DVC busses

[tinkluvr23]

Hello,
I am just wondering about the bus situation at the DVCs. I had read a thread complaining about waiting over an hour for a bus back to the Beach Club. I am wondering what people's experiences have been at any of the villas?

 

[Pakey]

I have stayed at all of the DVC resorts and most of the deluxes. The bus situation is similar at all of them. There's always going to be isolated bad experiences but overall, the system works just fine. The only one I really dislike is THV because it requires either a long walk to SSR or a shuttle bus then a park bus.

I own at BCV and have stayed there many times. I've never waited over an hour for a bus unless it was at park closing and there were so many people in line to get back to the resort. That can happen at every resort at park closing.

 

[chalee94]

I had read a thread complaining about waiting over an hour for a bus back to the Beach Club.

1) any resort's buses might be delayed at any time. it's a risk you take onsite, but it's hardly DVC related.

2) BCV shares buses with BC/YC...and often with the swan/dolphin/BWI/BWV. so if BCV's buses are an hour late, so are the yacht club hotel's.

3) personally i've had good experiences with DVC buses at OKW and AKV with one exception. staying at jambo house (AKL), there was one time that i waited 45 minutes for a bus and finally gave up and went to the parking lot and drove to the park.

but that can happen anywhere. POFQ. GF. poly. whatever. it's rare but it's not resort-specific, much less specific to DVC resorts.

 

[drusba]

We own at BWV and AKV. Those are both a combined Disney hotel and DVC and transportation does not depend on being one rather than the other. For BWV, you take boat or walk to Epcot or Studios and use buses for other parks and Downtown Disney. For AKV all trips are by bus. We have found the bus system at the two resorts to be as follows:

AKV. Very good bus system. There are two stops, Kidani and Jambo buildings, and when going to parks and coming back they stop at Kidani first then Jambo; Downtown Disney bus stops at Jambo first. They do not share with any other resort. Though we have experienced delays once in a while, buses there are usually timely and having stayed in the past at all the MK and Epcot resorts, and at Fort Wilderness, Carribean, OKW, and SSR when it was still just a Disney resort, my view is that AKV has overall been more reliable than any of those. No bus system is that great but AKV is just usually better than the others.


BWV: Worst bus system in the universe, the pits, ungodly awful, torture, capital punishment should be imposed on the ones running it. Bus shares with Swan and Dolphin (2 separate stops) and sometimes also with YC and BC (also 2 separate stops) making five possible stops none of which are actually close to each other. Delays seem to be the norm and not the exception. You can assume on more than one occasion during a trip that you will walk to the stop to wait for a bus and it will be a very long wait and it is common to arrive to get something like the MK bus and then see 3 AK buses come and no MK bus, or vice versa. At least once every trip I have ever had, I have had a 50 minute plus wait at MK waiting for the bus to come. You stand there and see multiple buses come for every other Disney resort but no BW bus (and when it does come, the driver has no idea there was ever any delay). Also, at least once and usually twice a trip, you will have a bus come and go to the Swan and the Dolphin and, at least at one of those, it will just sit at the stop for 5 to 10 minutes after loading doing nothing but waiting to see if someone else might show up (my suspicion is that they do that to asusre I will wait 50 or more minutes for the bus to get to MK).

 

[hakepb]

Agree on the BWV busses based on my July trip!!

I don't think I ever waited less than 30 mins for a MK bus, then Disney insults you further by stopping you at The non-Disney owned S/D before you finally start going to the MK. I finally realized that at BWV it probably is faster to drive to MK,take a tram, then take a monorail into MK. (I used to always believe the direct bus was faster)

On our 2nd DAK trip we show up at 11:35a. There was a Cm monitoring busses. As he left at 11:45 I asked him about the next AK bus, he looked at his list and said 5 mins tops because the last DAK bus was 11:25. The first bus for Any park to show up while we waited was at 12:05 when the MK bus appeared. DAK finally showed up at 12:10.

One night leaving MK, every stop (SSR, OKW, AK, even mods POR and FQ) on the 1st wing had at most 1/2 line waiting for the next bus.... Except both the BW/S/D line and the YC/BC on the other side. Both were a packed 2 turnstyle lines. I was so outraged I took a few fuzzy pics and sent an email to dvcmembersatiafaction while I waited. I missed their call back a few days later.

It did not help that due to weather we twice left DHS in the afternoon on a 5 stop bus instead of a boat (closed). We also had a high number of the old step up busses and really slow bus drivers.

Prior to this trip I was a big fan of DVC bus transportation. Sure there is an occasional wait (traffic or accident, or ECV loading) In general DVC resorts get bus stops closer to parks and have much shorter lines at parks than mods and values.

 

[supersuperwendy]

We've had great bus service at SSR, VWL and AKV and from CR when staying at BLT. If you know ahead of time that the buses will stop at another resort and plan accordingly you will be fine in the mornings. If you leave a busy park at closing expect to wait for a bus no matter which resort you are staying at.

 

[Sunshine22]

Some of the buses were delayed due to construction last month while I was staying at BLT. I heard one of the dispatchers mention that there were some people waiting for over an hour. Our bus driver apologized to us for it taking extra long to get back to our hotel during the construction and extra slow traffic. This was the first time we had ever experienced the extra long delays using the buses at either BLT or BCV.

 

[jade1]

Best way to have great bus service, is to eliminate the need for them when ever possible. BCV/BWV eliminate buses needed for EPCOT and DHS. BLT eliminates a bus to MK and EPCOT. We split stays between BCV and BLT so rarely use them anymore-its wonderful.

 

[Lynne M]

Hello,
I am just wondering about the bus situation at the DVCs. I had read a thread complaining about waiting over an hour for a bus back to the Beach Club. I am wondering what people's experiences have been at any of the villas?

There's just one bus system at WDW, and it's centrally managed and dispatched. So, one resort's buses aren't "better" than another's; it's all the same system, and all of the resorts are equally susceptible to being affected by breakdowns, drivers getting sick, and all those other little glitches that can lead to longer waits.

And if you've got a lot of people leaving a theme park at the same time (say, after the fireworks at MK), you may not be getting on the first bus that pulls up, and you may be waiting longer than you'd like. That's just the nature of trying to transport thousands of people at once all over a property the size of Boston.

Anyway...my point is, the review you read doesn't mean that the Beach Club has slower buses than the other resorts. It means that on that day, at that time, there was a problem that led to a longer wait for that particular bus. Heck, several resorts could have been affected by the same situation.

 

[hakepb]

But due to geographical proximity, different resorts have different travel times:
In this trip plan, SSR is the best resort for using Disney transportation if you value your time:
http://blog.touringplans.com/2012/0...spending-the-least-amount-of-time-in-transit/

Now that plan is DTD and DHS heavy, the 2 closest stops to SSR.

I need to plug these numbers into my plan to see what resorts may work better for me:
http://blog.touringplans.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/TransportTimeFreeDisney.pdf

 

[MikeyNS]

Again I always call it "bus luck".. that 30 minute wait for one group was a "Wow, the bus was there waiting for us" for another, or just a 5 minute wait for another. It all depends when you get to the bus stop.

You'll hear little good and all kinds of bad about the buses. We've had really decent bus luck with all our trips, with one or two longer waits that got frustrating.. but we always just go with the flow. If it was a huge issue for us we'd rent a car, but to us the bus rides are all part of the WDW charm.

 

[dianeschlicht]

Again I always call it "bus luck".. that 30 minutes wait for one group was a "Wow, the bus was there waiting for us" for another, or just a 5 minute wait for another group. All depends when you get to that bus stop.

You'll hear good and bad about the buses. We've had really decent bus luck with all our trips, with one or two longer waits that got frustrating.. but we always just go with the flow. If it was a huge issue for us we'd just rent a car, but to us the bus rides are all part of the WDW charm.

I absolutely agree, and if you know a resort well, you can figure out the best times to get good "bus luck". At OKW, we know that aiming at the quarter hour marks will usually get you a bus to your destination in 5 minutes. At AKV, we have hardly ever waited more than 5 minutes except to MK.