2012
Disney
Travel / Airport Transfer / Hotel Area
We had pre-booked the ‘Disney’s Magical Express’ bus transfer, it is a free airport transfer service if you stay in certain Disney’s hotels. Some buses where wheelchair capable. The driver will use tie down hocks/straps to lock your wheelchair in place so it cannot move during the trip.
Video screens play Disney ‘Welcome to Disney’ videos on the way to the hotel, and goodbye videos on the way back to the airport – all with Disney characters.
When leaving, we where able to check in a lot of our luggage just on the outside of the hotel earlier in the day so we did not have to deal with it at the airport.
The bus will likely pick up passengers at several Disney hotels along the way usually in the same area.
If you booked early enough the tickets for the ‘ Disney Magical Express’ bus will be sent to you by mail, otherwise print out your reservations and check in when arriving at the airport. On the return the tickets will be delivered to your hotel room a day or two before your leave.
The ‘All Star Sports’ Hotel (as well as other nearby ‘All Star’ Disney resorts) are a series of 3 story buildings, each with a different theme, in our case with a different sports theme, the lobby / food court / gift shop is actually a building by itself.
You have to go outside the lobby building to get to the building where your actual hotel room is located. Outside corridors on each level take you to the rooms. Two elevators in each building, and there are accessible rooms with roll in shower / shower seat (you do have to specify this when booking if you require one). Now normally 2 elevators are enough, but we happen to be there when a very rare event happened and they lost most power to 4 buildings, apparently a transformer blew and part of an underground line was also damaged basically leaving me unable to leave the second floor where my room was. Hotel staff would not assist in getting the wheelchair down the steps or help me down the steps (likely an insurance thing), they offered to get the fire department to get me down but I was not sure I wanted to go to all that much fuss and attention. I had several family members with me, and they carried the over 300 pound power wheelchair down the steps and then helped me down, they resolved the problem by late morning.
Two swimming pools where on the hotel grounds as well as a playground. There is a Macdonald’s in the area. If ordering Pizza from outside of the resort you will have to go to the front entrance of the lobby to pickup as they do not deliver to the room.
All Disney transportation to the parks is free and wheelchair accessible, and they get the wheelchair on before other passengers.
Most of the city buses (I seen one that was not wheelchair accessible) are wheelchair accessible that can take you to places like the outlet shops, Sea World, Universal, Florida mall. However I must warn you check the schedules in advance as certain bus routes end as early as 10 or 10:20 PM, after visiting the outlet shops we took the bus back to the Florida Mall where we should have been able to get another bus to ‘Downtown Disney’ where we could get the Disney bus to the hotel, but when we got to the Florida mall the last bus back to ‘Downtown Disney’ had already left and we had to get a taxi back to the hotel. The best way to get connected to the city system is to take the free Disney bus to ‘Downtown Disney’ then on the street beside there you can get the city bus. Unlike the Disney buses, the city buses are not free.
By: Donald Kerr