If you can’t decide between 2 resorts on Walt Disney World property, you might want do a split resort stay at Walt Disney World Resorts. This is when you check into one Disney World resort for a few days and then transfer to another resort for the duration of your stay. Split stays are also great for those that don’t want to pay for the dining plan for the entire length of your stay. Disney requires you to have the dining plan for all consecutive nights stayed at the same resort. To get around this, you could stay at one resort with the dining plan for 3 nights and then transfer to another resort for the other 4 nights of your trip without the dining plan.
Here’s an example: John and Jane decided to go to Disney World for their anniversary. They weren’t arriving until 8 pm at night, so they decided to stay at Pop Century for the night without purchasing the dining plan. The following morning, they dropped their luggage off with luggage services at Pop Century and then transferred to Wilderness Lodge for 2 nights with the Deluxe Dining plan. By doing a split stay, John and Jane saved almost $400!
Split stays are easy with Disney. Just let luggage services know that you are doing a split stay and they will transfer your luggage between the resorts. This leaves you free to hop on a bus to your favorite park and at the end of the day check into your new resort.
I suggest you check with luggage services when you arrive at the first resort for instructions on transferring between the resorts.
Maybe you will be lucky and receive an unexpected room upgrade at a Walt Disney World Resort.
Learn more about the Walt Disney World Resorts and contact Destinations in Florida to help you book your perfect resort.
We love doing split stays, even with our DVC membership. It allows us to experience the different resorts, even the higher-point/priced ones, without using more points that if we’d stayed there every night of our visit. Just one thing I’d like to point out. If you are on the basic dining (the one where you get 1 CS, 1 TS, and 1 snack pp/pn) plan for both parts of a split stay, your dining plans are separate, and sometimes you have to be careful. If you are on a 1-night stay for part of your trip, and you want to dine at a 2-credit venue, you might have to pay out-of-pocket. Example, my DH and I are staying at Boardwalk for 1 night, than moving to AKL for a few other nights. We can’t dine at a 2-credit dinner that first night unless we pay OOP for one of us. Also, if you use up your first-half (of the split-stay) dining credits before you’ve officially checked-in to your 2nd half resort, you’re out of dining credits until you check in and get your new/revised KTTW card.
We are doing this, this trip. We are staying in DVC AKL( timeshare exchange) for the first 7 days then changing over to the New Mermaid rooms that just opened this month. We are saving allot of money doing it this way. Since we are using our miles to fly it was much easier to book our home flight if we stay. We are saving more on one ticket then it is costing us to stay the extra time. The sacrifices we make to save money right…lol You can see I am just sick over having to do this. (oh wait maybe I should stop jumping up and down about it. ;o) )
Oh we have thought about it in great detail but I just think packing up all my kids stuff as a family of 5 with 10, 5, and 2 y/old would have been a nightmare to stay in a different room. My husband would have killed me. We are very light packers even and do laundry there but the kids get something immediately and accrue stuff, ugghh. I love to unpack first thing and feel at home I think packing up would change that. Except if you did it just the first night and really did not unpack. Good tip.
I recommend this all the time- I know I’d want to try out different resorts and it doesn’t take up too much of your stay. We did this during our last Disneyland visit as well!
I knew you could do a split stay, but didn’t realize that you wouldn’t have to do the dining plan for both stays…great tip! Totally could have done this & saved money on my last stay & will keep it in mind for my next stay!
I did a split stay a few years ago between AKL and CBR. We received a gift card for staying at the “Deluxe” hotel with the dinning package, and then we moved to CBR and used that gift card to pay for the room with the “room only” discount. I honestly was worried about my bags, but that was silly. Everything was fine! Depending on the deal, I’d consider doing this again.
i was just thinking about that but didn’t know i could do that. I want to fly in at night to stay at pop century to use the magical express then the next night stay at the dolphin. But I know check in isn’t until the afternoon so I wasn’t sure what we were going to do with our bags while we went to the park. Have you done this before?
We did this the last time we stayed, because we wanted to stay at the Art of Animation Resort in the Nemo rooms. It was awesome! We didn’t have money to stay there the whole time, but we didn’t want to miss the experience. It was nice. We moved to the Coronado Springs Resort for the remainder of the stay. Plus it worked well for our family, because the first 2 days, my Dad stayed with us and the kids, so there was plenty of room in the suites. Then he had to go back to work on Monday. We switched to a smaller room at the Coronado Springs and were able to save money. I have had people recommend not doing the nicer hotel first. Luckily our kids are young, so they didn’t complain about the second hotel not having a splash water park.
Thanks for posting this! We are doing a split stay in a little over a month between Bay Lake Tower and the Boardwalk and I wasn’t real sure what to do! Thank you read my mind!