Disney's Pop Century Resort, Orlando > Reviews > Pop Half Century

Author's product rating:   

Value for Money	Good
Quality of Rooms	Good
Standard of Service	Good
Quality of Facilities	Good

Advantages:	It's a Disney hotel
Disadvantages:	Has the longest bus queue at the parks

Recommend to potential buyers:

yes

Full review

We stayed here last year during the 2nd week of our trip to Orlando, so that we could spend the entire week at Disney.

The hotel itself is one of Disney's newest hotels, and is the newest in the value range. It consists of a main building housing the reception area and the dining/shopping area, and 10 buildings housing the rooms, these buildings are in the shape of a 'T' and are on 4 floors. There are lifts available to get to the top floors, which is very welcome after a long day in the parks when you can't be bothered to walk any further!

There are 3 buildings for the fifties section, the icons for these are a jukebox, and Lady and the Tramp, with giant figures at the entrances. It has its own pool in the shape of a bowling pin, and the entire pool area is very much bowling themed. We stayed in the 'Tramp' building, with a view of the pool. Apparently it is possible to see the Epcot fireworks from the top floor of the Jukebox building.
There are 2 buildings for the sixties section, this is right in front of the main building and is considered 'preferred' (i.e. costs more!) because it is so close. It has its own pool in the shape of a flower and this pool always seemed to be the busiest of all of the pools.
There are 2 buildings for the seventies section (there is no pool in this area) and finally the 2 eighties buildings and the nineties building share a large boring looking square pool (the computer pool).
The hotel has lots of large icons around the area for things that were popular in the 2nd half of the century, e.g. giant rubiks cube, giant Mr & Mrs Potato Head, giant mobile phone etc.

Next to all of these buildings is a large man-made lake in the shape of an hourglass and across the centre of this lake is a bridge called Generation Gap bridge. Once across this bridge you can't actually go any further as it is blocked off, but you can see the foundations and a couple of buildings of the other half of the resort (1900-1940 section) which was started but never completed. It looks a bit sad, as there are a few buildings that look like they were completed, but they haven't been painted or anything.

Back across the bridge to the 1950-1990 section again, and between these buildings and the lake is a very pleasant walkway, this is called Memory Lane and every so often along this path is a sign with some fact on it from a specific year.

The resort appeared very clean, and the rooms were cleaned every day. We saw a few 'towel animals' in some windows, but we didn't get any (probably because we didn't have any children with us) but we bought a Mickey and a Pluto toy and when we came back from the parks one day we found that the 'Mouskeeper' had moved them so that they were sitting together - it was a nice touch.

One minor issue we had was that when we got there it was quite early and our room wasn't ready so we left our luggage with the luggage storage people. They misunderstood us and thought we were leaving, instead of just arriving, so didn't deliver the luggage to our room (which they would have done if they hadn't thought we were leaving).

The dining area was clean, with a reasonable amount of choice, but not exactly encouraging for healthy options - e.g. a small banana cost $1. Other than that, the cost was reasonable. To get to the dining area, you had to go through the shop - something to bear in mind if you have kids!

Back to the room then - it was quite small with 2 beds in it, quite adequate for just the 2 of us but I wouldn't have liked to try to get 4 people in there, it would be a bit of a squash. One other point is that the safe in the room is tiny - about 2 inches from front to back. Not really any good if you want to put a camera or anything like that in there. There also isn't a fridge - they cost extra.

Finally, and the whole point of staying in a Disney hotel - transport to the parks. I can only describe this as adequate - the buses get you to the parks and they bring you back, but at peak times be prepared for a verrrry long wait!! One night after leaving Magic Kingdom we waited for a bus for about an hour and a half - and this was during the off-peak season. After an hour or so there were no queues for buses for any of the other resorts, but the bus queue for Pop Century was still a mile long. This was repeated throughout the week, the bus stop was usually the one furthest from the parks, and it had the longest queue. Also going to the parks at peak time, the queues at the hotel could be quite long - although one evening we were headed to Magic Kingdom for the halloween party, the queue for Magic Kingdom was about 4 busloads and nobody was queuing for Epcot, and the next bus that turned up was for Epcot - we jumped on that and transferred to the Monorail at Epcot and saved a ton of time!

I can't give a price of the resort as it was part of a package, but this is one of the 'Value' resorts which are all the same price so you can't stay at Disney any cheaper - except by camping.

Would we stay there again? Maybe, but the transport issue would make us think twice, there are more rooms there than at any of the other resorts (2880 rooms) so that's a lot of people to get to the parks and back!