Hello everyone!

Welcome to the Disney Specialist and to another trip report series! This post will serve as an introduction to the trip report series, where I will head to Hong Kong Disneyland for the first time in 7 years! 

For those of you who are new to the website, trip reports are posts that focus on all the details of what I did while I was at the parks. They’re meant to be entertaining as well as informative, giving you a more detailed, wholistic look at what a day in the parks could actually be and feel like and hopefully give you some tips on how to better enjoy your day in the parks! Ultimately, they function as snippets of park experiences that influence how I write my planning posts. But for the most part, I like doing them because they let me look back at my trips and allow me to reminisce for a little while, while helping you in the process. But before we get into the meat of the report, allow me to introduce the trip and explain why we decided to go on this trip, who was with me, where we stayed, and what planning we did. 

This series will be about my recent trip to Hong Kong Disneyland, or HKDL as fans refer to it as. We stayed at the Disney Explorer’s Lodge, which is Hong Kong Disneyland’s third and newest hotel. We were at the resort from June 3 to June 6, 2023. These were not our original dates, however. We were originally supposed to go to the resort on May 20-23. However, I caught COVID the week before the trip and we thought it was better for my health to delay the trip by a couple of weeks so I could fully recover from my bout with COVID. 

For this trip, I visited HKDL with my family which includes my 24 year old younger sister (I am 26 years old) and my 57 year old parents. We booked a deluxe room at the Disney Explorers Lodge as it was the cheapest of the two hotels open at the time (Hollywood Hotel was still closed at the time of our trip). Out of all the new things we were going to experience on this trip, I was most excited for two things: Momentous, which is the all-new nighttime spectacular at the park, and the Explorer’s Lodge. I had visited the hotel a few years ago, but having the opportunity now to stay at the hotel was something I couldn’t pass up. 

Now we decided to take this trip because, for half of my family, the last Disney vacation they went on was when we went to Shanghai Disneyland in June of 2019. Since then, I’ve moved to LA to take up my Masters in Film and have visited Disneyland in Anaheim multiple times as a Magic Keyholder. But since my family hadn’t been to a Disney park in a while, I was back in the Philippines for a few weeks, and Hong Kong finally reopened to visitors earlier this year, this was an opportunity we couldn’t pass up! So over a zoom call while I was still in LA, we organized and booked this trip last minute. Now like I said, I ended up getting COVID soon after we booked it, causing us to rebook it to June 3-6. I then started counting down the days until I would get to go back to my favorite Disney park in the world.

I know, that’s probably a controversial statement. But Hong Kong Disneyland is the park I grew up with. It’s the first Disney park I visited way back in Halloween 2006 and was my home park for 10 years. My family would go to Hong Kong Disneyland every year, sometimes even multiple times a year, from 2006 to 2016. I still consider it my home park and, while I admit that other Disney parks are better than HKDL, HKDL will forever hold a special place in my heart. But the last time I visited it was in 2016. Back then, the castle wasn’t even built yet and work was just starting on the Iron Man Experience.

I was really looking forward to this trip as so many things in the park would be new. We would get to ride Iron Man Experience and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Nano Battle for the first time, we would get to see Moana: A Homecoming Celebration and Follow Your Dreams for the first time, we would get to see the new and improved Castle of Magical Dreams, and we would get to see the much hyped Momentous as well. Getting to ride Big Grizzly Mountain Runaway Mine Cars, Mystic Manor, It’s A Small World, Hyperspace Mountain, the Jungle River Cruise, and the Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh again as well as seeing Mickey and the Wondrous Book and Festival of the Lion King after so long were things I was looking forward to. And of course, a trip to Disneyland would not be complete without trying a ton of food and shopping for exclusive merch. So there were a ton of reasons I was so excited for this trip. 

To plan for the trip, I routinely checked on the wait times to get a sense of what the current crowd patterns were like for the park. I immediately noticed that lines were generally longer than they were in the past. Before this trip, every ride would usually be a walk-on with the major exceptions being Autopia and Winnie the Pooh that could go up to a half hour or more in wait times. Now, however, with Autopia now being turned into a pile of dirt, as well as more visitors coming from all over Asia, the lines at rides were looking to be quite long. Gone were the days of 5 minute waits for everything, replaced by 45 minute waits for rides like Mystic Manor and It’s a Small World. Looking at wait times is something I would recommend you do before your trip, especially if you’re going back after a long time or for the first time. This will help you get an idea of what rides are busy at what times and will help you craft plans that attack the parks in an efficient way (of course you can also refer to our planning guides for information regarding these as well). 

I also checked the weather a lot. June is the rainiest month in Hong Kong and I wanted to make sure we had a game plan for how to tour the park in the rain. The weather also factored into a lot of our decisions, such as what rides to ride at what times depending on when it was predicted to rain as well as what we needed to bring to the parks to beat the rain (we ended up being very lucky rain-wise during the trip, but I’ll elaborate on that in the succeeding trip reports). 

So that’s it for the introduction! The next post will focus on our flight to Hong Kong as well as our first day at the park. 

Follow me on Tiktok and Instagram @ stephenthedisneygeek!

Read the next installments here:

Hong Kong Disneyland Trip Report 2023 Part Two: Humidity, Monkeys, and Magical Dreams

Hong Kong Disneyland Trip Report 2023 Part Three: Lines, Birds, and a Momentous Celebration

Hong Kong Disneyland Trip Report 2023 Part Four: Spaceships, Cruises, and a Feast for an Adventurer

Hong Kong Disneyland Trip Report 2023 Part Five: Music, Forests, and a Wondrous Book