If you’re planning a trip to Disneyland Paris, you’ll probably want to have at least one full day at Disneyland Park. But whether you’re planning a vacation from the United States or just a short day trip from somewhere nearby, fitting in everything you want to do can be daunting. We’ve got you covered. This one-day itinerary for Disneyland Park will guide you through getting the most out of a single day. Read on to learn how to plan the perfect day at Disneyland Paris!
About This Post
This post is designed to help you plan a single day at Parc Disneyland, the castle park at Disneyland Paris Resort. This post does not talk about the other park—Walt Disney Studios Park. I’ll usually use “Disneyland Paris” to refer just to the park (since “Disneyland park” sounds clunky and I don’t know anyone who says “Parc Disneyland.”).
After some introductory work, I’ll walk through a day at Disneyland Paris, explaining some of the options and decisions along the way. I’ll provide an example itinerary based on a day I spent at the park (not an exact minute-by-minute recreation, to be clear). Even if you don’t follow that example at all, this post still provides guidance for planning your day your way.
Notably, my example itinerary will not visit every ride. I definitely think on many—maybe even most—days you can get on every ride at Disneyland Paris even without Premier Access or Extra Magic Time. But my example itinerary simply isn’t about that. Among other things, it sets time aside for the parade, stage show, and some of the non-ride attractions that you can explore at your own pace.
We have a guide to all the rides, attractions, and entertainment at Disneyland Paris, if you need to know more about specific items. Check out that guide along with the official Disneyland Paris app to see what’s available in the park. Things come and go, and I’m sure I miss some “minor” things (this post doesn’t mention PhilharMagic…except for this sentence…for example).
This post is meant to layout some options for how to spend your day while providing what I consider a reasonable example day. This also means that if you have Extra Magic Time, or if you’re willing to pay for Premier Access, you’ll find it easy to use and improve upon this itinerary. Use those perks to get short waits on some of the rides that take a lot of time in my example, and then you’ll have room for some of the things the example itinerary misses.
Premier Access and Extra Magic Time
Premier Access and Extra Magic Time are the two major ways to greatly simplify your planning for a day at the park.
Premier Access is Disneyland Paris’s paid “skip the line” system. It covers around 11 rides at Disneyland park, along with around six rides at neighboring Walt Disney Studios Park. We have a Complete Guide to Premier Access at Disneyland Paris.
As you might expect, Premier Access covers some of the most popular rides in both parks. If you buy Premier Access Ultimate (covering most of the available rides) or the individual Premier Access One options (each covering a single ride), you’ll have a lot less trouble fitting those popular rides into your day.
If you’re on a short trip (2 full days or less), I think you should probably plan to spend a bit of money on Premier Access, and Premier Access Ultimate is probably worth it. With three days in the parks, I’ll usually still prefer Premier Access on one day to make the other two days (one in each park, for example) less stressful.
Of course, if you’re a casual fan just looking to have a fun day trip from Paris, you easily might decide this extra cost isn’t worth it—just know you’ll probably miss out on some of the most popular rides.
Extra Magic Time is a perk available to guests of Disney’s hotels at Disneyland Paris. It grants these guests an extra hour in at least one of the two parks to start the day. If you have Extra Magic Time, we have a separate post explaining how to get the most out of Extra Magic Time at Disneyland Paris.
What This Itinerary Does and Doesn’t Cover
The main attractions at Disneyland Paris that this post will cover are:
21 rides (example itinerary rides 16, skips 5)
The Lion King: Rhythms of the Pride Lands (stage show)
Disney Stars on Parade (parade)
feature nighttime entertainment
The big hole in this itinerary is the lack of character greetings. This is for two reasons. First, specific characters and greeting times vary—check the app for today’s listings to see what you might want to fit into your day.
Second, the three fixture greetings at the park—Mickey Mouse, Princess Pavilion, and Star Wars Encounter (usually Darth Vader)—can have ridiculous wait times. Just look at this day I randomly picked, when highest average waits in the park were:
Princess Pavilion - 103 minutes
Meet Mickey - 60 minutes
Peter Pan’s Flight - 32 minutes
Star Wars Encounter - 23 minutes
Suffice to say if you want to do these, try and line up before they open, which is (thankfully) usually a little after the park itself opens. Otherwise, there just isn’t much advice I can offer—plan to wait a long time if you must do these.
Two last notes before we get on with the planning. First, the example itinerary in this post is based on a day with park hours of 9:30AM to 11PM. Second, I provide posted wait times for the example itinerary. I note actual wait times once or twice where they’re of note, but otherwise they were close enough to the posted time to not be worth mentioning (some of the 5 minutes were walk-ons).
Planning Your Day at Disneyland Paris
Let’s start with a very quick outline for how we plan a day at the park…
Very General Planning Strategy
For starters, the parade and nighttime entertainment are scheduled once a day. For this post, those times are:
5:30PM Disney Stars on Parade
10:50PM The Disney Electrical Sky Parade
11PM Disney Dreams
Use the Disneyland Paris app to look up the times for the day you visit and lock those times into your memory. You build your day around those. Additionally, this post targets the 1:15PM showtime for The Lion King: Rhythms of the Pride Lands.
Around those scheduled times, we balance rides with walkthrough attractions you can do at your own leisure. The touring strategy we’ll follow is simple enough—do most of the west side of the park (Frontierland and Adventureland) early so you mostly only have to navigate Discoveryland and Fantasyland—comparatively dense with attractions—the rest of the day. Eat meals early and use them to plan the rest of the your day.
Morning at Disneyland Paris
Every good park day starts with rope drop. Try to arrive at the park gates 30 minutes before the park opens (or 30 minutes before the start of Extra Magic Time, if you have that perk).
As of this update, Disneyland Paris offers Extra Magic Time at both parks every day. If you have Extra Magic Time, this is an excellent time to get a head start on your day, and we highly recommend taking advantage of it. Again, we have a separate guide to Extra Magic Time.
If you don’t have Extra Magic Time, you’ll be entering a park that has already built up small crowds during that extra hour. Since Extra Magic Time typically includes the most popular rides in the park—Peter Pan’s Flight, Big Thunder Mountain, and Hyperspace Mountain—rope drop after that hour won’t be a good time to get a short wait on any of those rides.
That said, rope drop presents you a choice—wait in line for one of those three popular rides, just to get it out of the way, or get on as many rides with short waits as you can as quickly as possible. (This is a good first moment to note—if you think you might be willing to pay for Premier Access One later, you might not prioritize the rides for which that’s an option.)
If you’re aiming for short waits, you’re probably going to spend your morning hopping around Fantasyland. This plan works particularly well if you’re traveling with a small child. Besides Peter Pan’s Flight, Dumbo’s wait tends to go up the quickest, so that’s a good place to start.
With a small child, you might also consider the long wait for Peter Pan’s Flight, but even though that’s a good ride, I just don’t think it’s good enough to justify starting your day with a long wait if there are short waits around.
My quick reason for why I don’t like filling my morning with Fantasyland rides is that there are so many rides/attractions in Fantasyland and Discoveryland that you’ll wind up spending a lot of your day nearby anyways. While waits for these rides do get long, there’s some time saved by keeping your to-do list centrally located by taking care of Frontierland/Adventureland first.
Besides Peter Pan’s Flight, the other two long waits to consider are Hyperspace Mountain and Big Thunder Mountain. My personal preference is to start with Big Thunder Mountain.
This puts you in a good position to ride Phantom Manor as your second ride (or as your first if you get to Big Thunder Mountain and the wait time scares you) before heading to Pirates of the Caribbean and/or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril next. (Also, Hyperspace Mountain has a single rider line, which is a decent option if you don’t manage to easily fit it into your day later.)
If you manage to get on all four of these rides, you’ve basically finished the west side of the park, which will save you some walking later.
We personally prefer to pass on Pirates of the Caribbean early in the day, though. It’s a longer ride (more time for waits to go up), and it has an indoor queue that can be nice to wait in later in the day. It’s also very close to Fantasyland, so it’s not like you’ll have to go too far out of your way to get to it later.
A good morning with this approach looks like:
9:52AM - Big Thunder Mountain (20 minute wait)
10:06 - Phantom Manor (5 minute wait)
10:22 - Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril (5 minute wait)
Midday at Disneyland Paris
At this point, I have a somewhat surprising tip—start thinking about lunch. Disneyland Paris is an absolute nightmare when it comes to lunchtime crowds. I have a very strong preference for an early lunch, usually around 11AM. Waits will already be starting to plateau around then, and an early lunch keeps you out of a long wait for your meal while also leaving you a big block of time after lunch to work with.
Lunch is also always an opportunity to start looking at wait times and showtimes around the park to make sure you have a plan for the afternoon.
Off Indiana Jones before 10:30, there’s still time for a few things before lunch. Check the wait times around Fantasyland to see if there’s anything short to get on. I don’t recommend going all the way to Discoveryland at this point, though if something there really appeals to you, go for it.
10:39AM - Casey Jr. Circus Train (5 minute wait)
10:54 - Mad Hatter’s Tea Cups (5 minute wait)
I recommend a quick service lunch, and the geography of my planning usually places me at Pizzeria Bella Notte for lunch. It’s right near “it’s a small world” in Fantasyland and serves basic Italian-flavored foods.
One of the things you’ll need to decide early in the day is whether you want to see The Lion King: Rhythms of the Pride Lands. This is a 30-minute stage show held several times a day in the Frontierland Theater.
This is an excellent show that’s definitely worth seeing, in my opinion, but there’s a minor catch. The Frontierland Theater is really remote. If you manage to structure your day to time it with a ride on Big Thunder Mountain or using the Frontierland Station for the Disneyland Railroad, you’ll be close to it.
But in my experience you just have to accept that you’ll be making a long trek to the Frontierland Theater for this show. The show is also quite popular, which means it can hit capacity well before start time. Since you only want to have to make this walk once, I recommend you plan to arrive 30 minutes before showtime.
Aiming for the 1:15PM showtime means arriving at 12:45PM. This means that, finishing lunch at 11:30AM, we have just over an hour to fill. You could either visit some of the places to explore—Alice’s Curious Labyrinth, the Sleeping Beauty Gallery, and the Dragon’s Lair are all in Fantasyland—or squeeze in a ride or two.
On this example day, I went with the latter:
11:52AM Voyages of Pinocchio (25 minute wait)
12:28 Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (25 minute wait)
12:45PM queue for 1:15PM Lion King show
If you opt for a later Lion King showtime you’ll have a bit more early afternoon time to work with, but keep in mind you’ve also got the must-see Disney Stars on Parade parade at 5:30PM, so you don’t want to pick a showtime that conflicts with that, and even an earlier showtime can chop up your late afternoon a bit awkwardly.
Afternoon at Disneyland Paris
Exiting The Lion King (whenever you see it), you might be tempted to get on the Disneyland Railroad at Frontierland Station. I’ve tried this before and advise against it. Even if only a small crowd beats you into the station, not many people exit the train at the station, so you might wind up waiting a few trains before getting on. I very much enjoy the railroad, but I’d just as soon roll the dice and hope to get on it later rather than boarding at Frontierland Station right after a show.
The time from 1:30PM to 5:30PM (today’s parade time) is when waits are at their peak. Crowds will dip a bit during and then after the parade.
Because waits are high everywhere, you can’t really make a “wrong” decision. Preferably, you want to avoid rides that usually have very low wait times later in the day (check Thrill Data). Conversely, rides that tend to keep high waits even as the sun sets tend to be a good pick here.
I almost always like to check off one of the big names on my list during this time, so on my example day I went with Peter Pan’s Flight. Hyperspace Mountain is the other biggie remaining, but it has a single rider line (a last resort)
Moreover, I can plan to spend some time in Discoveryland late in the day. Fantasyland tends to close early in preparation for the nighttime shows. This makes it higher priority than the other lands, but in general you need to mind the operating hours of all rides that you care about riding.
2:48PM - Peter Pan’s Flight (60 minute wait)
The waits in Fantasyland didn’t really appeal much to me, but I made time for the carrousel before spending some time exploring some of the non-ride attractions in the area.
3:08PM - Lancelot’s Carrousel (10 minute wait)
3:10 to 3:45 - Alice’s Curious Labyrinth, Sleeping Beauty Gallery, The Dragon’s Lair
During my leisurely exploring I realized I’d broken one of my cardinal rules and forgotten about a ride with an early close time—Disneyland Railroad closed at 4PM. I definitely don’t know Disneyland Paris procedures enough to confidently queue for a ride right at close, but luckily when I got there just before 4PM it was still queuing guests and I boarded at 4:12PM.
4:12PM - Disneyland Railroad (15 minute wait)
The 20 minute journey put me back at Main Street Station just after 4:30PM, a very awkward time, given the 5:30PM parade time. You could easily spend an hour shopping and snacking on Main Street, along with exploring the Discovery and Liberty Arcades on either side.
Unfortunately, the parade starts by “it’s a small world” and ends down Main Street, so Main Street parade watchers wind up waiting a longer time for the parade, plus they have no chance at beating the post-parade rush of crowds back to rides.
Since “it’s a small world” was posting only a 15-minute wait, I opted to make the long walk to the back of the park in hopes I’d be able to squeeze that ride in just before the parade. It’s worth noting it’s not a short ride—10 minutes plus sometimes a backup of boats at the end of the ride—so this was a bit riskier than I might recommend to guests who must watch the parade.
Luckily it worked out just fine for me:
4:53PM - “it’s a small world” (15 minute wait)
5:30 - Disney Stars on Parade
Evening at Disneyland Paris
At 5:45PM, just as the parade finished going by the start spot at “it’s a small world”, Hyperspace Mountain was posting a 20-minute wait. This isn’t that short, but other than saving it for very late in the day I figured this was my best chance to cross it off my list.
6:10PM Hyperspace Mountain (20 minute wait)
For what it’s worth, my actual wait was 18 minutes, and the posted wait was quickly back up to 30 minutes. While waits will drop post-parade, during the parade is an even better time to visit.
Keeping in mind that Fantasyland still needs to be prioritized a little bit because of its early close, I opted for a short wait at Star Tours. There’s no reason to think I’d want to walk all the way back to Star Tours later, and it was posting a 10 minute wait.
6:29PM - Star Tours (10 minute wait)
If at all possible, I prefer to eat dinner outside a park after my day that the park. This maximizes the time for rides and attractions inside the park. With an 11PM close, however, that wasn’t a feasible option (of course, an 11PM close also means lots of time for rides, so that’s nice).
Wait times basically only go in one direction in the evening—down. So it makes sense to eat dinner as early as you can, while waits for rides are higher. This also helps to beat dinner crowds, and it works well with the early lunch I advised earlier.
Cafe Hyperion is in Discoveryland by Star Tours. Always check quick service hours before settling on a dinner plan—not all the restaurants are open for dinner. Also, consider using the mobile order (“Click & Collect”) option in the app.
6:45PM - Dinner at Cafe Hyperion
Like lunch, dinner is a good opportunity for one member of your party to look over what’s left on your list for the day and plan accordingly. With 13 rides done in my example itinerary, I’ve got eight left:
Fantasyland — Dumbo, The Land of Fairytales (Storybook Boats)
Adventureland — Pirates of the Caribbean
Discoveryland — Autopia, Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast, Orbitron
Already Closed — Main Street Vehicles, Thunder Mesa Riverboat Landing
Unfortunately on this particular day, several of these were still posting waits of 30 minutes or more. With nighttime entertainment not starting until close to 11PM, this isn’t a problem, per se, but I don’t want to spend the last part of my day waiting in line for many of these rides.
Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast is a fun one, and nearby. I opted to swing by Nautilus for a quick walkthrough before heading to Buzz:
7:30PM - Nautilus
8:08PM - Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast (30 minute wait)
Except for my journey to the Frontierland Theatre, I actually haven’t spent much time over in Frontierland / Adventureland since the morning. I’m a big fan of “taking a lap,” and with Pirates of the Caribbean still on my must-do list, I head to the other side of the park for anything I missed, including walkthrough attractions Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, Aladdin's Enchanted Passage, and Adventure Isle.
8:15PM to 8:45PM - Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse, Aladdin's Enchanted Passage, and Adventure Isle
9:07PM - Pirates of the Caribbean (20 minute wait)
This conveniently places me right outside Fantasyland just before its 10PM close, allowing me time for one more ride there.
9:51PM - Dumbo the Flying Elephant (25 minute wait)
Disneyland Paris Nighttime Entertainment
As of this update, Disneyland Paris has two nighttime shows. The Disney Electrical Sky Parade (an awesome drone show) occurs at 10:50PM. The Disney Dreams nighttime show then occurs at 11PM. (Again, check the app for the actual schedule when you visit.) (Note: The last “Disney Dreams” performance will be on May 30 2024. It will be replaced by “Disney Illuminations” beginning May 31. The Electrical Sky Parade will have its last performance on September 30 2024.)
While I still had time in the day for Autopia or Orbitron (maybe even Storybook Boats, if I hustled there from Dumbo), I didn’t feel compelled to force either of them into the day. Instead, I took time to shop on Main Street, have a snack, and explore the Liberty and Discovery Arcades on either side of Main Street.
10PM - Main Street & Arcades
10:50PM - Disney Electrical Sky Parade
11PM - Disney Dreams
Conclusions
When park hours are long and wait times cooperate, it’s pretty easy to see a good chunk of Disneyland Paris in a single day. My decisions this day leave me with the following five rides missed:
Thunder Mesa Riverboat Landing
Main Street Vehicles
Autopia (ride with adult) - 81cm (32in)
Storybook Boats
Orbitron
As noted earlier, this day also didn’t include any character greetings. Otherwise, the biggest skipped non-ride attraction was probably PhilharMagic.
But this was also a day that touched on almost every walkthrough attraction, along with a viewing of The Lion King, something I honestly hadn’t been to before because it was that hard to fit into my day.
While Extra Magic Time and Premier Access make things easier, they aren’t a necessity most days. Of course, you can’t bank on everything going smoothly every day, so if you’re at all open to using Premier Access, I recommend you check prices at the start of your day and plan accordingly. Even spending around €25 per person for short waits on Peter Pan’s Flight and Big Thunder Mountain would have made this day perfect.
Even without Premier Access, though, the example day in this post was pretty sparkling. I hope you find your trip to Disneyland Paris just as magical!