First like most public places all guests (over the age of 2) and cast members must wear a face mask at all times. They also have restrictions on the types of masks allowed so be sure to check before your visit. We also brought a spare in case ours got dirty or wet. The biggest difference is reservations needed to get into the parks. Unfortunately this also means no park hopping which our family always does on our vacations so it was a bit of an adjustment.
All throughout the parks and resorts they have stickers on the ground to help with social distancing when waiting in lines. I felt like some of the ones placed in the ride lines were not planned out the best when lines wrapped back around you would be standing near other parties. Since everyone over 2 has to wear a face mask it wasn’t too concerning.
Disney has made changes to the transportation to keep parties separated. On the buses the drivers assigns seats and some are intentionally left empty. The gondolas are restricted to 1 party per car now where in the past they would allow multiple groups to ride together, this made for much longer wait times in the morning to get to the park when we stayed at Pop Century as this was the only way to get to the parks. Make sure you are giving yourself additional time when trying to go between the parks and hotels as this added almost double the normal waits. One morning we waited an hour to get to Hollywood Studios on the gondola.
In order to enter the theme parks or Disney Springs all members of your party have to stop at these tents for a temperature check. If anyone in the group has a reading over 100.4 the whole group is taken to a 2nd testing location, if still high your whole group is denied entry.
When they announced the reopening of the parks they discontinued character meet and greets. They are also not offering any of the parades. Instead the parks have what they are calling cavalcades that appear with different characters throughout the day. We saw them at 3 of the 4 parks, at Animal Kingdom they were on boats. Disney has also done away with the popular shows like Festival of the Lion king and Beauty and the Beast.
Through out the parks and around the main buildings at the resorts they have hand sanitizers available. While Disney does not make you use it they encourage the use of it and frequent hand washing which we always have done even before covid was a thing. During our trip they were also shutting the rides down once an hour to clean all the ride vehicles, the length of time the ride was down depended on how much they had to clean. On average this took about 10 minutes which added to the already long wait times. At the current time the fastpass and single rider lines are closed. The standby lines were longer than we would normally ever stand in. The longest we waited was close to 2 hours to ride the new Mickey and Minnie runaway train ride at Hollywood Studios. Even with the limited capacity at the parks it still felt crowded, the week days were a little less crowded than the weekends but both busier than we expected.
Not all the dining is back up at the parks and resorts. The quick service locations are set up for mobile ordering only, if you want to pay cash or having trouble using the app a cast member will walk you to a register. The few character dining locations that are open have the characters waving at a distance and will allow you to take photos/selfies from afar. If you order a drink a cast member will get it for you, same if you purchased a refillable mug at your resort you just show your mug and the cast member will get you a fresh cup with your beverage of choice.