Keys to the Kingdom Tour at the Magic Kingdom Review
One of the longer, more extensive tours, offered at Disney World is the Keys to the Kingdom Tour in the Magic Kingdom. This tour gives you a backstage pass to the Magic Kingdom and offers a boatload of information on the history of the park and how they create magic every day. The highlight of the tour for many is being able to tour the utilidors that run underneath the Magic Kingdom!
We were lucky enough to do this tour, and it has become one of our favorites! There are various start times offered throughout the day, we opted to do the first tour of the day which for our day started at 8:00 in the morning.
The day we took this tour we were let into the park just before 8:00, and quickly made our way over to the Town Square Theater where the check-in is located. At check-in we found our nametags quickly, then filled out our lunch order. This day lunch was served at Pecos Bills and there was a good selection of food to choose from.
Our tour ended up started a few minutes late this morning since we were waiting for some people, but after about 5 minutes we headed out without them. So lesson learned, do not be late to the tour!
The tour starts with a group chat at the base of Main Street. Here we learned about each Key to the Kingdom, and went over the rules of the tour (mainly no photos backstage). We all had headsets to hear the guide as well, which was helpful as we made our way down Main Street and got spread out a bit.
I’m not going to divulge a lot of information here on what we learned since I don’t want to spoil this tour for others, but we did make our way slowly down Main Street with our guide pointing out interesting tidbits to be found on the buildings we passed.
We regrouped in the Hub to finish going over the hidden details of Main Street before we headed over towards Adventureland.
Now, at this point of the day Adventureland was not open to park guests yet, but being on the tour we got to bypass the line of people waiting to rope drop and headed into a completely empty land. This on it’s own was amazing. Being in the land without the crowds you can hear all the sounds and really appreciate the little touches that you don’t normally notice.
In Adventureland we stopped to discuss a few interesting things and point out some magic touches before we headed to the Jungle Cruise for our first ride of the day. We were on our own boat, and being part of the tour the skipper didn’t do the usual script, instead our guide took the mic and pointed out a ton of details on the ride that we had never noticed before. She also talked a lot about how the ride worked, and went into how Disney hides things in plain sight.
It was a very informative trip on the Jungle Cruise!
We next headed towards Frontierland where we were brought to the backstage area next to what used to be Splash Mountain. This is the area the parade starts from, so we spent a few minutes learning about how the performers got ready for the parade and even made our way back to the storage area for the parade floats. Since this area is backstage, we were not allowed to take pictures.
Our next stop was the holding tank for the water on (the former) Splash Mountain. Our guide went over a handful of facts about the ride that were actually very surprising! I will not spoil anything, but I will warn, don’t lose anything on that ride (when it reopens as Tiana’s), you’re not getting it back!
The tour continued with us heading further backstage to the canal where the barges for the Electric Water Pageant are stored. We had a brief stop here to learn some interesting things about that show before we moved on.
At this point it was lunch time, so we made our way to Pecos Bills.
Here they had an entire room set aside for our tour and tables were assigned, with nametags with our tour pin attached. Once settled in, the food we had selected at check-in was brought out and we had a very enjoyable lunch. Our party got the chicken salad and the chicken lettuce wraps. Both were delicious!
After lunch the tour continued on to the Haunted Mansion. We stopped briefly out front to discuss the design of the building and details of the ride before heading backstage to get on the ride. This time our guide let us enjoy the ride without any commentary since she had pointed out some things to keep an eye out for prior to boarding.
Our next stop was a store in Fantasyland where we entered a cast only area that lead down into the utilidors. This is the highlight of the tour to many, and we were surprised that they were not at all what we expected. In fact it ended up being our least favorite part of the tour!
Our guide led us through various sections of the utilidors, stopping occasionally to point out things of interest. We were not down there for very long, we explored about three of the corridors before heading back up to the guest level on the backside of Main Street. At this point we were wrapping up the tour so the guide asked if we had any questions.
We were then lead out of the backstage area, handed in our earpieces, and said our goodbyes. Overall the tour was about 5 hours.
Our impression of the tour was that it was really well done and very informative. There was a lot of information given that we already knew just from writing about Disney and doing our own research, but there was also a good amount of new information as well that kept the tour interesting. We would definitely recommend this tour, especially if you love the history of Disney World and learning about how they create the magic.
