michaelwilliammidd
DIS Veteran
- Joined
- Dec 3, 2003
- Messages
- 975
We returned from a 6 night stay at POP late Thursday. It was a wonderful trip, the first for our 6 mo DD, it was amazing to see WDW through her eyes and the amazement that she found in things. Since I'm posting this on the resorts board, I'll mainly stick to my thoughts on POP on this report. As always, we loved staying onsite, in our eyes you can never have a bad stay at WDW.
We arrived at POP around 1 pm via Magical Express, only had about a 5 minute wait to check in and no problems there. We were traveling with DMIL and DFIL, our room was right next to theirs as requested and our other requests that I had called in the week before were fufilled as well, top floor backside of building 3 in the 50's section. We had also rented a crib and rocking chair from " A Baby's Best Friend", we checked with the luggage room and all of the pieces were there, and we asked them to bring them to the room which they did shortly there after.
We have stayed at POP before so knew what to expect from the room, so no surprises there, everything was clean and just as we had expected. We went out to the MK for a while and returned that evening to find that our bags had been brought in from Magical Express. That night, I noticed our bathroom had a musty scent, kind of like stale cigarette smoke and you could really smell it up by the exhaust fan. When you turned the fan on it went away, when it wasn't on the smell was pretty overpowering at times. I didn't think much more about it but when we got up the next morning the whole room had taken on the smell. I'm allergic to cigarette smoke and with DD sleeping in the room we didn't want her getting sick as well so we went to the front desk to see what we could do about a room change. When I explained our problem to the front desk, they were more than helpful and were very obviously frustrated by the problems of people smoking in the rooms. They said that this goes on all the time and they don't know what else they can do to make it clear NOT to smoke in the rooms. They explained that since we were staying on the top floor all of the vents are connected in a row straight up from the first floor through the fourth and that someone must be smoking in a room below us in the bathroom and turning the fan on to vent it. They were able to get us 2 rooms together so that we were able to stay next to DMIL and DFIL and we were still able to stay on the top floor, we only had to move to building 4. They asked us to pack our bags and leave them by the door and that Luggage assistance would move them to our new room when it became available, to simply come by on our way in that night and ask for our new keys. All in all it was a very easy transition and its this kind of customer service that puts Disney above all others.
My only complaint about POP is the bus service. Like I said, we have stayed here before along with other moderates and have never had any real problems with Disney Transportation. However, this year the wait times for buses were far too long. We spent at least 2 hours of our day each day waiting for buses. For this reason alone, I don't think we will stay at a value again, last time we stayed at POP it wasn't this bad of a problem but at no point during this stay did we arrive to find a line with less that 30 people already in it. For us the added benefit of a covered bus stop with benches and less people is worth it for the extra money spent on a moderate. I would still recommend POP for people going to WDW, especially those on a tight budget, but now it will come with a warning about the transportation.
We arrived at POP around 1 pm via Magical Express, only had about a 5 minute wait to check in and no problems there. We were traveling with DMIL and DFIL, our room was right next to theirs as requested and our other requests that I had called in the week before were fufilled as well, top floor backside of building 3 in the 50's section. We had also rented a crib and rocking chair from " A Baby's Best Friend", we checked with the luggage room and all of the pieces were there, and we asked them to bring them to the room which they did shortly there after.
We have stayed at POP before so knew what to expect from the room, so no surprises there, everything was clean and just as we had expected. We went out to the MK for a while and returned that evening to find that our bags had been brought in from Magical Express. That night, I noticed our bathroom had a musty scent, kind of like stale cigarette smoke and you could really smell it up by the exhaust fan. When you turned the fan on it went away, when it wasn't on the smell was pretty overpowering at times. I didn't think much more about it but when we got up the next morning the whole room had taken on the smell. I'm allergic to cigarette smoke and with DD sleeping in the room we didn't want her getting sick as well so we went to the front desk to see what we could do about a room change. When I explained our problem to the front desk, they were more than helpful and were very obviously frustrated by the problems of people smoking in the rooms. They said that this goes on all the time and they don't know what else they can do to make it clear NOT to smoke in the rooms. They explained that since we were staying on the top floor all of the vents are connected in a row straight up from the first floor through the fourth and that someone must be smoking in a room below us in the bathroom and turning the fan on to vent it. They were able to get us 2 rooms together so that we were able to stay next to DMIL and DFIL and we were still able to stay on the top floor, we only had to move to building 4. They asked us to pack our bags and leave them by the door and that Luggage assistance would move them to our new room when it became available, to simply come by on our way in that night and ask for our new keys. All in all it was a very easy transition and its this kind of customer service that puts Disney above all others.
My only complaint about POP is the bus service. Like I said, we have stayed here before along with other moderates and have never had any real problems with Disney Transportation. However, this year the wait times for buses were far too long. We spent at least 2 hours of our day each day waiting for buses. For this reason alone, I don't think we will stay at a value again, last time we stayed at POP it wasn't this bad of a problem but at no point during this stay did we arrive to find a line with less that 30 people already in it. For us the added benefit of a covered bus stop with benches and less people is worth it for the extra money spent on a moderate. I would still recommend POP for people going to WDW, especially those on a tight budget, but now it will come with a warning about the transportation.
