Tourists who came for a sunny Disney vacation are instead stranded by the storm

They went to Disney World for theme park rides and photo ops with Mickey Mouse. Now they’re adding an unexpected adventure to their Disney vacations: Hunkering down at the resort to ride out a ferocious hurricane that is headed toward Florida.

In the past few days, Hurricane Milton has morphed from a pesky storm system in the Gulf of Mexico to a historic hurricane that Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has warned will be a “monster.” The quick pace at which Milton intensified took forecasters by surprise — and has left numerous Disney enthusiasts who didn’t anticipate airport closures or other weather-related travel interruptions stranded in the Orlando area.

“We came to the realization that we’re stuck here,” said Telissa Carpenter, an Indianapolis resident who is vacationing at Disney with her son for his 30th birthday. 

The first time Carpenter heard about any weather concerns was over the weekend, a day after she landed in Florida. A notification popped up on her Disney app informing her that the resort was monitoring a quickly progressing storm. 

Hours later, she received another notification, this time from her airline: Her flight home, which was scheduled for Tuesday, had been canceled. Alternate modes of travel, including buses and trains, were either booked or canceled, too, and the few available flights were out of the family’s budget. 

It’s a wrinkle that Carpenter has never experienced in her many years of vacationing at Disney.

“I understand it’s hurricane season, but we’ve been doing this since 2017 and never really had an issue in October,” she said. “We, at the time of our plans and leaving, had no idea that it was going to be this serious of a situation.” 

While Walt Disney World Resort has been mostly business as usual so far this week, it announced Tuesday afternoon that theme parks will be closed starting Wednesday at 1 p.m., and “it is likely the theme parks will remain closed on Thursday.”

The announcement came as Hurricane Milton roared toward Florida as a Category 5 storm with maximum sustained winds of 165 mph on Tuesday afternoon, according to the National Hurricane Center, which said in a 5 p.m. advisory that the storm was about 480 miles southwest of Tampa. The hurricane is expected to approach the west-central coast of Florida on Wednesday night, with Milton eying the densely populated Tampa Bay area for landfall.

The storm has prompted evacuation mandates along the coast. Farther inland, in the greater Orlando area where Disney is located, the Orlando airport announced it would be closing at 8 a.m. Wednesday.

Only a handful of hurricanes have forced the parks to close in Disney’s more than 50-year history, according to the fan-run Walt Disney World Magazine. The area depends on tourists as much as tourists from around the world seem to depend on it: Disney World, Universal Orlando Resort and other theme parks make the area the most visited destination in the United States, attracting 74 million tourists last year, The Associated Press reported.

Cara Prior, a preschool teacher from Thompson’s Station, Tennessee, drove to Disney with her husband and 14-year-old daughter in the family’s camper on Saturday, anticipating a fun week. But Disney is closing the campground where the family’s camper had parked ahead of the storm, and the family has been relocated to a Disney hotel at no cost.

“I know tomorrow we’ll probably be sitting in the hotel a little nervous,” Prior said in a phone interview  Tuesday afternoon, a couple of hours before the family headed to a Disney event called “Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party.” But “we have been reassured here that Disney has a generator on a generator on a generator — lots of backups.”

Others were able to cancel their Disney trips at the last minute. Kensly Williams, a physician’s assistant in Fairbury, Nebraska, was supposed to fly to Florida on Wednesday with her family. As the forecast grew more dire, she opted to reschedule.

“I would never want to put my family in danger,” said Williams, whose children are 3 years old and 6 months old. 

Nor did she want to be walking around Disney in a storm.

“I think anybody that has toddlers knows that they don’t tolerate being soaking wet and changes in the schedule very well,” she said.

Ashleigh Giliberto, a theme park vacation planner from Miami, said she strongly discouraged travelers from coming to Florida this week if they didn’t need to.

“People save for years to be able to go to Disney — the average person goes, what, once in their lifetime? It’s a big trip for people, and it’s something they look forward to,” she said. 

“If I had someone come to me and say, ‘Would you book me a room?’ I’d say, ‘No, I won’t.’ I will not make a new reservation during an active hurricane. I don’t think it’s smart,” she said.

Carpenter, the tourist from Indiana, said she’s nervous about being stuck in Florida for the hurricane. She did receive one piece of good news: She’s now got a flight home for later in the week after her original one was canceled. But she said she’s still in wait-and-see mode.

“I’ve never experienced anything like this,” she said. “I don’t know what it’s going to be like, or what the aftermath is going to be like, or realistically, if we’re even going to be able to get home on Friday.”