Where to Stay - The Easy Guide to Your First Walt Disney World Visit 2015 - page 91

Also, the Campsites at Disney's Fort Wilderness Resort are remarkably inconvenient
compared to the other Walt Disney World resorts. While often thought of as out of the way,
the resort is actually located just across Bay Lake and Seven Seas Lagoon from the Magic
Kingdom. Its inconvenience comes not from its location, but rather from the internal bus
system that the sprawling Fort Wilderness Resort uses.
To get to any theme park, two transportation actions are required: an internal bus to the
appropriate transfer point, and then an external bus or boat to the park itself. This can easily
add half an hour or more to daily transportation times—adding up to seven or eight extra
hours wasted on internal bus trips over the course of an eight-night visit.
Moreover, simply moving around the seven-hundred acre resort—getting to the pool,
the shops, the playgrounds—can be a chore. Even if you have a car, you are discouraged
from using it in the campground itself, both officially and by the lack of parking spaces
where you might want to go.

Other On-Property Hotels
There are two groups of resorts operated by third parties on Disney property.
First, there's a group of four that are comparable to the Disney deluxe resorts in room
size, quality, amenities, and location. These are Shades of Green, the Swan, the Dolphin,
and the Four Seasons.
•

Shades of Green is an inexpensive deluxe-level resort near the Polynesian for U.S.
service members, career military retirees, other eligible guests, and their families
and sponsored friends. For more on Shades of Green, see ShadesOfGreen.org and
Steve Bell's MilitaryDisneyTips.com .

• The Swan and Dolphin are deluxe hotels near the Epcot resorts—a little closer to

Hollywood Studios than Epcot, compared to the other Epcot resorts. The Swan and
Dolphin, at press time, are the only non-Disney resorts where FastPass+ is avail-
able at 60 days rather than 30 days, and are known for unusual exteriors, hardly any
Disney theming, conventions, great and varied restaurants, wider and more varied
discounts than at the Disney properties, and for a wonderful shared pool complex.
With about 2,200 rooms in all, both resorts are competitively priced, but suffer
from a daily $17 resort fee, in addition to $15 per day for parking.

• The Four Seasons Resort Orlando opened in 2014 as the first five-star resort at

Walt Disney World. It has the largest standard rooms on property, great dining for
adults, a character breakfast a couple of times a week with Goofy, and the best
pool complex at Walt Disney World. Its two bed rooms, oddly enough, offer full
beds, so the least expensive sensible option for most families will be a room that
combines a king bed with a fold-out sofa. A connecting full bed room could then
hold Nanny and other staff—or the kids. Multiple suites are available, including a
nine bedroom space that goes for $12,000 a night. For that, you could rent an entire
64-room accommodations building at Caribbean Beach and still have a couple of
grand left over each night for cognac and cigars—losing, however, a certain élan.
At press time, Four Seasons did not participate in any Disney hotel perks, includ-
ing EMH.