“I don’t know why you like Disney.”
Hi, I’m JD Hill, the founder of ParkCaptain. I’m a proud husband, a father of three and an Army veteran, and my family absolutely loves Disney.
It started small. I went a couple of times as a kid, then went back to Walt Disney World for my honeymoon. After that, we said we’d go every couple of years. Then it was once a year. Now we have annual passes, we go many more times a year than we’ll usually admit, and we’ve seen plenty of what Disney offers around the world.
Because we go so often, friends and family ask me how to plan their first trip. It’s never a short conversation. I ask a lot of questions to figure out what they love, explain how the system works, and hand over a mile-long list of things to do, with the exact dates and times to do them.
Then they’d come home and say it: “I don’t know why you like Disney. We just waited in line all the time.” Between everything I’d told them and everything Disney and dozens of travel sites had to say, it was just too much to digest. Steps got missed. So did things they wanted to see, and things they never knew existed, because those needed a reservation weeks or months ahead.
That’s what gave me the idea. You almost need a degree in Disney to have the best trip, and the only way to earn that degree was to have a worse one first.
So I built ParkCaptain to carry the degree for you.
I’ve been an information technology leader for the better part of two decades, which put me in a good position to try. ParkCaptain takes a staggering amount of data, adds what you tell us about your crew, and turns it into your plan. A plan that knows the best time for a ride or a park, from years of real wait times. A plan that knows about the food allergy and the kid who gets motion sick. A plan that keeps up when Disney changes a rule, and they’re always changing something.
Things will go wrong, because they always do. Miss a ride, and you can rebuild the rest of your day from right where you are.
I love Disney and theme parks in general, and I want to share that. I hope ParkCaptain lets you stop worrying about the plan and just have an amazing trip, whoever your crew is.
I hope you’ll join us. And when you get home, tell me if it made your trip better: [email protected].
JD