Question about Disney World

andyandhillary

Is anyone staying in one of the non-Disney hotels in the Downtown Disney area?  How long did it take you to get to the park using their shuttles? 

alithebride

we did not stay at one of those. i would highly suggest staying at a disney property. the extra hours, shuttle busses, and delivery of purchases from stores to the hotel make it so worthwile!

andyandhillary

Thanks but we already have our hotel booked, it was free and part of a time share.  The Hilton actually does get the extra hours and it does have it's own shuttle bus system (although not as great as Disney's).  I also never purchase things in park that would need to be delivered. 

It's hard to say no to free!

jennylove810

Interesting - I go to Disney about 2x a year (yeah, I'm a huge dork) and when I'm not staying in one of the monorail hotels, I've usually had a pretty good experience with the busses.  Must be hit or miss.

pandasquishy

I stayed at the Regal Sun Resort in Downtown Disney.  All of the Downtown hotels have the same bus system.  There are two sides of the road so you have Downtown Bus A or Downtown Bus B depending on what side of the road your hotel is on.  They loop around and stop at each hotel.  The buses run regularly, about every half an hour.  When they drop you off they tell you what time they'll be back (ex: 17 and 47 after the hour) and they'll tell you what time the last run is.  

Once on the shuttle it only took about ten to fifteen minutes to get to park, including the stops at the other hotels on the line.

Also, just so you know (and just in case) you can ship items from the park back to the downtown disney hotels.  We did it.

Unrelated: I highly suggest you get the Disney photo pass when you get to your first park.  And Disney photog can give you one and they scan if before they take your pic.  Then you can go online after the trip is done as see all your pics at once.  They're really cute, sometimes they photoshop Tinerbell or Stitch into the picture.  You can arrange them into a scrapbook like photo album to be sent you to.  It's a little pricey, but we did it and it came out beautiful.  You can also put the pics on ornaments, magnets, anything.  

HTH!

RachaelA

DH and I refuse to use the buses. We've waited forever for them. We must have bad luck because the few times we used them we waited around 45 minutes for the bus. DTD buses also took the longest for us.

Now we drive everywhere.

andyandhillary

Yeah driving definitely isn't an option because I only have a week for vacation and it takes us 24 hours to drive to Orlando from our hometown in Michigan.   

Thanks, Pandasquishy!  Your info was very helpful.  I read in a travel book that it takes people an hour to get to the parks and I was flabbergasted (and upset)!  Even when I've stayed at the Hard Rock Hotel and other outside ones it didn't take that long! 

I don't mind waiting for buses and when I stayed in the park I thought it was fine.  Maybe that's because I live in a city where public transportation is the main mode of transportation so you deal with waiting for buses/metro for sometimes 20 minutes. 

alithebride

we took the bus on average 4 times a day to and from hotels and other parks for 3 days about 3 weeks ago. we never waited more than 5 minutes and the only park it tooka while to get to was magic kingdon-about15 minutes I guess-but i didn't find them to be anything but super useful and ran on a regular schedule.

andyandhillary

Ali, what time of year did you go and did you stay at the downtown disney hotels?