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(For the first page of this review of Disney’s Beach Club Resort, click here.)

PHOTO TOUR OF A BEACH CLUB ROOM

Standard rooms at Disney’s Beach Club Resort sleep either four on two queens or five on two queens and a sofa that converts to a bed.

The floor plan is for a four person room, and the photos from my January 2019 visit (my fifth stay in the Beach Club, with four more in the Beach Club Villas) are of a five person room.

As is typical among Disney’s Deluxe resorts, when you enter the room the bath is on one side and the closet on the other.

On the closet side you’ll find this coffee service.

It includes a small storage drawer…

…and below a mini-fridge.

Also on this side is the large closet. Here’s one side. Note the ironing board, etc.

The other side of the closet. Note the safe.

I did not measure the safe, but my book is 6 inches by 9 inches, so the safe is plenty big.

On the other side you’ll find the bath, starting with a pair of sinks.

Bath toiletries.

In a separate space you’ll find the toilet and tub.

The showerhead–and more toiletries.

Deeper in the room you’ll find two queens on one side, and in the rooms with the fifth sleeping spot, also the desk. Four person rooms put an easy chair where you see the desk.

Here’s the beds from the other side…

…and a close up of one of the beds.

Between the beds is a bedside table with a couple of storage drawers below and curiously designed shelves above.

The large bedside table drawers have plenty of room for your important books.

In five-person rooms the desk is also on this side of the room. As is common in the Disney deluxe resorts, it includes a small rolling table that plays multiple roles: perch the kids on the bed and roll it up to them for dining or games, or use it as a better-height laptop table.

The other side of five person rooms has a dresser with TV above and a couch (in four person rooms, the desk replaces the couch.)

The TV side from the back of the room.

A closer shot of the dresser. I measured the TV at 54 inches.

The dresser includes five drawers and two shelves/cubbies.  This, the other drawers in the room, and the closet means plenty of storage for the four or five people these rooms will hold. (Note that the dresser  is not scuffed, that’s “design,” you philistine.)

Five person rooms include a couch that folds down into a bed.

After you find the black lever at the right corner of the cushion…

…the back flips down to this bed. I measured the cushion as 72 inches long, with two or three more inches of toe-wiggling room. Mattress width is 32 inches, and the cushion is 4 inches+ deep. I had no trouble sleeping on it except that it’s a little short for my height.

There’s four types of balconies at the Beach Club.

• First floor rooms commonly have good-sized patios.
• Top-floor rooms have balconies narrower than some, but just as wide, and quite livable
• Many “middle” floor rooms have teeny balconies that you can barely stand on–or stand. You may find these on the second floor of three story buildings, the third floor of four story buildings, and the third and fourth floors of buildings that have five stories
• The second floor of four or five story buildings tends to have full size balconies

(Not every room at every level will be as I describe…)

At one stay we had a narrow balcony that was just fine.

Here’s a smaller balcony from a different room from another trip. Note my Mickey Croc as an aid to scale. My croc is a foot long, so you can see how uselessly narrow these balconies are. You can stand on them, but that’s it.

On another stay we had a first-floor patio.

These rooms are otherwise nicely proportioned and have all the right furnishings.

In their 2015 refurb these rooms lost much of their former charm…although this print, new with that refurb,  is very cute!!!

DINING AT DISNEY’S BEACH CLUB RESORT

This review continues here.

PAGES IN THIS REVIEW OF DISNEY’S BEACH CLUB RESORT

• Overview and summary of Disney’s Beach Club Resort
• Theming and accommodations at the Beach Club
• A photo tour of a Beach Club room
• Dining at the Beach Club
• Amenities at the Beach Club
• Stormalong Bay, the Beach Club’s main pool

OTHER KEY PAGES FOR WHERE TO STAY AT DISNEY WORLD

• Where to stay–the Basics
• Where first-timers should stay
• Reviews of all the Disney World resorts, based on my 160+ stays in them

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Chapter 8 of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit (now available on Kindle!) covers “Which Tickets to Buy and What to Budget.”

(I’ve previously published an introduction to the easy Guide, and discussed Chapter 1,  Chapter 2,  Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6 and Chapter 7.)

Most first-timers do just fine with standard Magic Your Way tickets, with no add-ons. But we also cover the add-ons, their prices, and when and when not they might be useful.

Helping people sort out what to budget is much more complicated, as it varies by group size, ages, length of stay, timing within Disney’s price seasons, and, most importantly, which hotel price class. But we do our best…

We also present some thoughts on saving money–and on spending even more!

Click the link to find The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit on Amazon!

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Chapter 6 of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit (now available on Kindle!) covers “How to Spend Your Time.”

(I’ve previously published an introduction to the easy Guide, and discussed Chapter 1,  Chapter 2,  Chapter 3, Chapter 4, and Chapter 5.)

Chapter 6 is the heart of The easy Guide, as it covers why people actually come to Walt Disney World–the four theme parks. At about a hundred pages it’s also the longest chapter, accounting for more than a third of the book.

After the usual introductory stuff, Chapter 6 begins with an overview of FastPass+. FastPass+ (and My Disney Experience, covered in Chapter 9) is the heart of Disney’s brand new attempt to make visits less burdensome, and if well-strategized works really well for first-timers. A key contribution we make in Chapter 6 is delivering those strategies.

After that we cover the principles of designing an itinerary, and then give some example integrated multi-day itineraries. Because we know not everyone can use them as is–or even at all–we then cover each park overall and review each ride in the parks, so that those who need to can pick and choose from among them. Our reviews are very brief, and meant not to tell the whole story of each ride, but rather just enough to guide people to or away from them.

At the end of the Chapter are the Cheat sheets, one for each park.  These include maps (better printed from here, by the way) and step by step touring plans designed so that people who can’t use the integrated itineraries presented earlier in the chapter can put together their own visits quickly and easily.

There’s a bit of redundancy between the Cheat Sheets and some of the earlier material in the chapter–which is purposeful, as we wanted the Cheat Sheets to stand on their own, so that you could tear them out and use them in the parks without having to pull the book along with you.

Of course you could instead simply take the Kindle edition along with you on your phone, and thus avoid tearing our book up!

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For a limited time–at least through the end of June, everyone who buys the paperback version of
The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit can get the Kindle edition–which we will update–for free!

Got yours yet?  Click here to buy!  And once you’ve gotten the paperback, see Josh’s post here on how to get the free Kindle version!

The Kindle version–besides being updated–is also handier in many ways, since it will travel with you not just on your Kindle but also on on your laptop, phone, etc.

On the other hand, you can’t get Anna and Elsa to sign your Kindle…

…and you will miss the strange romantic effect The easy Guide has in the parks–note this shot of its mysterious powers from the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train queue.

To get the paperback, click here, and for the Kindle, click here.

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The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit is now available on Kindle!

Those with Kindles or any of its apps/readers know how convenient (and inexpensive, and quickly-delivered) Kindle books can be.

For example, getting our guidebook to Walt Disney World on a Kindle means that you can have it on your phone–and you can whip it out and check out our Epcot restaurant reviews while you are in Epcot!

Now, you can’t do everything with an e-book that you can with our paperback…you can’t scribble notes on it or dog-ear key pages.

You can’t get Elsa to sign it…

…you can’t watch with delight as Anna reads it aloud…

…and you can’t end up with one of these.

Because of that, for a limited time we will be giving away a Kindle version to everyone who buys–or has bought–a paperback version, as part of the Kindle Matchbook program.

As soon as I understand how the Matchbook program works lol, I’ll post about it!  But in the meantime, for those of you who don’t want the paperback and have been waiting for the Kindle edition–have at it!

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Chapter 5 of The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit covers “Where to Stay.”

(I’ve previously published an introduction to the easy Guide, and discussed Chapter 1,  Chapter 2,  Chapter 3 and Chapter 4.)

Where to stay matters a lot.  The biggest issue is budget, but also you will spend more time in your hotel and its grounds than any other place during your Disney World visit, and another large use of your time is getting back and forth from your hotel to the parks.

The hotels vary tremendously in their prices, convenience, adult appeal, and kid appeal, and change all the time. As a result, hotels are the weak spot of most other guidebooks and Disney World websites and discussion boards, simply because it takes an enormous amount of effort to keep up with them. For example, just in the Disney-owned resorts there’s more than forty major variants among the standard rooms.

Between us we’ve got your Disney World hotel choices covered.  In the last two years or so I’ve stayed in every major room variant (including sixteen different rooms so far in 2014!), with almost every one of those room visits my third, fourth, fifth or tenth visit to that particular room type at that particular resort.

See the excerpt.  Our stuff on where to stay at Disney World is the best that you will find, anywhere.

Even Anna likes our book!

Check it out: The easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit!

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