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THE PIRATE ROOM REFURB AT CARIBBEAN BEACH

I had the chance to stay in the newly-refurbed Pirate rooms at Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort in mid-October–my third stay in a Pirate room, and eighth overall stay at Caribbean Beach, since I started this site.

There’s a complete photo tour of one of these refurbed Pirate rooms here, and I’ve also here and there updated the full review of Caribbean Beach that starts here.

This post is just mean to highlight some of what’s new in these Pirate rooms—and what’s not.

Caribbean Beach is a great resort, especially for families with kids. There are some issues, though. The overall design of the resort yields too many bus stops, and a couple of the villages—specifically Barbados and Trinidad South, where the Pirate rooms are located—are a bit far from the central services, dining and main pool.

Caribbean Beach also was the last of the Disney World moderates to have full sized beds in its standard rooms. But after its recent refurb, standard rooms now have queens, and many of them have a fifth sleeping spot from a Murphy bed as well.

The Pirate rooms, however, kept their full sized beds and four person capacity. Refurbs here focused on new mattresses and new surfaces.

A lot of this refurb was quite successful. For example, pre-refurb the rooms had a heavy nautical theme but a light Pirate theme.

The refurb did not add a ton of pirate stuff, but in fact the simple addition of skull and crossbones pillows to the beds successfully amps up the overall pirate feel.

In the prior version of the room, the carpet was themed as ship planks. This never made much sense, as the bed-ships thus had the appearance of sailing on a ship’s deck.

The new carpet is more abstract, and works much better as a place for the bed-ships. Combined with the (sort of) sky blue of the new wall color (see the images at the top of the post), the overall sense of seafaring is heightened.

The bath shifted from a tiled floor…

…to a plank floor, and nautical detailing—posts, deck beams and their knee supports—was added to the closet.

Also worth noting was the addition of more power points to both the bedside and mini-fridge “barrels.” The net increase is seven more traditional power outlets and four USB charging outlets.

Overall, this is a minor but successful refurb.

However, the Pirate rooms are still distant and inconvenient, still have full beds, still sleep four rather than five, and are still a fair bit more expensive than more convenient standard Caribbean Beach rooms. (Most 2016 price seasons they are $50-$85 more per night than standard rooms.) So it’s pretty hard for me to recommend them for first time family visitors.

In addition to the room refurb, I saw another new thing at Trinidad South—a food truck.

The food truck menu (as always on this site, click it to enlarge it).

This food truck—if it sticks around—would go a long way to moderating one of the issues with the Pirate rooms—their distance from the dining venues at Old Port Royale.

The ESPN theming of the truck doesn’t help the overall piratical ambiance (unless it makes you think of the piratical price of your cable bill), and you won’t want to take every meal here—but having an option that doesn’t require a walk or bus or car ride does really increase the livability of Trinidad South.

For more on the Pirate rooms, see this.

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