4 Parks, 1 Day

Going to all 4 Walt Disney World parks in 1 day is a definite Disney bucket list item. Some people have made it an epic day and flown to California and hit up both parks in Anaheim on the same day making it a 6 in 1. Sadly, with current park hopping restrictions (no park hopping until 2pm), I don't think this is possible. But it is still possible to get all 4 WDW parks in!

Park # 1 - Hollywood Studios (credit to my sister for the fabulous 50th Anniversary shirts and ears!)

First, you'll want to pick a day to complete your challenge. 📆Ideally a day where one of the parks is open later (Epcot till 10, Magic Kingdom till 11, etc.). The earlier the closing time, the less time you'll be spending in the parks. Because while it may be an overall challenge, you don't want to just step foot inside the park, you want to have fun too! If you can pick a weekday where this happens, even better as then you'll have less crowds.

If there ever are no restrictions on park hopping again, I'd suggest staying at a Disney hotel that allows for early theme park entry so you can get started on your day sooner. Right now this doesn't matter since you can't go to your 2nd park until 2pm.

Park # 2 - Animal Kingdom

Second - PLAN! 📒

You absolutely need to plan your day to be successful with this adventure. Once your day is picked determine what order you want to do the parks in and check opening/closing hours of each. You can do them in any order but there are orders that may be more efficient than others. My sister and I did Hollywood Studios first - as we had Oga's Cantina reservations - then Animal Kingdom, Magic Kingdom with Epcot at the end. It's our favorite park so we wanted to finish there. If you aren't picky about the order, I'd suggest this:

1st - Animal Kingdom. 🏔 It's the furthest from the center of WDW property. It also tends to open earlier than most of the parks.

2nd - Magic Kingdom. 🏰 This is the biggest park and takes the longest to get in to so you don't want to be doing this one at the end of the day if you are crunched for time.

3rd - Epcot. 🌐 When you leave Magic Kingdom you pass Epcot so it only makes sense to go there next.

4th - Hollywood Studios. 🛎Hollywood Studios is connected to Epcot by a number of arrival options making it smart to do this after Epcot.

You could potentially flip flop these last two, I just have this order in case you use Disney transportation. Which brings up the next part of your planning -how you're going to get to all the parks!

🚙🚌⛴️🚡

Park # 3 - Magic Kingdom

If you aren't going to the parks in the most efficient order as my sister and I did, I would strongly suggest driving. I would also advise to drive while the park hopping restrictions are in effect. Driving is just the fastest way to get between parks, period. Yes, you'll need to walk in the parking lots but, halleluiah, the trams are running again (they were not for us so we were questioning our driving when we had to trek through the enormous MK parking lot😓). When adding in drive time to your planning it will likely only take around 20 minutes to get in between parks but I estimated a 30 minute window in between parks for planning purposes.

If you really want to make an experience of it, you can use Disney transportation. It will be fun but it will really add time onto your day. I'd estimate a minimum of 30 minutes, some will be 45 minutes. You can even do this if you aren't staying on Disney property, you'll just need to figure out how to get to Animal Kingdom to start your day. If you aren't driving, you can take a Disney bus (from a Disney resort), a Disney Minnie Van (now back after a Covid closure🙌🏽) or other rideshares like Lyft or Uber. Once you leave Animal Kingdom to head to Magic Kingdom you can take a Disney bus from Animal Kingdom to do so. Of course once you leave Magic Kingdom you can take the Monorail from MK to Epcot. This will get your two longest journeys out of the way. Animal Kingdom is far out but once at Magic Kingdom, you're dropped at the entrance. The monorail involves a switch at the Transportation & Ticket Center so it involves waiting time for two monorails. When you leave Epcot, you'll want to exit out the back of World Showcase in between the France and UK Pavilions as you can't take a bus to Hollywood Studios. At the back exit you'll have three options for getting to Hollywood Studios - walking (approx. 1 mile), by boat or by my personal favorite, the Skyliner. The walk is scenic and takes you through the Boardwalk area but will obviously take a while. The boat will pick you up right at Epcot's exit and drop you off at Hollywood Studios entrance but makes multiple stops along the way at all the Boardwalk area resorts. The Skyliner heads from Epcot's exit to the Caribbean Beach Resort which is the hub for the Skyliner. From there you'll switch Skyliner cabins to the one that goes direct to Hollywood Studios. For planning, I'd estimate 45 minutes for each trip.

Park # 4 - Epcot

Once you know the order of the parks and how you're getting there, set a schedule of how long you'll be at each park. We did approx. an hour and a half to 2 hours. This could be expanded if park hopping restrictions go away (please go away!🥺). Epcot was our last park and we knew they closed at 10pm so we wanted to be there around 8 and basically worked backwards from there. I factored in 30 minutes of travel time between parks but use 45 minutes to an hour for planning if you use Disney transport. While Hollywood Studios opened earlier, we got there around 10:30am since we knew we couldn't get into Animal Kingdom until 2pm. But don't wait until 2pm to leave! We left Hollywood Studios at 1:30 so we could be scanning our bands at the Animal Kingdom entrance at 2pm. We had about 2 hours there and left for MK around 4pm. We got a bit behind schedule here as we didn't factor in how long it would take to walk from the car to the Transportation and Ticket Center and THEN get on the monorail (definitely more than 30 minutes ). We did leave around our scheduled time of 7:30pm but again, with the walking + monorail time, we got to Epcot a bit later than we wanted (around 8:30) but it was still allowed us plenty of time to celebrate in World Showcase with champagne and watch the new nighttime show since they didn't close until 10pm.

Now that your park order, transportation and timing is planned you can decide what you'll do at each park! Our goal was to do an attraction, have a snack and get Photopass photos in front of each park icon. If you have more time (and everything is open), I'd suggest doing both a ride AND a show - and including a character in the Photopass options, especially since meet and greets are back to normal now (hugs!🤗).

To plan and maximize time for rides, definitely fork out the money for Genie+ to utilize the Fast Passes aka Lightning Lanes. This will allow you to pick a ride or attraction at each park and not have to waste time waiting in line for it. I've only used Genie+ twice (and once for the day we did this) so I'd recommend getting more info from my favorite Disney newsletter site, All Ears. But, for the basics, as of 7am the morning you are going, you can pick your first ride at your first park. As soon as you've scanned your band for that attraction, pull up the app and book the next attraction at the next park.

This is where you're going to need to be flexible as you may not be able to get a Lightning Lane reservation for the ride you want or, in our case, we had one for Rockin Roller Coaster but as we approached the line - it was broken down! We didn't have time to wait around for it to open so we looked at the app to see what we could do - the Beauty & the Beast show was just about to start so we headed there and were able to check off an attraction at DHS. {Had the app been working properly we'd have seen that it gave us a replacement Fast Pass for Tower of Terror. But we didn't see that for over an hour. They definitely still have some work to do on Genie+.} From there we just picked rides that fit into our window of time in which we'd be at that park. And if we had time to do more things, we did! Below is us on Thunder Mountain (left) and Expedition Everest (right).

If you want to get a snack or drink and aren't picky about what you get you can obviously go to any cart or counter service spot. But, if you want to pick out some fun, park themed treats, plan ahead using the menus from All Ears. For example you can get a Simba shaped pretzel at Animal Kingdom, Dole Whip from Magic Kingdom, anything from World Showcase in Epcot (my fave would be the macarons in the France pavilion) and at Hollywood Studios you can go for some out-of-this-world choices in Galaxy's Edge.

Below is one of our snacks from Hollywood Studios - a 50th anniversary funnel cake! It was really good. Since we did this during the holiday season, one of our other goals in each park was to get a photo by each park’s Christmas tree - below is the first one at Hollywood Studios.