Disney World Split Stay: Add More Magic to Your Vacation
OK, I gotta be honest. A split stay – staying at more than one resort on your Disney World trip – will not add more magic to everyone’s vacation. But if you’ve never really thought about a split stay at Disney World, you might want to keep reading. I’ve done plenty of Disney World split stays, and I’m here to tell you how they can add value to your vacation. And yes, that includes saving time and money!
Advantages of a Disney World Split Stay
Let’s do an example. Two days at a monorail resort, followed by a switch to Pop Century for the rest of the week. You can enjoy the resort perks of a Deluxe – maybe you wanted a treat for someone’s birthday. The switch to pop Century helps you stay within your budget. And you can plan your trip to benefit from your resort location. Hit the Magic Kingdom and have a splurgy celebration meal in one of the monorail Signature restaurants. Then head to Hollywood Studios and EPCOT after switching to the Skyliner resort.
Here are some more examples of how a split stay can help you meet vacation goals for budget, or take advantage of a convenient location or resort features.
➡ It can be hard to break even with the Disney Dining Plan, but with a split stay, you can add the Dining Plan for only a few days of your trip. If you can load all your splurge dining into a couple of days, it can pay off. Bonus: included refill mugs are good for 14 days and will work at your second resort if you do the DDP on the first part of your stay.
➡ Room discounts that only apply on Sunday to Thursday nights are common, and even without a discount, weekend nights are more expensive. A judicious switch can help you save some money.
➡ It’s easy to forget, but the Swan and Dolphin are “off-site” hotels, and you can book them with loyalty points. The Disney Springs resorts are less expensive, but some still give you Early Entry. And doing part of your stay off Disney property entirely can give you economical access to more space and a kitchen.
➡ Don’t want to pay for a Deluxe hotel room when you’re not checking in until midnight? Stay at an inexpensive hotel near the airport, or an inexpensive All-Star, then check into your more expensive Disney hotel early the next day. Got a super-early flight out? Do it in reverse.
➡ Dining at resorts and Disney Springs is often cheaper than in-park options, but resort-to-resort travel can be challenging. Magic Kingdom resorts connect via monorail, Crescent Lake and Skyliner resorts form another easy-access cluster, and Port Orleans, Saratoga Springs, and Old Key West offer water taxi access to Disney Springs. Moving between resort areas can make it easier to get to where you want to eat.
➡ Coordinating your park plans around your lodging lets you take advantage of monorail, Skyliner, or pedestrian access to the parks.
➡ Some resort amenity winners are obvious, like the pool at the Beach/Yacht Club, or the savanna at Animal Kingdom Lodge. But all the Disney World resorts are highly themed, and a split stay lets you see more than one. You can use all your resort’s amenities and extras on both check-in and check-out days, including pools, club lounges, and Early Entry and Extended Evening Theme Park Hours.
➡ It’s common to hear that if you’ll be in the parks all day, then a Value might have the most value for you. If you’re planning a resort day, a step up to a Deluxe resort – or even to Club Level – can add something special to it.
Reasons To Avoid a Split Stay
If your trip is only 2-3 days, you might want to stay put. I mean, if you’d like to do a different resort every night, go for it. But most people find that a little stressful. Even on a longer trip, if you’re traveling with a lot of gear, you might feel like the packing and unpacking isn’t worth it.
Check-out from Disney World hotels is 11 a.m., and check-in at your new resort will be 3 or 4 in the afternoon. For a few hours, you’ll be “homeless”. We didn’t do quite as many split stays when our kids were small enough to need naps, because it was more important to have access to a hotel room midday.
Planning and Booking a Split Stay at Disney World
If your split stay includes any kind of discount or promotion, consider using a travel agent. The quote is free, their services are free, and they’ll help you do the math to get the most from the discounts.
Each resort you stay at will be a separate reservation. If you’re booking a package, you’ll want tickets for your whole stay on the first reservation. That’s because tickets are cheaper the longer you stay. And be aware that when it comes time to reserve dining the 60+10 rule may apply to each reservation separately if you are doing them yourself. (A travel agent should be able to book your dining as if it were a single reservation.) This “separate reservation window” problem doesn’t happen with Lightning Lane Multi Pass.
A common question is whether to do the lower-tier resort first or second. Sometimes budget math will decide this for you, but if not, it’s common advice to do the cheaper resort first because it “feels better” to move up. But it really depends on how you’re arranging your vacation. Booking a monorail resort for easy access to the parks might mean that you’re going to do more relaxing on nights you’re booked into a Moderate – and you might prefer that relaxation to come after the go-go-go.
Planning and Tips for Transfer Day(s)
Moving Your Stuff
When switching between two Disney World hotels, Disney’s Bell Services will move your luggage. It won’t move from place to place instantly, so you may want to pack a day bag to keep with you. Bell Services will tell you what time your bags will be available at your new resort, usually after 5 pm. For a switch to or from off-site lodging, you’ll need to handle the luggage transfer yourself.
Having a bit of extra suitcase space makes packing on transfer day feel like less of a chore, and it’s easier to move small stuff you accumulate on the way. Bell Services will bring you 17 individual plastic bags to pack random things into (ask me how I know), but having fewer pieces to move feels less stressful and more organized.
Special cases like refrigerated stuff and computers? There may be several hours between pickup and dropoff, and there’s no way to guarantee that chilled items are kept at the proper temperature during transit. Because of this, the official policy is that Bell Services will not move perishable items. They’ve let us send our stuff anyway if it’s things like cans of Coke or ketchup, where refrigeration isn’t critical. If it’s something like medication where you can’t risk spoilage, you’ll want to transfer it yourself, or plan to have it in an insulated bag with an ice pack.
For electronics, let Bell Services know that a bag contains a computer or tablet. We’ve had Disney transfer these items many times and never had an issue. But my employer’s policy doesn’t allow me to send my laptop this way, and yours might not either.
Planning Your Day
If you’re spending all day in the park, you won’t even notice not having a room in the middle of the day. My family often lacks the stamina to spend all day in the park, so here are some ways that we lessen the impact of that time when we’re in no-man’s land.
➡ Do Early Entry and head to a Table Service lunch at or near your new resort. If you get lucky, your room is ready early, and you can head up after your meal. If not, visit the pool, hang out in the lobby, or check the resort activities calendar for something fun. All lobbies will have space to sit and wait. Many lobbies will have a TV playing Disney cartoons to keep littles entertained for a bit.
➡ Book a very late breakfast or early lunch at the resort that you’re leaving. Depending on the timing, you might stop by the desk the day before to request a late checkout.
➡ Enjoy your resort for the morning, then head for Disney Springs for a midday lunch and some shopping after you check out.
➡ Go to the water parks. If you have free access to the water parks on check-in day, that applies to the transfer day of your split stay! If you felt like a couple of hours wasn’t enough time to make it worth springing for a full day at the water parks, then heading over for free while you are in resort limbo may be just the ticket.
Do you do split stays at Disney World? What do you like or dislike about them? Let us know in the comments!
(First published October 31, 2023. Last updated August 1, 2025.)
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Hi again, Jennifer, hope I didn’t sound critical of your writing, I wasn’t shooting for that at all! I appreciate all of your helpful articles. I was just frustrated finding out about the “two trips” thing, and wanted others to be aware. You wrote, “Disney has made a number of changes to how they manage dining reservations, and many reservations are simply easier to get than they used to be.” Can you please elaborate on THAT now please? <3 I've never used a TA, I've gotten used to slugging through the process myself and don't really go that often, but if a TA could make dining reservations for the second leg of the trip that sounds like a very valuable service that would tempt me to use them. Just FYI …
I can't recall the check-in process right now, but I think I would have checked in online if that was possible. We were given a special needs room that we didn't need or want, it had a very different feel to it than what I was expecting. Furthermore, we had a view of a wall, the room was pretty dark as a result. In hindsight since we were in EPCOT that day, I could have run over and checked out the room once it had been assigned, but of course that would have taken "fun time" out of the day. I'm not normally super fussy about a room, it's just this one was particularly disappointing. Also, FYI I had tried to use the TouringPlans tool to request a particular room, so I guess I had my hopes up that I would get something close to what I had requested, but that did not happen 🙁
Hi Leslie, no, I didn’t take it that way, I just wanted to be clear for anyone else who was reading why I hadn’t chosen to go into that in more detail. We’re good. 🙂
FWIW, I agree that Disney IT should fix the part where a split stay is treated as two trips. It isn’t a problem for everyone, but it can be a pain in the rear. That said, I personally, others who work for TouringPlans, and others who are in the general Disney blog-o-sphere have found reservations to be easier to get than they used to be. It’s hard to say directly what’s causing it, but my opinion is that it is a combination of a number of changes post-pandemic: change to 60-day reservation window, introduction of the walk-up-waitlist, and no DDP. They have also recently made changes to how you book dining (no more “you can only see three times and why can you see this 1 p.m. reservation if you search for noon but not if you search for lunch) that are probably going to be helpful also, going forward. It will be interesting to see what happens when the DDP comes back, but my own opinion is that the switch to 60 and the Walk-up Waitlist are the two biggest factors. (I do not have any data to back this up, it’s just an opinion.)
The TA is free to use and my favorite part is that they will watch for discounts for you and try to rebook if something is released that will make your room/package cheaper. I admit that sometimes I don’t use them because I am a super-control freak, but I’ve never been unhappy when I have. When you really appreciate having used the TA is not when everything goes right, but when something goes wrong like a canceled flight or whatever. (I had a cruise booked for April 2020, the TA saved me hours and hours of my life, as well as $$ in that rebooking experience.)
I know for sure that the online check-in didn’t used to work correctly if you were doing a split stay. But I did it multiple times (we had a 3-leg split) this summer and it went off without a hitch. And yeah, I love the room request tool but sometimes it doesn’t work out.
I have done a few split stays. I like the theming of the hotels, and a split stay allows me to have multiple theming experiences. Fun! Bell Services makes it easy to transfer your luggage to the next hotel. That part is great.
The not so great part … Jennifer, you kind of buried this part: “And be aware that when it comes time to reserve dining the 60+10 rule will apply to each reservation separately if you are doing them yourself.” The issue is this: you are most likely to snag a coveted dining reservation on the last day of your “trip”. If you do a split stay, Disney treats it as if you are taking TWO trips. If you spend 3 days at a monorail resort to be close to MK, your ability to snag a dining reservation at MK is 60+3 days out from day 1 of that stay. If you then spend 3 days at a resort close to Hollywood Studios and EPCOT, your ability to snag a dining reservation at one of THOSE parks is 60+3 days out from day 1 of THAT second stay. Even though you are spending 6 days at Disney, you don’t have the ability to reserve dining 60+6 days from the start of your original stay. That seems like an IT issue that Disney could and should fix. Can you please elaborate on the ” (If you’ve booked with a travel agent, they should be able to book your dining as if it were a single reservation.)”
The other not so great part … we xferred into Beach Club after spending a long day at EPCOT, and found out at 10pm at night that we had been given a crappy room, and our luggage was not in the room, we had to get it from Bell Services. It was late, we were tired, didn’t have the energy to deal with it so just took the room. But it’s kind of like the situation that you described where you didn’t want to pay for a Deluxe hotel getting in late at night. I think they kind of took advantage of us, we paid a ton of $$$ for a crappy room because we were not in such a great position to complain about the room we were given. People should be aware that the managers in Hotel #2 might pull that same trick on them if they check in late after a full day in the parks.
Hi Leslie, thanks for reading. Yes, you are correct about how the reservations work, but there were a few reasons not to go into quite so much detail in the article (which is already kind of on the long side for some readers). One reason is that Disney has made a number of changes to how they manage dining reservations, and many reservations are simply easier to get than they used to be – availability can still be an issue for some restaurants, but not nearly as much as it has been in the past.
To your question about travel agents; our agents confirmed to me that they are able to call Disney when the phone lines open for dining and have Disney confirm the split stay, then open the second leg of the trip for them to book dining. It’s true that the phone lines open an hour after dining becomes available online, but in most cases this doesn’t make a significant difference. This works for TAs, but I can tell you from personal experience that it does not reliably work for private individuals like you or me. I have occasionally been successful when calling this way, but it’s the exception and not the rule.
I’m sorry you had a bad experience at Beach Club. In general, we check in online (that didn’t used to work properly at the second hotel but it does now) and receive our room assignment midafternoon no matter where we are on property. It might be a room that for some reason we don’t like, but it’s given to us at 3 pm. Using the online check-in would be my recommendation for anyone who is concerned that they might get a less desirable room simply because they have arrived late.
I really enjoyed this article. I’ve never considered myself a person who can pack up and switch to different hotels, but now I might consider trying it to take advantage of the perks of a new dining area or transportation method! How far in advance would you say you should book a split stay? Do you think you need to do it farther in advance than if you chose a single hotel?
Hallo other Jennie, that is an interesting question. I’m going to go with no, and also “it depends”.
Here’s the thing, if you want to book any part of a discount it’s the same as always, you have to book far enough in advance that there’s availability. (I mean, that’s true even if there isn’t a discount. But if there’s a discount it’s possible that there are rooms at the resort you’re trying to book, just not for the discounted price you’re trying to get.) But you don’t need to book any farther in advance than you normally would to guarantee getting what you want. There’s either good availability at many places, or there isn’t. But if availability is poor then you might actually be able to make adjustments more easily if you’re aiming for a split stay.
Let’s say you’re trying to book a week’s stay, 4 nights at a discount in the Poly and 3 nights at Pop Century. It turns out there aren’t 4 Poly nights at the discount rate, there are only 3. If you were just trying to book a 4-day stay and that was your whole vacation, you’d have to choose between full price at the Poly or somewhere else entirely. But for a split stay, you could just reverse it, take the 3 discount nights at the Poly, and do 4 at Pop Century. You got *almost* exactly what you wanted, despite having left it later than you “should have” to book and get everything you wanted.