesian) where you can wait casually for folks to arrive. @PaulPavlinovich also does this great thing where he shares his location with attendees for a short period of time (during the meet-up) so folks can catch up with him; so you don’t have to stay on Connect to get the PMs.

One other thing is that you’ll likely have to pay for parking at most of the places unless you have a dining reservation. I think Disney Springs parking is free, so that may be what encourages you to go there.

I do think a scavenger hunt is fun; you could use Hidden Mickeys as a theme, but also tie it with the kinds of images most helpful to folks or things not often photographed. To avoid 100s of the same photos, I’d definitely split folks up in teams. Oh, see how excited I am thinking about this? :slightly_smiling_face:

I’m signing up for emails for this thread; so excited!

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@TraciC I wish I could do a different date, but I can’t :disappointed: The following weekend (4th of July), I’ll be in LA watching my son in an acapella competition. I agree with the teams, etc and I hope to get enough attendees to do that! I was thinking that Disney Springs had free parking, but riding the Disney transportation systems (e.g. monorail, skyliner) would be awesome. One of the hotels on the monorail does sound like a good place to start and folks can still take the buses from Disney Springs to get there.

Here are some of the things I was thinking to have on the scavenger hunt. Thoughts?

Activity - Photos of
Hidden Mickeys
Trading pins on lanyards (e.g. cast members)
Souvenirs under $1
Souvenirs between $75 and $100
Food items under $2
Food items greater than $50
Selfies with Disney characters
Selfies with cast members
Different Disney characters (e.g. merchandise)
Different mouse ears (e.g. on heads, for sale)
Cast member name tags - all 50 states
Cast member name tags - different countries
Lowest priced souvenir
Highest priced souvenir

FYI… I’m holding a West Point meet-up on April 25th that I’d love to get at least 25 attendees to arrange a private tour. Do you know how I can reach the NY guides besides their FB group (which doesn’t seem to be too active).

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Hi @Denise_Barlock . I hear you and best wishes to your son competing. I love acapella! :slightly_smiling_face: I think there are free buses to the resorts from DS but I haven’t used them. @SP31 might you know?

I think the scavenger hunt sounds fun but if I know Local Guides, they’ll also want to be able to add content to Google Maps, too, so perhaps adding in some things like capturing the entrance of five places and uploading pics to Google Maps, or noting which places have certain food options might be good, too.

For your West Point meet-up, I recommend looking for posts that mention NYC here. There are a good number of us and I’d be happy to pass along the word, as would @U-royFelixA . :slightly_smiling_face:

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@TraciC I was so blind with out of box thinking, I forgot the Google Maps items! What?!?!? I’ll make sure they are there as well! Thank you!

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Thanks for the tag, @TraciC ! Hi @Denise_Barlock - this sounds exciting! Not sure if I will be a Disney Annual Passholder by this point but if not, I wish you tons of fun and luck!

There definitely is free parking at Disney Springs (tons of it now too!) and there are shuttles from DS to the resorts and even other parks as well if my memory serves me right. I also think it’s a great idea, pointed out by Traci, to revolve some of the scav hunt or activities around snapping photos that may be worth contributing to Maps. When I was a Passholder, I loved going for the Food and Wine festival and adding photos to the specific POIs established in the park. : D

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This seems like a fun meet-up @Denise_Barlock as @TraciC mentioned I share my location, but since we can’t share it publicly I thought I would let you know how I do it.

On each Meetup we have three announcements. Remember that Local Guides send several automated reminder emails to people who have joined so you don’t need to cover that. 24 to 48 hours before the meet-up I share an update which refines the meeting location, gives a suggestion of the weather, any local recommendations and a gee-up positive phrase suggesting I’m looking forward to seeing them.

On the day of the meet-up after I’m well away from home I turn on Maps Location Sharing with a link for the number of hours between “now” and the time that the meet-up should end and share a second update via the meet-up site which includes a link to the location and any last minute details usually what sort of top, bag, hat I have on.

Finally after the meet-up I share a very simple Google Forms based survey via the final meet-up update. You need to be a little bit sneaky to do this, you have to book mark your meet-up event page because it vanishes from the list after your meet-up starts but is still there behind the scenes for a while.

I echo Traci in that you need some Google Maps things for your treasure hunt, you can certainly work in some of the various campaign concepts such as

and you can encourage, adds, edits, removals, reviews, photos, etc. as part of the normal activities.

Paul

Paul

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@PaulPavlinovich Great information!!! I’ll have to do this! and hopefully I can practice it ahead of time :slightly_smiling_face:

I agree that I need to add more Maps stuff in all the meet-ups I submitted. I’m so glad everyone has made such wonderful suggestions!! I now just need them to approve the meet-ups so that I can fix them. They have already declined one which I understand and I’ll resubmit it. Whew!

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You’ll do great, travelling human @Denise_Barlock :slightly_smiling_face:

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@PaulPavlinovich I love it! Me = #TravelingHuman. Hahahaha

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