2024 Disney World Hotel Prices: When to Go, When to Say No

Well, summer is over and the holidays are heading in fast. Lots of people are planning Disney World trips for 2024, and that means it’s time to take a look at Disney World resort prices. How much room can you get for your budget? How many extra days can your money buy if you stay in a Value resort instead of a Moderate? How much more will you pay to find a place for that third kid to sleep? Answers to all these questions and more, just ahead.

Here at TouringPlans, we are a data-driven outfit. But I do know that not everyone’s heart goes pitter-patter at a complicated chart like mine does. So we’re going to take a super-zoomed-out picture first to get an idea what we’re looking at, then tackle the most common questions with a deeper dive. Tap on any of the links below to jump directly to that section. If you just want to skip to the bullet list, you’ll find it in the TL;DR.

The BIG Picture
Value Resorts and Family Suites
Moderate Resorts and Sleeps Five Rooms
Deluxe Resorts
The TL;DR

A Necessary Disclaimer

The prices that went into these charts are the 2024 rack rates, accurate as of October 2023. Disney doesn’t tend to change the rack rates, but they do change the price of rooms by releasing discounts. In fact, some discounts have already been released for early spring of 2024.

Not only that, but I’m only going to talk about the prices based on week-long stays, beginning on Sundays.  Of course not everyone stays for a week, but my aim is to give you a rough idea of cost, not a down-to-the-dollar answer.

Want to get an actual price for your trip, one that takes into account whether or not the cheapest room (or one that’s eligible for a discount) is available? You’ll still have to go to Disney’s site or, maybe even better, connect with a travel agent. We’ve seen at the end of 2023 that demand has been softening, and there are multiple overlapping promotions. A Disney-specialist agent can help you sift the possibilities to find the best room for your budget.

The BIG Picture

I want to start with the view from five miles up – how do prices at each resort vary over the whole year. And how do resorts to compare to each other?

The chart below shows the weekly price of the cheapest room at every Disney World resort. The legend is ordered from most to least expensive, following the lines of the chart. And each resort is colored based on its tier; Value, Moderate, Deluxe. You might wonder why there seem to be more than 3 colors. I put the campsites in their own category. And I also put the Family Suites and the Fort Wilderness Cabins – the “sleeps six” rooms – into their own group.

Look how tightly those Moderates (in blue) are grouped! If you’re targeting a Moderate, you may not find that much variation in price between them. It’s harder to pick out because there are more Deluxes, but the Crescent Lake resorts are grouped pretty tightly too. That’s Beach Club, Yacht Club, and Boardwalk. These sit between Animal Kingdom Lodge and Wilderness Lodge on the less expensive side, and the Magic Kingdom resorts on the high side. If you’re aiming for the Grand Flo or the Polynesian, you’ll be paying top dollar.

Altogether, the cheapest Disney World resorts range from $1-2K per week, and the most expensive from $6-7K, per week over most of the year. Keep in mind that those are only the cheapest rooms at those resorts; we’ll take a look at the full range in just a bit.

A few other quick takes:

• The Values are very consistently spaced from each other. We’ll look at this in more detail in a few minutes.
• After Spring Break, the Values are pretty evenly priced all through the summer. They don’t dip until late August and early September.
• The Moderates don’t even dip in late August – they’re just steady from late April until mid-October.
• The Deluxes, on the other hand, seem to be dipping every month after April. They’re pretty bouncy heading upwards from October on, too.
• In the Sleeps Six group, the Fort Wilderness Cabins are priced like the Art of Animation Suites when demand is higher. Midsummer when it’s slower, they’re more midway between AoA and the All-Star Music Family Suites.

The Fort Wilderness Cabins are scheduled to be taken out of service; see: Fort Wilderness Cabins Will Become a Disney Vacation Club Resort. But the timeline on that is a bit uncertain. They may be removed midway through 2024, and if they’re not around in 2025 it will be interesting to see what happens to the pricing of other sleeps-six rooms.

I’m going to use the “seasons” that you can see in this chart when looking at prices for each resort. I’ll put the dates in whenever I refer to them, so you won’t have to keep coming back up here to see what’s what. And I want to emphasize that these are date ranges that I picked out by looking at the chart above. They are not based on anything that Disney knows about or uses to set prices.

Disney World Value Resorts and Family Suites

I am aware that on many screens it will be difficult to read the chart below; you can click or tap to zoom into it. But you don’t need to if you don’t want to, I’ll discuss the major takeaways below. There are three sections in this chart:

• Fort Wilderness Campsites
• Value Resorts (All-Stars, Pop Century, Art of Animation)
• Family Suites and Fort Wilderness Cabins; rooms that sleep six

Campsites

When I was growing up we camped a lot, and part of that is that it was a much cheaper vacation than staying in hotel rooms. It turns out, it is mostly not that cheap to camp at Disney World. Only the tent sites are always cheaper than the cheapest room at an All-Star. And even when the Full Hook-Up is less expensive than an All-Star Standard Room, it’s only by about $30-50 a night.

The “Step” column here shows the difference between the median of each room and the one immediately below it in price. You can see that for campsites there is definitely a diminishing return as you go up in “view”. And looking at the sparkline in the right-hand column shows that the pricing pattern is the same across all room types.

Value Hotel Rooms

Moving on to the Value rooms, you might notice that only All-Star Music is shown. The Standard Room is identically priced across all three All-Stars, and the Preferred Rooms are only different from each other by a few dollars a night. So for convenience, I stuck to a single All-Star.

One thing we can see is that you’ll pay more (about $150-200 for the week) to get a Preferred room location than you will to get a better view. Is it worth it? See: Are Preferred Rooms Worth It at Value and Moderate Resorts? for Becky’s breakdown of the satisfaction data.

Overall, you’ll pay between $1,400 and $2,100 on average to get a regular room at a Value Resort. That’s between $200-300 per night. But remember that all nights aren’t priced the same—I divided by 7 to get the nightly average, but Friday and Saturday nights generally cost more.

Family Suites and Cabins

Moving on to the sleeps-six rooms, there is a price hike of $400-500 for the week between each resort. And then there’s another $300 or so hike to go from Simba to Nemo. I do not get that. If you understand why Nemo commands so much more, please let me know in the comments. And another thing that’s interesting is that the sparkline shows a different pricing pattern for the Cabins than for any of the other Family Suites.

Here, we can also answer questions about two rooms vs. one. If you have a group of 6 that includes smaller children, you might not have a choice about a Family Suite. But if you have Grandma & Grandpa, do you save money doing the Family Suite instead of two regular rooms? It turns out the answer is “not really”. At both All-Star Music and Art of Animation, the cost of a Family Suite is usually more than double the price of a Standard Room. Of course, there are benefits that you get with the Family Suite and it still may be the right choice. But it’s not saving you money.

Disney World Moderate Resorts and Sleeps-Five Rooms

Here’s the same chart for Moderate Resorts.

The first thing I want to point out is that the tight grouping we saw in the “Big Picture” chart wasn’t an artifact. The weekly prices of Standard View rooms, which are the cheapest rooms in each resort, are separated by less than $150 in most seasons – about $20 per night. If you need every dollar, Coronado Springs is clearly the least expensive. But you might find it easier to save that $150 somewhere else and pick your resort based on theme or transportation.

The second thing to take away is how different the pricing is from the Values! Take a look at the shape of the sparklines on the right, then roll back up and look at the sparklines for the Values. The Values have a much more prominent “low season”, where the Moderates are flatter throughout the year. Not flat! But flat-ter.

5th Sleeper Rooms

Next, let’s take a look at those 5th sleeper rooms. It’s harder to rank the Moderates based on cost, because there are rooms that flip-flop with each other in price throughout the year. So instead I used the Step column to show the difference in price between a particular room and its 5th sleeper sibling. Overall, you’ll pay between $115 and $160 for the extra bed, or about $20/night.

More importantly, all of these 5th sleeper rooms are much cheaper than the Family Suites, to the tune of at least $100 per night and often more. There are a few tiny exceptions; in January you can get an All-Star Movies Family Suite for only about $30 per night more than the cheapest 5th sleeper room. But as a general rule, if you have three kids your most economical room will be at a Moderate, not a Value. “Wow, a third kid is expensive, but at least they justify making the jump to a Moderate.” (Before y’all jump on me, I have three myself.)

View vs. Price

Overall, you’ll pay between $2,300 and $3,300 on average to get a room at a Moderate Resort. That’s between $330 and $470 a night, with the standard disclaimer about weekend nights being more expensive.

I want to take a moment to point out how many, many different room types there are here, across only 4 resorts. There are more rows in this chart than in the Deluxe chart below, and that one covers eight resorts. The Values chart above also covers 4 resorts, but that’s a little deceptive since it includes both campsites and Family Suites. And it still has fewer rows!

If you take a hard look, what you’ll see is that offering a huge variety of view types lets Disney walk up the nightly price for these rooms just a few dollars at a time. $12 here, $20 there … but there’s $140 difference between the bottom and the top. I will be the last person to yuck your yum as to what makes your vacation perfect. But when you’re booking, I think it’s worth asking how much your view will add to your experience, and if it’s worth the price.

Disney World Deluxe Resorts

The chart below excludes a few Deluxe room types: King Beds and Club Level. The King Beds aren’t priced much differently, and they just create a lot of clutter. And the Club Level rooms were mostly “off the charts”. If there’s interest, let me know in the comments and I’ll come back and add a section for Club Level.

I want to head to the sparklines right away here and point out a couple of things. The first is how consistently shaped they are. And if you’re looking at that, you’ll notice that one of these things is not like the others. That’s right! It follows the Moderate pricing pattern because it’s a room at a Moderate resort. If you want to stay Club Level, you can get a Club room at Coronado Springs for less than the price of most regular Deluxe rooms.

Splurge vs. Season

The second thing is how much swingier they are than we saw with the Values and the Moderates. You might immediately think “Well, that’s because the prices are so much higher, of course they’re going to have a wider range of variation.” But there’s no particular reason that they have to be set that way. If guests in every season had the same willingness to pay a fixed difference for a Deluxe room, we wouldn’t see that.

Here’s what we do see. On average, the difference between our “Spring Break” and “Holiday” seasons at a Value resort is about $200 a week. At a Moderate, it’s also about $200, sometimes $250 or $300. At a Deluxe? That will be an extra $700-1,000 a week to stay at a Deluxe between November 24 and the end of the year, compared to February and March.

It’s always dangerous to tell “obvious” stories about data, but when I see those numbers do you know what my brain says? It says people are saying “Let’s go to Disney World in the Christmas season and stay at a Deluxe it will be part of our present to our family I just love the Christmas season and it will be so awesome to splurge at Disney World.” Again, I want to be clear – I have thought this myself, and done this myself. I am not knocking it or criticizing it. And the Christmas vibe at a Deluxe resort is definitely more pronounced than at a Moderate, so you could even argue that you’re paying for extra Christmas atmosphere. But supply and demand is what sets these prices. It is clear that Disney knows us, their audience, and knows what we say to ourselves when we make vacation decisions.

By the way, it’s also about $1K more per week (on average) to stay at the Deluxe in “Spring Break” vs. “Mid Summer”. For other resort tiers, I gave an average price for the week, because it was possible to give an average price that made sense. If we just look at the range of medians here, we see that it runs from $4,200 to $8,500 per week for Deluxe resorts, which is about $600-$1,200 per night. But there’s so much variation over the course of the year that it’s difficult tell you what you should “expect” to pay to stay at a Deluxe resort, unless you first say when you’re planning to visit.

Ranking the Disney World Deluxes by Cost

Here’s what we can say. Deluxe resorts have clear tiers. Just looking at the medians, the most expensive room at Animal Kingdom Lodge is cheaper than every single room in a monorail resort but one. The cheapest room at the Polynesian is more expensive than about half the rooms available across all resorts. And the cheapest room at the Grand Floridian is more expensive than about 75% of all the rooms available at all the resorts. The general ranking, from least to most expensive, is

1. Animal Kingdom Lodge
2. Wilderness Lodge
3. Yacht Club / Boardwalk / Beach Club
4. Contemporary
5. Polynesian / Grand Floridian

What to Take Away

Well, that was fun. Let’s go back to the big picture view and summarize our takeaways. Remember that everything below is a general statement. Between discounts and the fact that I only looked at weekly prices, if you’re comparing specific dates you might find an exception here or there.

• The average weekly cost of a room at a Disney World Value Resort is between $1,400 and $2,100, or $200-300 per night.
• The average weekly cost of a room at a Disney World Moderate Resort is between $2,300 and $3,300, or $330-470 a night.
• The average weekly cost of a room at a Disney World Deluxe Resort doesn’t give you a useful idea of what you should expect to pay. You’ll need to narrow it down to when you’re going first. Still, it’s fair to stay that unless there’s a discount in play you’ll be looking at a minimum of $500 per night.

For groups and larger families:

• The cost of a Family Suite is usually a little more than the cost of two regular rooms at the same resort. Of course, there may still be features of the Family Suite that are important to you.
• The price of a 5th sleeper room at a Moderate is also less than the price of a Family Suite.

Last but not least, pricing patterns over the year are very consistent within tiers, but very different between tiers. At all resorts, the “Holiday” season from November 24 through New Year’s is the most expensive, followed by “Spring Break” from February 4 to March 31. But the Values have an off-season in late summer where the Moderates don’t. And the price gap between Spring Break, Holiday, and Summer is far more pronounced at the Deluxe resorts than either of the other two tiers.

Want to get an idea of how much your whole price tag might be, including dining and tickets? See The Cost of a Disney World Vacation in 2024.

Are you surprised that Christmas is so expensive at Deluxe Resorts? How do you think about price when deciding where to stay at Disney World? Let us know in the comments!