Choosing a Walt Disney World Resort Part 1

Hi there Disney friends,

After you have booked your dining reservations, you may get a chance to breath if you have already booked your resort. There are some advantages to booking your rooms early. The biggest thing is that the earlier you book, the less likely you are to run into a situation where the resort you choose books up. Secondly, (and this goes back to dining) if you have booked your resort stay prior to the 180 day dining reservation window, you would be able to book up to 10 days after the first day—that means you would not have to log back in everyday for the length of your stay (if 10 days or less.)

I know that I started with meals, but planning which resort to stay in is a little different than planning meals. Planning dining requires looking at many aspects of your stay, such as Extra Magic Hours and fastpasses (and what a family can handle in terms of naptimes if traveling with children.) Planning where to stay will come down to five main items (generally in this order): budget, room size (how many people can be in a room,) location within Walt Disney World, size of the resort, and theming. These items are generally not affected by things like park hours or dining decisions. Budget is probably the biggest item that will affect where you will stay. Prices for rooms can start off in the low $100/night area (if “offseason”) and go as high as in excess of $500/night.

Disney has broken down most of the different resorts into 4 categories. (There are some non-Disney resorts either on site or nearby and there are Disney campsites on site.) The entry level category are the value resorts, which are All Star Music, All Star Movies, All Star Sports, Pop Century, and Art of Animation (which prices more like a moderate resort.) These entry level resorts are great for families on a tight budget and who plan to stay in the park most of the day and just use the room as a place to rest and regroup. These resorts are fairly large, but each one has multiple pools and a nice quick service food court. In fact in my opinion, the food courts are a major advantage since they each have many food choices so it is easy for a family with different tastes to find something to eat and not get floundered from eating the same thing every day.

In the next most, I will give a brief breakdown of the other classes of resorts in terms of budget and then I will move into the other pieces of information about deciding on a resort. I hope you are finding these post useful and informative. Again, if you have any specific items you would like for me to address, please email me at brian.herndon@mousemadesimple.com or put a comment below. It is my hope for this to become an interactive blog. Thank you for allowing me to be a part of your Disney vacation.