Live From Universal Orlando Resort!

Follow us on Instagram and Check out our story for the latest from this visit to Universal Orlando Resort

Coincident to whatever “EPIC” news Universal is announcing this weekend, I’ll also be in Universal Orlando Resort, bringing my theme park “hacking” (which mostly means waking up early, walking fast, and asking for free cups of water) skills down the road from Disney World!

If you want to follow along, the best spot will be our instagram story, but we’ll also have a trip report going up in a week or so that covers the visit, along with a bunch of new planning content for Universal Orlando.

Does This Mean Less Disney Content??

Definitely not. If anything, expanding to include Universal Orlando allows us to make more frequent and longer trips to Orlando. Regardless, our readers love Disney content and we love the Disney parks—that isn’t changing.

So…why Universal?

For starters, we get a lot of questions about Universal. Lots of people going to Walt Disney World want to know if we’ve hidden Universal content somewhere. The answer is no, but we’ve decided it’s a good time to add some. Why now?

Here’s the complete truth. Emily is away at a bachelorette party this weekend. I don’t like to just sit around, and when she’s away that’s what I tend to do, so I decided to plan a trip. Here were some contenders…

Disneyland Paris. Ruled out because flight prices were over $1000 round trip. I don’t mind 8 hours in economy, so I don’t tend to use points/miles for Europe flights. But I don’t like to pay more than $500 round trip to Europe if there’s a connection involved. Nonstop flights were over $1500. Not meant to be.

Disney Cruise Line, Aulani, or Tokyo Disney Resort. Too expensive and Emily loves these so I wouldn’t go without her.

Disneyland and Walt Disney World. Many, many trips booked or planned already.

Shanghai Disneyland. This was actually my target trip. Flight prices were acceptable, and I depserately need to clean up our Shanghai content. But here’s the thing…

I can fly economy to Asia (14 hours) one way, but overnight I need to use miles for business class. The best / only workable option when I was looking was a United nonstop flight for 70,000. I would have booked that, but…

United flies an absolutely awful business class product on this route (it’s their old 2-4-2 on a 777-200, if you want to google that). Sure, it’s better than economy, but it is not worth those points, given the better ways they could be used (including finding availability on a better flight to Asia).

So. If you were thinking “Wow, Mouse Hacking is expanding into Universal, what a well-thought out strategic idea,” that’s not quite it. It’s more like “Wow, if United kept up with modern long-haul trends, I’d get a report from Shanghai Disneyland this week instead of Universal.”

Okay but when’s the next Disney update?

Well…Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween party does debut August 16…and I thought I heard that the first day of passholder previews for Galaxy’s Edge was August 17…