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We’ve just got word of two major Special Offer alerts from Disneyland Paris.

First of all, the smart All Your Meals for FREE offer, the first time Paris have ever run a promotion like this, has been extended by one month to 15th December 2009. This innovative offer, clearly designed to ease the poor exchange rates for Brits, gives you vouchers to claim lunch and dinner absolutely free at selected park and hotel restaurants, potentially saving you a massive amount of Euros. Find out more here.

All Your Meals for FREE

But hold on there — the second offer if the one you’ve been waiting for, a huge last minute discount at the perfect time: Book before 15th December 2009 for arrivals between now and 5th February (except the Christmas holidays, which are usually too busy anyway) and SAVE 30%! So now we can enjoy a Christmas break to Disneyland and stock up on a few extra presents!

SAVE 30%

You can find more information about both offers on our Special Offers tracker, or via the direct links to the official Disneyland Paris website above.

Yes, here they are, let the festive planning begin!

The official park Programmes for the next two weeks — from 8th to 13th and from 14th to 20th November — have been published and can be found right here.

Daily Park Schedules

You’ll find a half-hour gap between the two lighting ceremonies — or as Disneyland Paris would have us call them “lightning” ceremonies, scary! — plus three performances of new event Snow White: Happily Ever After each day, Mickey’s Winter Wonderland back in The Chaparral Theater and the Christmas version of Winnie the Pooh and Friends, Too at weekends.

Note the recent addition of Jack Sparrow to… Walt Disney Studios Park! Yes, he’s now trying to drum up trade at Disney Blockbuster Café. The morning meet ‘n’ greet Merry Christmas Walt Disney Studios is unfortunately the only festive scheduled event here.

Finally, notice something fun back in the Disneyland Park listing? Hmm, where exactly is Belle meeting her fans? … Les Pirouettes du Vieux Moulin, back from the dead! (Well, at least in terms of using its name as a location…)

Time for some Calendar updates. First, you’ll be glad to know that the full December 2009 park hours have now finally been published.

You’ll be even more glad to see that Disneyland Park gets an extra half hour of operating time each morning on the busiest days, opening at 9.30am — yes, on a half hour for the first time in years! Elsewhere, notice that Walt Disney Studios Park will thankfully be seeing in its second New Year, opening till 1am just like last year, with equal fireworks.

December 2009 park hours

Next up, Extra Magic Hours, and our pages have required a bit of modification. Because, as DLRP Today has just reported, EMH is going to WDS! For three upcoming weekends, usually now the busiest of the year with huge amounts of visitors pouring in to see the Christmas season events, those qualifying will also get a welcome 1-hour head start at the studios. We’ve added the info to our Extra Magic Hours and Monthly Park Hours pages (where the special trial is shown using “EMH+” as a key).

Extra Magic Hours

Finally, this week’s park schedule is now available.

Daily Park Schedules

As the joining week between Halloween and Christmas, it seems they’ve gone back to the previous programme design again, rather than designing another more fanciful one.

The complete relaunch of our ever-popular Calendar is now complete! All the same sections return, now rebuilt to be simpler to use, easier to update and “lighter” on our server.

Daily Park Schedules now use a programme-by-programme format, with the showtimes simply cut out of the official PDF programme and posted as a JPG, making them quicker and easier both to check and to update each week.

Monthly Park Schedules have seen the most improvements, with each month loading within the page using AJAX, rather than reloading a whole new page. In addition, we’ve added Extra Magic Hours, Annual Passport Blockouts and even the colour-coded Booking Seasons from the official brochures to the calendars. This means when you’re looking to book, you can check dates in advance and see all these things together at once.

Special Offers has now been split into several pages, with more offers and discounts than before.

Work on our brand new Calendar is almost complete! Take a look at the brand new versions of these popular old favourites, now with easier, quicker browsing between sub-pages:

Daily Park Schedules

Season Dates

Extra Magic Hours

Annual Pass Blockouts

Have fun planning!

Good news, trip planners — the ever-popular Calendar is now almost entirely back online, with some new dates and details added in.

Some “heavy usage” issues with our web host a couple of weeks ago spurred on a re-think of the section. See, the way the resort publishes its entertainment times these days, as a ready-to-print PDF programme stretching just a few days in advance, the day-by-day system of the old site was unnecessary. Now, we’re not only dropping the quite server-intensive WordPress publishing system which powered that but changing the focus to a programme-by-programme style.

The first new pages are now online, mixing a toned-down, more traditional look and colour scheme with some more modern innovations like AJAX page loading. Sorry, horrible web designer-ism alert — it just means that sub-pages, like the Closures & Refurbishments Archive for 2009, load within the current page, rather than you having to load up an entire new page. In short, speeding up your planning.

Try it out now on the new Closures & Refurbishments page.

Closures & Refurbishments

New closures have now been published up to December 2009, with a good variety of refurbishments ahead. Finally, it looks like the troublesome Buzz Lightyear Laser Blast is getting a quick look at, the Dragon goes down for a lengthy and much-needed refurb and “it’s a small world” closes for a general clean-up and installation of its returning seasonal overlay.

The Calendar is right up to date again with all the latest Disneyland Paris times and dates. First, check the Daily Park Schedules for the next fortnight, leading us up to the opening weekend of Halloween:

View Daily Schedules

Download Programme

Second, the Park Hours for the first half of November 2009. Yes, in a new move the opening times for only half a month have been posted up on the official site, allowing us to see the times already confirmed whilst the resort finalises the rest:

November 2009 park hours

The Closures & Refurbishments page has also been refreshed, but with no notable new additions for the months ahead just yet.

The resort appears to be getting a little behind with its opening times in recent months, publishing them online later and later. So here we are with the hours for next month, published just a few weeks ago.

October 2009 park hours

If you’re heading off to enjoy Halloween during the school half-term in the final week of the month, you’re in luck — Disneyland Park until 10pm every night, except when the Halloween Party hard ticket events are occurring.

Earlier in the month, however, and the weekday opening times haven’t been kind to Walt Disney Studios Park, which has slipped back to a 6pm closing time long thought to be in the past. Check back at October 2008 in our archive, and you can see we had an extra hour.

The Daily Park Schedules have also been updated with this week’s entertainment times, up to Sunday 20th September 2009.

View Daily Schedules

Download Programme

Since the end of the Summer season, the Once Upon a Time Sleeping Beauty happening has returned, It’s Dance Time… in Discoveryland has been cut to 5 days a week and a few character appearances trimmed. Popular ones, like Aladdin & friends outside Agrabah Café, have stayed.

Staying in a Disney Hotel between now and February 2010? Find out when you’ll be enjoying extra time in Disneyland Park with the latest updated dates on the Calendar:

Extra Magic Hours

Extra Magic Hours appear to become less frequent (at least, not happening every single day) in November, December and January, but then suddenly switch back to “Daily” for most of February, which seems to be becoming a more popular month for the resort.

This week’s Daily Park Schedules are available now on the Calendar. Notice just the slightly different times for the Buzz Lightyear meet ‘n’ greet in Toon Studio.

Also, remember that “the nights are drawing in” — as the Summer season comes to a close, it’s getting darker earlier, meaning the final late performances of It’s Party Time and It’s Dance Tiime have become almost twilight events, with a whole new atmosphere.

View Daily Schedules

Download Programme

Mobile Edition

Lastly, please note that it will not be possible to post the Daily Schedules for next week, the final week of the Summer season, on the Calendar. However, you should be able to find them from Monday in PDF form by clicking here.

The Updates page has been… updated!

Now featuring a new, simpler design, it’s running as a WordPress blog, which means you’ll now be able to view updates individually and search all the entries by category — Guidebook, Calendar, Video, etc. (using the buttons on the left). Most importantly, the updates won’t disappear forever when they drop off the page, and they can be posted from any computer, giving much more flexibility.

On the right, you’ll find the new Feeds column, with more of the latest from all the Disneyland Paris projects in our little web family. Note the new Memorabilia Blog, which will be getting going during September, and the long-awaited return of the “latest from the forum”, made possible via the new magicforum Twitter feed.

This has all been set up in just 24 hours, so there’s still a few things to be sorted. One special new feature in particular will be Comments, meaning you can respond directly to each and every update (be kind!). You’ll start seeing more changes appear at the start of September.

Finally, if you subscribe to the RSS Feed, first of all — thank you! Second of all — don’t worry about a thing. An invisible redirect has been put in place “backstage”, so whichever old feed URL you originally subscribed to, you’ll continue to get all the updates.