We’ve had a chance to check out the new Port Orleans Riverside Royal Guest Rooms, and we have thoughts! But this isn’t just a chance to discuss the design shift Disney made with these rooms. It turns out there’s a whole new playbook for deciding whether these rooms are right for you. Read on to learn all about the Royal Guest Rooms at Port Orleans Riverside Resort!
This post focuses specifically on the Royal Guest Rooms. For a more comprehensive review of the entire Port Orleans Riverside Resort, click here.
Royal Guest Room Basics
The Royal Guest Rooms are a unique room category at Port Orleans Riverside Resort. They don’t come with any special perks or “royal treatment”—they just have their own unique design compared to other rooms at the resort.
The Disney World website treats Royal Guest Rooms as their own category with their own price—booking one guarantees one of these rooms, you don’t have to request one. The Royal Guest Rooms are located in only one building, building 95, in the Magnolia Bend (“mansions”) area of the resort:
A Look at a Royal Guest Room at Port Orleans Riverside
Let’s start with the elephant in the room—the new Royal Guest Rooms lost a ton of character compared to the old ones. That’s just not up for debate. With that said, I think some people have been too quick to overlook that the room overall is still somewhat elevated compared to that old design.
The new rooms are elegant in a way the old rooms simply were not. The old rooms felt like they were someone wanting to “play prince(ss)”, the new rooms feel like nice Disney hotel rooms. How that positions them relative to other rooms at Riverside is a discussion for below. For now, let’s turn talk about the specifics of the rooms…
On the functional side, these rooms measure up to Disney’s latest and greatest. There’s plenty of storage space under the bed (I was worried I’d forget something!) and next to the vanity. And our loyal reader knows I love a big console under the TV to dump my park bag out onto at the end of the long day.
Those headboards have lights in them and a night mode (the scene itself changes to a night scene) that I failed to photograph. They’re a fun little feature, for sure.
There are plenty of outlets—along the console, on the wall next to one bed, and between the two beds. I’d prefer a Keurig to a Cuisinart, and it would be a nice way to distinguish these rooms from the rest of Riverside, but I’ll never win that battle.
The bathroom area is separated into a vanity and toilet/shower room. The two sinks at the vanity allow for two people to get ready at the same time, and the sliding door between the vanity and bedroom maybe allows you to do so while a third person gets a few extra minutes of shuteye. There’s also a step-stool under the vanity for anyone who needs a boost.
The toilet+shower room is typical of modern Disney World rooms, with sliding doors, a clothesline, and mounted toiletry dispensers. The shower has both an overhead and handheld option.
My only actual complaint about these rooms is that the shower pressure was low for my liking. It wasn’t at all unusable, and it’s never clear whether this is a single room, building-wide, or resort-wide issue. I rolled my eyes a bit when I noticed (“royal” treatment, hmph), but it wouldn’t impact my decision to book these rooms again.
Let’s close with a look at where these rooms really shine, the theming. There were details and patterns throughout, which makes other Disney rooms feel a bit bare by comparison. This is one thing these rooms have in common with the old Royal Guest Rooms—they leave you feeling like this is what a Disney hotel room should be like.
Among the design choices, only the decision to keep a “themed” table strikes me as a little odd. I think they did their best to elevate the idea, but it still just looks a little kitschy to me.
Otherwise, I think the level of detail here is more impressive than what other moderate rooms have to offer. Sure, the rooms may have lost the “pop” of the old rooms, and the detailing alone might not be worth the price Disney charges for these rooms (more on this next), but when I look at other Disney hotel rooms, this one seems to pretty squarely fall between moderate and deluxe rooms, which is a good place to be for a premium room in a moderate hotel.
Are the Royal Guest Rooms at Port Orleans Riverside Worth It?
While a lot of people have commented on the reduced theming in the Royal Guest Rooms, that’s not the only thing that’s changed. Their relative price point has changed, too.
For whatever reason, Disney has reimagined the role that Royal Guest Rooms play in the Port Orleans Riverside room portfolio. This isn’t simply “oh no, they missed the design mark on this one!”—it’s a deliberate shift in how they’re positioning the rooms.
As proof(ish), let’s look at some summer (the season I happened to visit in) prices of preferred (not Royal) rooms compared to the Royal Rooms:
2023 Summer: Riverside Preferred - $395; Royal Guest Room - $411
2027 Summer: Riverside Preferred - $474; Royal Guest Room - $453
So you can see that back in 2023 when the Royal Guest Rooms were actually something special, Disney priced them at a higher rate than preferred locations of non-Royal rooms. When we look to 2027, when Royal Guest Rooms aren’t such an upgrade in terms of quality, they actually are a lower price than a preferred location.
Whatever the reasoning behind this shift, it’s a definite shift. The Royal Rooms are no longer priced as the premium rooms at Port Orleans Riverside. Rather, they’re priced as a premium option. (For comparison, the lowest priced summer room at Riverside in 2023 was $322, and in 2027 will be $351, so the “premium” paid for both location and Royal theming has gone up.)
As to whether they’re worth it, I’ll start with one easy line to draw—the Royal Guest Rooms are absolutely not worth staying at Riverside unless you were otherwise going to stay here. This is a shift from how I saw the old rooms, which were a unique treat in themselves.
If you are planning at staying at Riverside, are the Royal Guest Rooms worth the extra $100-ish over a standard room? Probably not, but I’ve got some mental gymnastics that would get me there…
To start, if I just had to be at Riverside for some reason, I generally wouldn’t be thinking about paying the premium for a Royal Guest Room. When you view the design details in a vacuum, on a blog post highlighting them, they look cool.
But the truth is I looked at videos of other Magnolia Bend rooms while writing this post and got confused, thinking I’d clicked into other Royal Guest Room videos. It’s almost as if the regular Magnolia Bend rooms feel like what you’d get if you looked at the Royal Guest Rooms and said “save some money without wrecking this concept.”
This brings us to a more awkward topic—the Alligator Bayou rooms. These rooms have their own theming, but for booking purposes they’re treated the same as Magnolia Bend rooms. You can request a room in the Magnolia Bend section, but it isn’t a guarantee…unless you book a Royal Guest Room.
The Alligator Bayou rooms are set for refurbishment over the coming year, but they are functionally still behind the Magnolia Bend and Royal Guest Rooms. You could research those rooms a little more and easily conclude the guarantee of a Magnolia Bend room is worth the cost of a Royal Guest Room.
Finally, if you’re planning to pay for preferred location at Riverside, you might consider whether the Royal Guest Room is a better option for what you’ve budgeted. I find transportation at Riverside to be a pain from all angles, unless you have a car. The buses make multiple stops, and even some preferred rooms are going to have a bit of a stroll to the pool or the bus stop or the main building.
PortOrleans.org has a good map highlighting preferred room locations. It’s a little hard for me to think I’d like to pay more to be in Alligator Bayou building 27 than in a Royal Guest Room in building 95, for example. If your budget allows you some breathing room above the standard room rate at Port Orleans Riverside, spend some time making sure the preferred location is where you’d like to spend that extra money.
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