Thursday 31 October 2019

Halloween at Disneyland Paris



Since going to Disneyland Paris for the first time in my life back in February, I have been dying to go back. In May we booked a trip to go at Christmas as we thought it would just be so magical. However, we then saw the theming for Halloween and my sister and I decided we just had to be there. It just fell that we both had annual leave the same week, and after a short conversation of should we / shouldn't we? we quickly decided we needed to be there and started the process of scrolling the internet for the best deals. As it was last minute we thought we might be able to get a fabulous deal. We were definitely too optimistic and to stay in any Disneyland hotel like we did last time it was coming out way above our budget. With a bit of research we decided to stay in Paris and travel in ourselves. I have an upcoming post on how we did it on a budget.

Once we went through the gates at Disneyland Paris we were overwhelmed with the spectacular theming throughout the park. They really do go to town which is great as it makes the experience even more magical. They change their programme for October and have special parades, performances and meet and greets.

No matter what time of year you visit they do two different parades each day. In the morning they always do two of the same parades which have the theme as to whatever season you are going. Then every night at 5.30pm they do the disney on stars parade which is just the most fabulous spectacular, and every single person watching has a continuous smile on their face. This time it was obviously a halloween themed parade in the morning  featuring all of the disney villains. It was led by mickey and minnie dressed up in the absolute most divine and cutest costumes you have ever seen. This parade had lots of characters who you would not normally see on a daily basis and it was great to have more variety and not to just have the 'bigger' characters. It featured cruella de vil, queen of hearts and jack skeleton. It is also huey, dewey and louie who are just the cutest next to donald and daisy.



There was also lots of exclusive meets and greets. I love that the programme of meet and greets change throughout the seasons and the characters change up. Throughout halloween the meet and greets include characters such as stitch, queen of hearts, cheshire cat, max and daisy duck. As always they had all the princesses in the princess pavilion which you can meet, but the queue is normally very long. I discussed in my first post all about using an app called lineberty and how you can get exclusive meet and greets with characters such as woody, buzz and minnie so head over to that post for more details.



They decided to have some halloween exclusive food and snacks which we thoroughly enjoyed. I have written an in depth a post about where you can eat in disney and my recommendations. This time we didn't have a meal plan and had a very different experience to last time. There is no denying that the food everywhere is expensive. However, using the counter services makes things cheaper. We queued in videotopolis for over an hour and a half just for burger and chips as we thought the prices were reasonable, but it was just soooo busy. If you do book any kind of disney meal plan I would very much recommend taking advantage and booking in advance restaurants for all your meals. The counter service although much cheaper than all the restaurants, we found on all three days we had to queue no matter where we chose and it added a lot of time and effort on to the day.


Overall, we had an absolutely incredible time and we both said we would recommend to everyone and anyone to visit at halloween. The whole feel was just so special and we had a fantastic time. Going for a second time means you have so much more knowledge on just the simple things which we spent our first trip trying to get our heads around. We used the fast passes to our full advantage, used the Disneyland app to watch for the queue times, find the parades information and we planned our days out so much more to ensure we got everything done. When I came back from my first trip I wrote a post listing all of my top tips for first time visitors, as I would have found it so useful to have read something similar before my initial trip. We also treated ourselves with tickets to the halloween party which is an exclusive event which happens twice during the week of halloween. It costs £60 per ticket but the park closes to all non-party visitors earlier than normal at around 7pm. The park is then only open to party members for the entire night until 2am. The party has exclusive meet and greets and one-off parades, you can also go on all the rides and enjoy special food and snacks. We thoroughly enjoyed the party but it was a very long day and also very busy meaning the queues for all the meet and greets were huge. Although, if you are a huge disney lover I would recommend going and treating yourself as it was lots of fun.

Lucy
xoxo




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