As others have pointed out, your distances are wrong. The walk from DLH is 0.5 miles to the Esplanade. During the pandemic they made people walk from Mickey & Friends Parking to the park and you’ll walk past DLH if you take the Downtown Disney route. I hate walking which is why I prefer to stay at BLT when at WDW and I don’t ever feel that DLH is that far at all. And if the monorail is reliable and hotel guests are allowed to use PP entrance to DCA, then the tower location is looking to be pretty amazing.
Google Maps has it .7 miles from the DVC building to Disneyland Park entrance. That's pretty dang close to "about a mile." I've stayed at the Disneyland Hotel numerous times including Frontier Tower (which would be closest tower to the DVC tower). It's a walk especially having to go around a crowded pool area, people hanging out at Downtown Disney, shops and stalls, etc. It'd be tough to make it in Google's 10-12 minute time frame on a normal night from the crowds alone.
That may not be a lot for some of you, but I consider it a con for the property. It's a pretty substantial location difference when Grand Californian is literally right outside the gate.
You can disagree, that's fine but I'm not the only one that thinks so. It's a fairly common complaint. They've even brought it up on the DVC show before.
From MouseSavers,
"The Disneyland Hotel is actually
not super convenient to the parks (Paradise Pier is probably the least convenient overall, but Disneyland Hotel is a close second). T
here is no shuttle service, and the Monorail is not really a more convenient method to get to the park, as it was in the old days. To get to Disneyland Park, you now have to walk a fair distance through Downtown Disney to get to the resort Monorail station, which only serves Disneyland’s Tomorrowland station. Most of the time, it’s faster to just continue on foot to the entrance, unless you can see the monorail just about to arrive and the line isn’t long. If you are going to Disney California Adventure, which is not served by the Monorail,
you will be walking a long way to that park’s entrance, fighting the crowds in Downtown Disney the entire time.
Believe it or not, you will walk a lot less distance if you stay off-site and take the ART shuttle or park in the Mickey & Friends parking structure, because the shuttles drop you right near the front gates of the two parks."
https://www.mousesavers.com/the-disneyland-resort-hotels/
I did not know they moved the west end security checkpoint to outside the Disneyland Hotel. I haven't been since 2017/2018. That's nice and maybe helps with the morning crowds that used to bunch up at the Esplanade, not sure.
Either way, I still think the Villas at Disneyland Hotel is overhyped (on this board and DVCFan) and is not going to be this easy, must-buy premium property many people have made it out to be (at least not right now). But we will see.
They may want to at least open a table service restaurant (that's not a character buffet) in the complex before they put it on sale.
