We Bring 20 People to Orlando — Here’s Everything We Wish We Knew First

Here’s how most Orlando trips get planned. Somebody — usually the same somebody every year — opens forty browser tabs, makes a spreadsheet nobody reads, and quietly becomes the unpaid travel agent for eleven people. Meanwhile, almost every guide they find was written for a family of four in a single hotel room.

Stay & Play Orlando exists because that family of four is not who we travel with. We travel with the whole crew: grandparents and grandkids, in-laws and cousins, two families who’ve been saying “we should do Orlando together” for a decade and finally did. If that’s your trip, you’re in the right place — and if you’re the somebody with the spreadsheet, pull up a chair. We made this for you.

Who this blog is for

Big families and multigenerational groups. When the trip spans toddlers to grandparents, every decision changes shape: park days need rest days, the littlest ones set the pace, and dinner for fourteen is an event, not an afterthought. We plan for all of it.

Groups of friends travelling together. Reunions, milestone birthdays, the sports-team trip that grows by six people every year. Travelling as a group is cheaper per head and better in every other way too — if somebody thinks through the logistics. That’s us. That’s literally this blog.

UK and Canadian visitors. You’re planning the big one: seven to fourteen days, flights booked months out, a villa as home base. Your questions are different — ESTAs, driving on the right, pool heat in February, how to dodge school-holiday price spikes — so we answer them directly, in dedicated guides, in plain British English where that’s who the guide is for.

What you’ll get every week

Two posts, on a rhythm you can set your watch by:

This Week in Orlando Parks. A roundup of what’s actually changing across Disney World, Universal, Epic Universe, SeaWorld and Discovery Cove — new rides, seasonal events, crowd patterns, ticket and policy changes — each one read through a single filter: does this change how a big group should plan? If it doesn’t, we skip it. Your time is worth more than a headline.

One proper planning guide. The deep, practical stuff: splitting the parks across a week so nobody melts down, the arrival-day grocery run that saves a fortune, honest cost maths for groups, rest days that actually restore people, and the rhythms we use ourselves.

How we write

Warm, direct, and allergic to hype. We do these trips — with the crowd, the spreadsheet, the cooler of drinks and the grandparent who insists the lazy river counts as a park day (it does). When something worked, we’ll tell you. When something was a bin fire, we’ll tell you that too, so your crew doesn’t repeat it. No breathless “you won’t BELIEVE this new snack” energy. Just the stuff we’d text a friend who’d asked.

One more thing, up front, because it matters: we’re independent. This blog isn’t affiliated with any theme park, and nobody pays us to say nice things about rides. We’ll link to the villa we run, openly, at the end of posts — it’s where our own crew stays, and it’s genuinely a good base for a group. Everything else here is just the advice.

One last thing before you dive in: if you’re reading this while planning, you’re already ahead of most groups. The trips that go well aren’t the ones with the most park days — they’re the ones somebody thought about at the scale of the whole crew. That’s the thinking this blog exists to share: two posts a week, all year round, for the people holding the spreadsheet.

So: welcome. Start with the launch posts below the next time you open this site — the Brits’ villa guide if you’re flying in, the Big-Family Playbook if you’re driving down — and come back each week for the roundup. The crew’s all here. Let’s plan the trip properly.

← Back to all posts