Transportation from the Airport

OK, we're here. How do we get to WDW?
You have multiple choices for getting from the airports dependent on your needs and your sense of adventure:

• Your charter carrier may have organized a charter bus, hop aboard
• You may have organized an airport shuttle bus (such as Mears)
• You may have booked a limousine service
• You may wish to simply hop in a taxi
• You may have booked a rental car

Let's hop straight to rental cars as that's going to be the biggest adventure prior to your arrival in Walt Disney World. Here's the good news. By now all the rental car company staff are completely familiar with the fact that not all British Driver's Licences don't have pictures on them and have the date of birth encoded in the licence number. If you booked your car through your travel company, it might be prepaid, so all you have to do is sign and drive. If not, you hand the clerk your D/L and your credit card and they will process your rental. You have to be 25 years old to rent a car. I would highly recommend getting the new credit card sized driving licence, it will save you carrying around your passport for ID (which you will need from time to time).

In addition to the following words of warning before you get behind the wheel, please be sure to check out Driving in Florida for Brits.

1. Do take all available insurances offered (if it is not covered through your package). If you hit somebody and they get hurt, you're going to be paying for their injuries (either real or otherwise) for the rest of your life. Take the worry away and take the insurance option.

2. This is basic but, for some reason best known only to the Americans, they decided to put all the steering wheels on the wrong side and then drive on the right-hand side of the road. Take some time to get familiar with driving on the right. It is pretty simple but there is a tendency to exit and turn sharp-left instead of easy left to get to your side of the road.

3. On a motorway, you are all used to a slow lane and a fast lane and everyone overtakes on the right. You would therefore expect that the rule here would be that everyone overtakes on the left. Yes? Well, actually, no. You will find folks barreling down what you would regard as the slow lane at speeds approaching the sound barrier. Remember to look in all your mirrors and expect the unexpected.

4. Give yourself plenty of time to get off at your freeway exit and, if you miss it, go on to the next one and come back. Do not try to turn across the central reservation, the central median of a Florida freeway has many similar properties to a paddy field (remember, it rains almost every day in the summer). Do not stop and try to back up along the freeway. (Trust me -- I've seen it done many times).

5. Go onto mapquest.com; familiarize yourself with the route you are going to take.

6. Road signs are very different, you will not see a list of town and how far away they are; roads are signed North, South, East and West, so just knowing the road you want is not enough, you need to know if you want to go East or West. At a Junction you will also see the name of the road over head, this is not the road you are on, but it's the road you are about to cross.

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Last Updated: May 9, 2009