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A Different look at Disney...

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This is hardly a breaking news story, nor is it an investigation of anything unique. I venture to say, in fact, that the vast majority of people who have ever traveled to Walt Disney World (WDW) have walked the road I intend to explore today. I did it myself on more than one occasion, in fact, when I was a non-local visitor several years ago (for the record, I've lived here since 2004).

I'm referring to the hugely fundamental decision -- perhaps even the very first decision to make about a Disney trip -- about choosing a hotel. Every so often, you run into a helpful tip on Disney websites, urging uninitiated visitors to stay at the Disney hotels no matter what. "It's important to be surrounded by the Disney magic all day and all night," they exclaim, "and it's worth the extra expense!" Some go so far as to proclaim this to be the single most important tip for new visitors.

I have a confession to make. I have my doubts about this supposed benefit. Part of my confession must be to admit that I have never stayed in a Disney hotel, though I think I have the basic concept down. It's a themed room, most of the time anyway, and there are channels on the TV that blare Disney movies or even better, nonstop promo videos of the theme parks. But I've never plunked down the extra dollars required to see this for myself. I've been in the lobbies and common areas of the Disney hotels -- all of them -- and have a good handle on those parts as well as the restaurants. I just haven't been in the rooms themselves.

My rationale has always been, back when I was a tourist, that I did not intend to use these rooms for anything beyond sleeping and bathing, so there was little justification for spending a dime more than necessary. So long as the room was clean and not too noisy, I figured, I could care less if it was themed or not. My interest was in sleeping soundly, jumping out of bed, showering quickly, and heading off for a 14-hour day of fun in the sun with the Mouse.

Who cares if the sheets don't have Disney characters? Why would I need a Disney theme park channel anyway, if I'm arriving home at 11 pm and falling directly into dreamless sleep, only to wake up at 7 am the next morning, my head immediately pounding with impatience that we need to HURRY UP ALREADY and get out the door? There's no time for television in that kind of scenario. I was in many ways the quintessential "Orlando Commando," the kind of person who maximized every second in the park and saw it as a mission in life to get on every ride at least once, ideally with enough time left over for re-rides late in the day.

The cold calculus of simple economics therefore determined that I stay not on property, but rather at the cheapest possible off-property motel. We settled on Motel 6 most of the time, trying both the one on US-192 East and the one on US-192 West. I never had a problem. I found them clean, quiet enough, and perfectly serviceable.

It's not that I'm immune to the intoxication of theming. I melt into a different person whenever I step into the lush lobby of the Polynesian, for instance. It's always a great feeling, at least for the first few minutes. But the effect doesn't really persist for hours on end, and even more importantly, the effect was less pronounced at the cheaper Disney hotels -- there's no such melting at Pop Century, for instance -- and so one realizes there really must be a dollar value to all of this.


Pop Century doesn't offer the same kind of escapism as the deluxe hotels.

And that's exactly the point. For me, the dollar values simply do not, and never have, added up. To illustrate the point, I looked up a date in the near future and compared the price of the hotels. For this venture, I choose November 8, 2008, a Saturday just before the Veteran's Day holiday. I figure a Saturday on a 3-day weekend is fair game, since a good many tourists might actually want to travel when they have extra days off work.

Here are the results, all of them calculated for my family of two adults, a five year old, and a one year old, and for double-beds:

Disney's Grand Floridian Resort & Spa - $385

Disney's Polynesian Resort - $340
Disney's Beach Club Resort - $325
Disney's Yacht Club Resort - $325
Disney's BoardWalk Inn - $325
Disney's Contemporary Resort - $270

The Cabins at Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort - $255
Walt Disney World Dolphin - $249
Walt Disney World Swan - $249

Disney's Animal Kingdom Lodge - $225
Disney's Wilderness Lodge - $225

Disney's Caribbean Beach Resort - $149
Disney's Coronado Springs Resort - $149
Disney's Port Orleans Resort French Quarter - $149
Disney's Port Orleans Resort Riverside - $149

Disney's Pop Century Resort - $82
Disney's All-Star Movies Resort - $82
Disney's All-Star Music Resort - $82
Disney's All-Star Sports Resort - $82

Motel 6 on 192-East (franchise #646) - $33

The Disney prices, as you can see, are noticeably higher than Motel 6. Almost 250% higher, in fact, when you compare the cheapest Disney hotel to the off-property motel (I dare not compare Grand Floridian to Motel 6 on percentages!) I suppose we can't be too surprised about that.

What did surprise me was what happened on the Disney.com website when you go beyond the standard rate and put in a quote for an actual one-night stay at the Polynesian. It came back with a price of $1,074.16 for a single day -- the price seemed to include park tickets for me and my family. I was a little confused by this default setting on the website, until I learned how to take it out.


I'm not the only one who feels like it's a different world at the Poly, right?

Since a realistic vacation is not one day long, but a whole week, I switched my travel dates to November 8-14, and learned that the Polynesian would cost me $4,912.28. Again, this figure included parkhopper tickets, and this time I saw that it included the more expensive lagoon view, also by default. Can't blame Disney for trying, you might think, except that you can. The metaphorical reaching into my pocket has started even before my trip reservations are made!

The other option on screen, the free Disney's Magical Express (DME) shuttle bus to and from the airport, was defaulted in the OFF position, for no apparent reason except perhaps to save Disney money. Sure, you could turn it on and then have DME for free, but you have to know to take this step. Turning on the expensive options and turning off the free option by default strikes me as customer-unfriendly. They can do better. Has the website always done this?

Stripping out the park tickets and resetting to the less-expensive garden view (the Disney Dining Plan was not offered by default, thank goodness), the week at the Polynesian shrunk in price to a mere $2,693.


The most expensive hotel is not the Polynesian, but the Grand Floridian.
It's elegant, I'll admit that!

I took a quick glance again at the Motel 6 costs and mentally shook my head. I hadn't priced out the whole week yet, but if a single day was $33, that huge cost for the Polynesian was going to dwarf the Motel 6 cost. As a tourist, this was usually as far as my calculations needed to go. I would save hundreds (or in this case, literally thousands) of dollars by not staying at the Polynesian. Sure, the theming is lush and the monorail is convenient. But would "being surrounded by the magic" really be worth two thousand dollars?

Maybe a budget Disney hotel, I thought next, would be more realistically priced. I reset the website for All Star Movies, took out the "preferred room" option that came by default, and removed the parkhopper tickets, and the price was a more sane $671. Curiously, it broke down the nights as $99/each, but my calculations do not show 671 as divisible by 99 with whole numbers, so something was screwy there.

But if you think about it, most people traveling to WDW hotels would want the Disney park tickets (which were actually parkhopper and the "water parks and more" option), so I put those back in and left the other defaults, which added back $81 for a preferred room. The price for the week was now $1,719.85 for my family of four (one of whom is a baby and needs no park ticket, which the website did verify).

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© 2008 Kevin Yee

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