Disney in a Minute: What is the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World?

Planning a trip to Walt Disney World can feel overwhelming. With four theme parks, two water parks, dozens of hotels, dining reservation rules, and a constantly changing reservation system, it’s easy to feel lost before you’ve even booked your tickets. That’s where The Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World comes in.

First published in 1985 and yearly since 1990, The Unofficial Guide (or UOG for short) has been saving people time and money for nearly four decades. The UOG is not affiliated with Disney, and that’s why you’ll find it so helpful. It’s written by a team of researchers and Disney fans (a lot of whom write for this blog), not Disney employees – which is why we can be honest about what we have to say, whether it’s complimentary or critical.

The guide is designed with one purpose in mind: to help you understand how to plan your trip to Walt Disney World, so you save time and money. We let you know that not every attraction is worthwhile, not every restaurant is worth the price, and not every hotel lives up to the online hype. We tell you the best times to visit, where – and where NOT – to buy tickets, and how to avoid long waits in line. There are sections discussing WDW hotels, complete with readers’ scorecards (even hotels that aren’t on Disney property!); pages of park maps and room diagrams; and ratings for every restaurant. These discussions are backed by expert opinions and more than 60,000 reader surveys from the past year alone.

What hooked me on the guide was planning our first family trip in 1992. The sample step-by-step touring plans in the back pages let us navigate the parks to enjoy every attraction we wanted. In those pre-internet days, it steered us to the hotel we could afford with the onsite perks we needed (like laundry). We learned where to get our money’s worth at lunchtime. And now, some three decades later, that information and the touring plans have become way more sophisticated and helpful.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Can’t I find all this info online with a quick Google search? Hotel and restaurant reviews, how to avoid long lines, and the best money-saving tips?” You sure can. But you won’t find everything in one place, and you’ll spend hours doing it and maybe even more time trying to put it all together to make sense. The 2025 guide has more than 570 pages of information all right at your fingertips.

And yes, you may think that online information is up to date and print is old before it’s published. Each year, a new UOG is published and available in late summer. And between publications, you have access to free online supplemental updates, so the info is current. There’s a good reason the UOG has been called “indispensable” by the New York Times: it is!

Disney in a Minute is a series of short posts designed to help you better understand a Disney term or planning topic. Do you have a Disney term that you think needs a little more explanation? Let us know in the comments!