Picking Your Walt Disney World Resort Based on Convenience

OVERVIEW

This site recommends Disney’s Polynesian and Pop Century Resorts based on their combination of convenience and kid-appeal.  If you need to pick a different resort, this material addresses the convenience of all resorts.

The same material is organized in two different ways.

  • One list ranks all resorts in order of convenience. You’ll find it here.
  • Another list groups the resorts by price category (see this for what you get by price category), and then by convenience, so you can see the most convenient resorts within a price level, and can be found here.

The rest of this page gives the basis for these lists, and ends with a note on future visits.

CONVENIENCE IS RELATIVE 

  • No Walt Disney World Resort is more than 6 miles from the furthest theme park.  Even so, differences in travel time can make a difference in your overall enjoyment of your first family trip, as depending on where you stay, you may be taking as many as 20 bus rides on the Walt Disney World transportation system over the course of your vacation.  A less convenient resort that adds an extra ten minutes per bus ride adds up to more than three hours of wasted time. That’s an afternoon at the pool lost, or two great naps!
  • Convenience is also relative to where you are going.  On your first family vacation, the key destinations are Epcot and the Magic Kingdom.  If you pay more attention to the Basic Itinerary than you really should be at this stage of your planning, you will note that you will be going to or returning from the Magic Kingdom area ten times on your visit, and six times to or from Epcot.  In contrast, Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom together account for only 3 trips. (The odd number is not because you are abandoned you at a park, but because you don’t return to your resort from the Animal Kingdom, but rather go from the Animal Kingdom to Fort Wilderness for the Hoop Dee Doo Revue.)

 NOT JUST TRAVEL TIMES BUT ALSO VARIABILITY

There are a number of sources in books and on the web for travel times. They are mutually inconsistent, and in some cases internally inconsistent.  So I rode a lot of buses in 2007, and the recommendations below are partially based on this data, supplemented by what seem to be more reliable other sources, as well as a couple of other factors:

  • Beside total trip time, another key basis of my recommendations is that, given the small number of trips you are taking, normal variability can swamp any point estimates of total trip time.  Variability comes from three sources. 
    • First, the buses, although typically expected every 15 to 20 minutes, are not on an exact schedule. Other transportation modes (boats and monorails) are also variable.  All of the instructions in the daily itineraries about when to be at a stop add extra time to account for this variability. 
    • Second, buses can be delayed in loading from large crowds on or off the bus, and/or the need to load or unload wheelchairs and scooters. 
    • Third, most buses serve more than one stop–multiple stops at one resort, or stops at multiple resorts, or both–and each added stop adds not just length but also variability to total trip time.
  • Also, different resorts are served by buses with wildly varying resort rooms potentially served per bus, ranging from around 700 to near 4,000. Larger numbers of potential guest rooms served per bus indicate that you may need to wait in line for a second bus because the people ahead of you in line fill up the first bus to drive up, and also hints at whether you are likely to have to stand on your trip.

The lists rank resorts by convenience in terms of total likely trip time (weighted based on trips in the Basic Itinerary), adjusted for variability and for (weighted) resort rooms served per bus.

  • One list ranks all resorts in order of convenience. You’ll find it here.
  • Another list groups the resorts by price category (see this for what you get by price category), and then by convenience, so you can see the most convenient resorts within a price level, and can be found here.

 NOTE FOR FUTURE VISITS

Convenience varies based on what you plan to do, and you will do different things in your future vacations, which likely will make the Epcot resorts more convenient then than they are for your first family trip. 

This is because the parks at Walt Disney World are laid out like a backwards L, with the Magic Kingdom at the top of the L, the Animal Kingdom at the end of the bottom of the backwards L, and Epcot and Hollywood studios at the corner of the backwards L.  One of the Epcot resorts will put you in the center of the action.

Resorts that will move up the convenience scale for future trips because of this include the Beach and Yacht Clubs, Boardwalk, Caribbean Beach, and Pop Century.

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