Disney Vacation Ideas: Staying At On-Site Resort or Off-Site?
So your family is debating a Disney vacation. With so many options, multiple parks to choose from, lodging on-site or off-site, ground transportation, and scheduling, planning can be a bit overwhelming. In today’s article, I’ll cover a few tips that hopefully will save you so money, make planning easy, and highlight some fun.
Staying on-site at the park
Budget
Each day you will have a number of costs that will drive your overall bill. I’ll use an assumption here of 4 family members (2 adults and 2 kids) traveling during a high travel time (peak season). We’ll take a look at staying on-site and comparing the costs to an off-site option. While there is a wide range for these costs, I will use these sample costs to walkthrough some tradeoffs.
Lodging
If you choose to stay on-site at Disney, you can easily pay $500 – $1000/ night for lodging. This cost includes a number of benefits that could make it worth the premium.
Some key benefits include:
• Free transportation between the airport and hotel
• FastPass+ reservations 60 days prior to arrival
• Reduced parking fees and complimentary transportation to parks
• Dining reservations 180+10 days out
• Free MagicBands
• Disney Dining Plan
• Extra Magic Hours
So let’s compare some costs
Typical offsite hotel might run $150 – $250 / night at an offsite location at a premium hotel brand (e.g. Hyatt, Hilton, Marriot, etc.). While significantly lower cost, than staying on-site, you would then have to add the cost of getting to and from the park (either parking and rental car costs, or Uber/Lyft fees). Some hotels do have shuttles as well, but let’s assume you drive. Parking will add $25/day, and a rental car or Uber will likely run another $40/day. So in total, you are comparing a $200 – $300 offsite option to a $500+ on-site hotel. There are some other hidden costs. If you are staying on-site, you will likely end up eating at the resort. Typical food plan costs range from $20 – $40 per kid, and $50 – $110/adult per night. Clearly you can eat for less outside the resorts, and if you are staying offsite, you will likely have breakfast and dinner at nearly half the cost. This means another $120/ night in savings when staying off-site versus on-site.
This means an on-site nightly cost for Food and Lodging (using the average costs) would be around $750 for the room, and another $220/night in a food plan for approximately $1000/night for the family. Staying offsite lower this to about $250 for Lodging and transportation with another $150 in food for a grand total of $400 night.
Clearly from a pure dollar standpoint, it will be significantly cheaper to stay off-site, so why would one stay on-site?
In the end, the main difference is time. The first time savings is the commute to the park, likely a 30 – 45 minute savings each way for an extra hour or so in the park. In addition to this, on-site hotels offer extended park access, typically letting hotel guests into the park an hour before others arrive. This is likely good for one extra ride. This may not sound like a lot, but it typically can take about an hour to an hour and a half per ride, between walking between the rides, lines, and the ride itself. This means a typical day might only have 5 rides for those with younger kids, and 8 or so with older kids. With an extra hour and a half staying on-site, and the extra hour with less waiting time, the onsite guests get one or two added rides in, which is a 20% – 30% increase in fun time.
In addition, the on-site resorts offer greater FastPass access, with the ability to reserve rides an extra 30 days earlier than those not staying on-site. Again, this is key to quickly getting on the rides you want.
If you plan to visit different parks during your stay, some of the time savings will be eliminated, as you will still need to shuttle to the resorts that are off-site from your hotel.
The Verdict
Is this worth an extra $300 – $600/night? For my family it never really was, but if you have members of your family where the logistics getting back and forth make it challenging, the convenience may be worth it to you. Also, if you can find on-site hotels that offer discounted pricing that close the gap, to a more modest difference, it may be worth it as well.
At these costs, you might want to compare staying at Disney to going on a Disney Cruise. To see the verdict on that, take a look at: Resort vs. Cruise
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