A 2019 spreadsheet that wouldn't quit.

Florida Planned started life as Disney_Meal_Planning.xlsx. A tab per trip. A sheet per day. Formulas for dining-plan credit budgets. Conditional formatting that turned cells coral when a booking window opened.

That spreadsheet has been the planning tool for the most recent of fourteen Florida trips since 1988. It started as five rows of restaurants we wanted to try. By the time it became Florida Planned, it had grown to dozens of tabs encoding things you can't easily look up: which Lightning Lane attractions are worth the early-start window, which signature restaurants are worth two credits, which days a jet-lagged family of four should anchor near the resort.

It worked. It worked specifically for the way our family planned trips. Karen asks about Cinderella's Royal Table on Tuesday. We pull it up. The spreadsheet has a row, a credit cost in dollars, a credit cost in DDP credits, a confidence score I made up in 2019.

Four decades, one place

I first went to central Florida in 1988. Then again in 1990, in 1996, in 2001 — that's the trip I remember as the one I saw with adult eyes for the first time, aged 20 — and a steady cadence ever since. In that time WDW has gone from three parks and a handful of resorts to four parks, two water parks, Disney Springs in its current shape, the Skyliner, Genie / Lightning Lane, and an entertainment slate that's roughly tripled. The trip has gotten bigger and more involved every decade. The planning has had to keep up.

And that's only the Disney slice of it. A modern central-Florida holiday now routinely takes in Universal (and Epic Universe as of 2025), SeaWorld, Kennedy Space Center on the Cape, the Clearwater and Anna Maria beaches on the Gulf side, an airboat trip in Kissimmee, the outlet malls on the way back to the airport. Each adds a half-day or whole day that the rest of the trip has to bend around. You used to be able to wing it. You really can't any more — not without leaving £500 of value on the table.

In 2005 we took the whole family — mum, dad, brothers, sister, niece, nephew, aunt and uncle. Thirteen people in one villa, one schedule to negotiate, a lot of opinions about Cinderella's Royal Table. We did it again in 2016, same scale. Then trips got smaller. It's the three of us now, and Florida has become the place we keep going back to.

Planning for thirteen is a fundamentally different problem from planning for three — and both are different again from the trip a UK family is dropping into for the first time. Florida Planned grew out of all three. The whole planner is built around the thing those trips taught us: a good holiday needs the right balance of family fun, actual rest, and squeezing value out of a trip most UK families only do once or twice in a lifetime. Lean too hard on any one and someone's miserable by day four.

The friend ask

Around the eighth trip, friends started asking. You've got a spreadsheet, right? Could we have a copy? Yes. Could you show me how it works?Yes, but it's three hours and you need to know which cells reference which.Could you just plan our trip with it?

That's the moment Florida Planned became something. The spreadsheet was a tool built for one person — me. To be useful to anyone else, it needed to become software. Software that didn't require knowing which tab held DDP credit costs. Software that handled the things UK first-timers stumble on: the 11am booking morning, the £/$ conversion, the choreography of multi-day shaping.

"The existing tools were American, expensive, and built for repeat visitors who knew what they were doing. UK first-timers needed something narrower, sharper, and aware that booking morning is at 11am on a Tuesday in May."

The morning it all comes due

One trip taught the rest. We replanned it three times before booking day — each version reshaped the whole fortnight. Then the 60-day window opened and several of the restaurants we'd built the plan around simply weren't there. So we improvised live: re-sequencing on the spreadsheet, trying a different strategy, taking the next-best slot — all in the few minutes when every other family is booking the same tables at the same time. That morning is the reason Florida Planned has a booking-morning surface at all: a priority list you can re-order on the fly, so when a first choice falls through you already know your second.

Software, not a service

Florida Planned doesn't book your restaurants. It doesn't replace the four-minute panic at 11am UK time — but it makes sure you walk into it with a priority list, a countdown, and a single screen that tells you what to click next.

It's also not a community. There's no comments section, no forum, no "share your trip" feature. The internet has enough Disney communities. What's missing is the operations tool the communities tell you to build yourself in Excel.

Planning is free — build the whole trip, browse the whole catalogue, pay nothing. You pay once, per trip, only when you're ready to unlock the booking-morning surface and the dining-plan tracker: £14 at launch, £19 after. No subscription, no enterprise tier, no annual lock-in. The economics are simple: a family of four spends £8,000+ on a WDW trip — £19 of operations tooling is rounding.

What's next

The app is open now. The catalogue stands at 340 restaurants, 146 activities and 35 Lightning Lane attractions today, and it's still expanding — with editorial notes on every venue from someone who's actually eaten there, ridden it, or done it. Florida Planned is a side project built solo from a 2019 spreadsheet, and it keeps growing trip by trip.

If you're planning a trip, sign in and start shaping it. The catalogue and notes will keep getting richer around you. Either way, the spreadsheet won't get any quieter.