bumbershoot
DIS Legend
- Joined
- Mar 5, 2007
- Messages
- 69,750
The only difference in sound muffling I've noticed is with the scary-loud HoJo toilets. Those are pretty noisy.
If you can book with the Entertainment Rate, or even the 15% off with the disboards rate, you don't book through agencies, and there's no fee to cancel. You can generally find better rates if you do that. And I hear that Australians have access to some amazing ticket deals, with a 14 day ticket for less than the cost of an AP? Not that you need 14 days, but still, that's awesome.
We prefer the Garden view rooms at HoJo. The only time they are noisy is during the day when kids are swimming, but even that seems diminished now that the kids are in the water play area instead of the proper pool. At night it's tranquil and lovely. We've stayed at hojo now...3 total times, I think...2 times as a family and then I was there on the recent ladies trip.
The two times we've stayed at PPH we've had really good luck. The first time we booked a standard room through a travel company with a package, but we were upgraded to a DCA view. (note that that is the only disney view they have, as far as I know...you're not going to see disneyland, just DCA) Of course that was hardly an upgrade, as they were just starting the Villa construction for Grand Cal across the street and it was NOISY very very VERY early in the mornings. The construction is ongoing, but I doubt they have bulldozers and diggers anymore.
And the second time we stayed we randomly were chosen as "big kahuna family of the day" and were upgraded from our AP-rate, cheaper-than-HoJo's-rate-at-the-time, room to a suite for our stay, and that was pretty cool.
However! The walk is about the same. And unless you're in Tomorrowland every time you want to leave, and you want to start in Tomorrowland...taking the monorail won't help at all, b/c you still have to walk walk walk to and from the monorail station. So really, the walk is about the same.
Having access to every Magic Morning during your stay (including check-in day if you're there early enough and also check out day if you have time for the parks) is lovely but on an 8 day stay, it might not be important to you. You'll have plenty of non-MM days to enjoy Fantasyland and Nemo, so it might not be important to get up an hour earlier.
Then again, $300 spread out over 8 days is not all that much. If your HoJo rate is as low as you can get it. Others have mentioned the Entertainment Rate, and you can use the Australian Entertainment Book for that (so we have all recently found out in other posts, including posts by Lorealle, who is in management at HoJo). Someone here listed the days, but know that those dates can change. Dates might drop out of availability, and dates might be added. So assuming you have the lowest possible rate, and it's still only $300 difference, that *might* make it worth it.
But if you're comparing packages, well, you might be able to get things lower on both sides. HoJo almost surely will be lower in other ways. And PPH might be lower too.
To me, when they were equal in price, we chose PPH for the MMs. $300 for a short stay isn't worth it to us. But $300 for a longer stay, IF we knew we would take full advantage of those MMs, would definitely be worth thinking about...
Oh and we never used the package service either. Tried to, but when we tried, the stores didn't have the paperwork...so we just carried stuff with us.
