Olaf’s Royal Picnic Review: A Pricey Production That May Leave You Feeling Frosty

Olaf’s Royal Picnic is one of the most popular and most expensive add-ons that you can purchase for your cruise on the Disney Wish. Despite the incredibly high price – $275 per child and $75 per adult – it frequently sells out before any other onboard activity or port adventure. In fact, if you’re not a Castaway Club Gold member or higher, you may not even get a chance to book it.

If you’re familiar with the Royal Court Royal Tea experience on some other Disney ships, this is the same basic idea. It’s an upcharge character meal with live entertainment, gifts for kids, music, and princesses. The theming is different, of course. You’ve got Frozen friends, picnic bites, and a quaint little storyline about a hostess planning her very first royal event.

In theory, this sounds like a slam dunk. After all, why would it be so expensive and yet so popular if it wasn’t a sure hit? The Wish has an adorable Frozen-themed dining room that is perfect for the show, and kids love Olaf. But after attending with my daughter this past weekend, I walked away with mixed feelings. And that’s largely because the quality of the experience depends almost entirely on where you sit. And the kicker is that you have no way of controlling where you end up.

Some families receive something genuinely magical and immersive, and others pay the same price to watch it all from behind heads and elbows. And they miss the coordinated service that is supposed to be a core storytelling moment of the event. That inconsistency makes it difficult to recommend, but let’s cover the details so that you can make your own informed decision.

The Details

Olaf’s Royal Picnic is offered on Disney Wish cruises, and is available for booking if your party includes any children between the ages of 3 and 12. Children cannot attend on their own, and each party must also include at least one adult, age 18 or older. Children ages 13 through 17 may also attend, but must attend with an adult, will be charged the adult rate, and will not receive any gifts. To sum it up:

• Ages 0 to 2: Free to attend, no gifts included, no separate food or beverage, must be accompanied by an older child and an adult age 18 or older
• Ages 3 to 12: $275 per attendee, gifts included, must be accompanied by an adult age 18 or older
• Ages 13 to 17: $75 per attendee, no gifts included, must be accompanied by an adult age 18 or older
• Ages 18 and up: $75 per attendee, no gifts included, must be part of a party that has children

Keep in mind, this means that the absolute bare minimum for the full experience is $350 for one child and an adult.

How Does Disney Describe The Event?

As of this writing, Olaf’s Royal Picnic is described as:

A one-of-a kind picnic in the beautiful Arendelle Castle. A lively Arendellian host will introduce the most fun event of all the Nordic Midsummer Festivals in the land – complete with everyone’s favorite snowman, Olaf!
When you arrive, behold the splendor of summer! The corridor of Arendelle Castle is covered in a canopy of the most beautiful and colorful flowers in all the land, and the entire banquet hall is filled with sprouting sunflowers—looking just like a summertime meadow, only indoors!
Join Olaf, Anna, Elsa and Kristoff and the Castle Staff in a delightful afternoon of summertime melodies, treats and merriment.

And what about the food?

Fresh, flavorful, summertime treats are served at the table by Castle Staff. It’s a fantasy-come-true for little ones!

So descriptive!

The final piece of the event is a flurry of gifts that kids get to take away. Disney currently describes those as:

• Olaf headwear
• Cinch bag
• Mandolin
• Troll plush
• Water bottle
• Activity book
• Picnic blanket
• Troll necklace

As I work through my review of the event, I’ll compare our actual experience with what was advertised.

Full Royal Picnic Review

Venue and Atmosphere

The picnic is held inside Arendelle: A Frozen Dining Adventure, the same space where the nighttime rotational dining show takes place. It’s already heavily themed, so the ambiance works immediately. You’ve got fluted columns, warm woodwork, Nordic patterns, and Frozen touches. Fans of the movie will feel right at home.

Supposedly the corridor and banquet hall were all going to be decked out for summer, “just like a summertime meadow”. Disney invests an entire paragraph to emphasize this decor. What did I notice in real life? A few streamers, some flowers tied to a few posts, and a wooden sunflower decoration on each table.

This isn’t a big deal unless you’re very committed to the idea that you should be immersed in summer for this picnic. Otherwise, the space is detailed and themed enough that you feel transported to Arendelle. And there are picnic-style tablecloths on every table that help with that picnic feel.

Event Seating: The lottery you didn’t know you were playing

Tables are arranged in a wide ring around the central performance space, a slightly raised stage where most of the action and dialogue takes place.

In principle, this layout ensures that every guest is close to the show. In practice, there are some issues. Because it turns out that where you sit is the single biggest determinant of your experience.

The stage area is surrounded by what looks like a single ring of tables. But depending on party sizes and how many different parties are attending, a handful of groups can spill into a second row of tables behind that front ring. That’s where we were seated.

From the second row:

• Adults at front tables block sightlines
• Kids struggle to see over heads
• Photo and video can be blocked
• Coordinated “show beats” do not land in the same way

For example, my daughter had to kneel up in her chair in order to see any of the characters on stage, which made eating difficult. Compare that to front-row tables, where children had unobstructed views and performers made more eye contact.

A big (non-spoiler) part of the storyline is that your hostess is organizing her first royal event and has everything planned perfectly and timed down to the second. She’s in control to an impressive degree. And so delivery of food (two times – once for tiered trays and once for baskets of scones) and gifts happens all at once, all around the dining room, at the signal of a “clap clap” from the stage.

Or at least that’s how it was supposed to go. Instead, all front row tables did get the on-time delivery. Then, any unlucky server with a second row table had to awkwardly scramble off backstage again to fetch another round of food or gifts to bring to the second row.

Paying the same amount and watching your kid see almost everyone in their room get their things and be very excited about them, while being forced to wait and wonder when they’ll get theirs, really doesn’t feel great. As a parent, I was frustrated. And it’s impossible to overstate how much this undermines the event’s whole storyline.

This is a problem that Disney could solve with tiered pricing or a redesign of the table setup. I would have gladly paid a little less to get our things slightly later than everyone else and have a worse view. At least it would have been a choice I was making. But as long as seating is random and the quality of the experience varies by table position, the value proposition remains messy.

The Characters and Show

Despite the seating issues, the show itself is charming, although with a few pacing issues.

The premise is that a new hostess is nervously running her very first royal celebration. Anna and Kristoff stop by, Elsa arrives separately, and Olaf makes a delightful appearance via a small-scale roaming animatronic. The Olaf figure is outstanding. He’s expressive, mobile, funny, and easily the highlight of the show. Everyone lit up when he arrived.

There are all of the expected songs featured throughout the event, and kids get involved multiple times, which is a clear highlight. All of the songs were performed live except Let It Go, which was clearly the original track being lip-synced. An interesting choice, but probably best for kids to get what they’re used to.

The storyline is sweet and accessible to younger children. But there are major breaks in the action three different times:

• While you’re expected to do most of your eating
• While Anna and Kristoff circulate to each table
• While Elsa circulates to each table on her own

By the time we made it to the end of the hour and a half, there were many antsy kids all throughout the room. Again, an easy fix if one character rotation happens while you eat. Or if all characters rotate at the same time. Instead, it was just too drawn out for shorter attention spans.

During those character circulations, characters are willing to give autographs (which doesn’t happen during the rotational dinner, so it is a plus), but won’t take pictures or stop for lengthy conversation. This is strictly a smile, wave, short comment, see you later situation.

At the very end of the event, you do get a photo with Elsa, Anna, and Kristoff to commemorate your time. PhotoPass photographers take the picture, and you only get one per child.

Food and Drink

Food arrives in three “acts,” timed to the show. Bites may vary (Disney is very careful about not getting specific), but here’s a representative lineup of what we received:

• Round 1: Tiered trays
  • Cucumber finger sandwiches
  • Tuna salad finger sandwiches
  • Tiny ham sliders
  • Ham, cheese, and mayo wraps
  • “Campfire” cheesecakes on top of chocolate chip cookie bars
  • Carrot cake bars
  • Rice Krispie treats
  • Creme-filled vanilla cookie sandwiches with a dollop of jam and a generous dusting of powdered sugar
  • Macarons of undetermined flavor (my best guess is pistachio)
  • Chocolate-covered marshmallows with graham cracker crumbs
• Round 2: Blueberry Scones
• Round 3: Olaf Cupcakes

If your child is a relatively adventurous eater, this is all great. If not, you may want backup snacks. Or just eat lunch before the afternoon showtime and consider everything else to be a bonus. My daughter ate both of the creme-filled cookies, so those were a hit. She also particularly enjoyed the chocolate-covered marshmallows and the Rice Krispie treat. But the stand-out for her was the Olaf cupcake (only children receive these). It was a GIANT cupcake, and she devoured almost all of it, even after all of the other treats she had enjoyed.

As an adult foodie, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of what we received. The ham and cheese rolls were especially tasty, and appealed to kids too. The macarons were another stand-out. Decorations were well-made and fitting for the event, and nothing tasted like it had been left out for a day or two. Nice and fresh.

Drink options are very limited, and at least during our picnic, were strictly adhered to. All attendees had a choice of water, lemonade, or mango raspberry iced tea. No juice, no selection of teas, no anything else from the fountains.

The Gifts

This is where Olaf’s Royal Picnic admittedly shines. Each child receives a truly impressive amount of merchandise, much of which is integral to their participation in the show. When you arrive, the following will be waiting on the table:

• Very well-made Olaf’s Royal Picnic cinch bag
• An Olaf baseball cap
• A toy “mandolin” (look, I’m a stickler for music instrument naming, and this is a ukulele with four strings, not a mandolin, which has eight.)
• An activity book with coloring pages, crayons, and punch-out characters and snowflakes
• A troll necklace

During the show, servers deliver a second round of gifts:

• A nice fleecy picnic blanket
• A water cup with a swirly orange straw
• Troll plush that begins as a rock but magically transforms (turns inside out) into a troll

The gifts are all well-made, incredibly on-theme, and thoughtfully designed and incorporated into the show. The troll plush, in particular, hasn’t left my daughter’s side.

Overall Thoughts

Is Olaf’s Royal Picnic objectively “worth it”? Strictly speaking, no. Nothing about the food, gifts, or entertainment can justify this high price tag. But are the gifts impressive? Yes. Is the Olaf animatronic outstanding? Absolutely. Is the show charming? Yes. Will many children love it? Of course. Mine says it was “so much better than I thought it would be.”

The problem is inconsistency. Some families get an intimate, immersive experience worthy of a splurge. Others, like us, sit behind the front row, wait for delayed food and gift deliveries while the hostess is “perfectly” timing her event, and squint around a wall of heads to see the action.

The differential treatment among guests paying the same price is the real miss here. Disney intentionally created a narrative where timing and spectacle matter. Food and gifts are delivered in perfect synchronization. But only the first row of tables gets that orchestrated moment. The rest of us second-class citizens of Arendelle wait for servers to return from backstage to retrieve a second round of goodies, breaking the show illusion and testing the patience of child attendees.

There is no practical reason that Disney couldn’t either only sell front-row space OR offer tiered pricing. At a minimum of $350 to participate in the fun, feeling like you’re getting a worse experience isn’t an acceptable frustration.

Olaf’s Royal Picnic has some genuinely magical elements. I laughed out loud at the presentation of Bowl-af. My kid waving snowflakes in the air and playing her mandolin with Kristoff were standouts. The Olaf animatronic is a wonder. The stage show is cute. The gifts are substantial and thoughtfully themed. If you are seated in the right spot, this will be a cherished memory from your cruise.

But with seating allocated randomly and a dramatic difference in show quality and delivery timing between tiers of tables, it becomes impossible to universally recommend. Until Disney solves for that, Olaf’s Royal Picnic sits squarely in the “you might love it, or you might regret it” category, and at $275 per child, that’s a tough gamble.

Have you been to Olaf’s Royal Picnic? Would you go? Let us know in the comments!