The Disney Vacation Club today opened its newest property - the Villas at the Disneyland Hotel.
The new Discovery Tower is the fourth tower at the original Disneyland Hotel. Featuring 344 units across 12 floors, the Villas at the Disneyland Hotel are available for DVC members as well as resort guests. At Disney's invitation, I got to tour each of the room types today in advance of check-ins beginning this afternoon.
The tower's lobby features the new mural by Disney Animation's Lorelay Bové, set among mid-century-modern appointments.
Colorful carpets and murals featuring Disney Animation franchises decorate the hallways through the tower.
Let's start in the smallest of the Discovery Tower rooms - the Duo Studio. Themed to the Jungle Cruise, this room offers a pull-down bed - and not much else.
The Deluxe Studio feels more like a traditional hotel room, with a queen-sized bed and a pull-down, along with an under-the-counter refrigerator, microwave, toaster and coffee maker.
In addition to the studios, the Discovery Tower offers three types of Villas: one-, two-, and three-bedroom. We toured a "The Princess and the Frog"-themed one-bedroom Villa, which sleeps up to five people and includes a fully equipped kitchen and stacked washer and dryer.
The two-bedroom Villa we toured was themed to "Fantasia" and sleeps up to nine.
But the highlights of the new tower are the two three-bedroom Grand Villas, which span two floors and sleep up to 12. It also includes a full-sized kitchen with a large dining area, a fireplace, and an expansive balcony overlooking the Disneyland Hotel monorail pool. See the video above for more views of this and the other room types.
If you're staying at one of the three other towers in the Disneyland Hotel, you will have access to the new pool area behind the Villas, including the "Steamboat Willie"-themed splash pad for young visitors.
While these are available for booking with DVC points, the cheapest cash prices I could find on Disney's website for these rooms started at $394 a night for the Duo Studio, then continuing to $525 a night for the Deluxe, $960 for the One Bedroom Villa, $1,397 a night for the Two Bedroom, and $3,727 for the Grand Villa.
In general, I found all of these rooms nicely appointed, with abundant device charging available, well-lit bathrooms with plenty of sinks, and in-room dining available for order, too. With pools on either side of the building, almost all rooms have a pool view, though rooms facing west on the upper floors will have views of the adjacent neighborhoods rather than the Disneyland Resort.
We were not invited to spend the night, so I can't report on the comfort of the beds. Hey, I volunteered.
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They're nice rooms, sure. I would love to stay in any of the ones that did not require me to use a fold-down bed. (Yeah, I'm too old for that anymore.)
Travel and theme parks are passions of mine, and four people in my family have worked for Disney. Yet I never once have been even remotely tempted to buy into DVC.
I get that Disney's market research sees a whole bunch of people like me out there, causing executives to salivate at all that unrealized market share. But DVC, by complicating bookings and inflating pricing across all Disney resorts that have it, just pushes me to book my Orlando vacations at Universal, instead, where there is no timeshare system.
And if I'm going to stay overnight in Anaheim, I would rather book one of the perfectly nice neighbor hotels where I can earn loyalty points while spending far less than I would to stay just a little bit closer with an on-site hotel at Disneyland.
I remember when Walt said "Disneyland is a place exclusively for the super wealthy. I welcome all the sheiks, barons, moneygrubbers and trust fund kids to this place that is theirs and theirs alone. Should a pleeb want to visit, I would expect it would cost them all of their disposable income for the entire year, but to be clear, pleebs are not welcome. Now, let us drink the blood of infants and praise our dark lord, the dollar bill. Amen."
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I'm sure there are people out there that can afford this, and appreciate the thematic touches at the Disneyland Resort Hotels, but there are not enough perks to justify rates that are 2-3x of similarly sized rooms in other hotels within walking distance of the Esplanade. I guess if you're in DVC, you've got to spend your points somewhere, but these new developments (both here and at WDW) are not going to offset the number of DVC owners getting increasingly upset with the program, it's significant price increases of late, devaluing of points, and discontinuing of Tables in Wonderland with little indication that the valuable dining discount program will return.