How is the bus service during the summer months? Specifically, between parks and Disney resorts. We've heard that due to the economy, WDW has cut back on the number of buses and they get overcrowded, and the wait can be awful. For people that were there this past summer, what was your experience?
We were there in June and had no problems at all with bus service. We didn't notice any shortage of busses or decline in service. We stayed at the Poly, planning to use the monorail but on 3 occasions it was delayed quite a while; the bus would actually have been quicker.
We were in the World from 8/16-8/30. During the day, I found the buses to be great, from anywhere going anywhere really. Now if there was bad weather or you were at MK after the fireworks and parade, that is where you saw it all fall apart. One night at MK (combination of bad weather and canceled parade) the lines were insane for buses! We were staying at Pop which is bus stop 18. Completely packed! Somehow, people started lining up at bus stop 17. Not sure if it was for another resort or not. We finally were at the front of our line (after about 30 minutes or so, maybe longer) and a Pop bus is sitting waiting to come over to us. The worker is sitting there flashing the guy over. Next thing we see is 2 other workers go to the bus, chat for a minute and then watch our Pop bus pull forward and then back up to bus stop 17. Needless to say there was a lot of unhappy people saying some not so happy things. Thankfully there was a Pop shortly afterwards. I believe I saw the sign on the bus that went to 17 change to Animal Kingdom Lodge. Why in the world did were these people coming this far for AKL??? I still don't know and oh well. But the point of my story is, bad weather and canceled parades can cause major backups.
We were there August 8-15 and thought bus service was fantastic. The longest we waited going to the parks was once for 15 minutes and coming back from the parks the majority of the time we arrived at our stop and a bus was waiting there. Didn't have to stand once (though there were people who did). Of all the times we've been to Disney, we've never experienced bad bus service and no one resort has been better or worse than another. I think it depends on time of day and luck more than anything else.
We were there from August 3rd-10th and had no problem taking the bus. We were staying at the Polynesian and it always arrived there with in 10 minutes or less. When we waited at Beach Club one night it took about 22 minutes because we just missed the bus to magic Kingdom. Overall the bus service was great the whole length of are stay.
Stayed at the Dolphin in June and honestly -- buses were no problem.. Longest we waited was about 25 minutes for a DTD bus.. but we literally saw the bus leaving as we were walking out to the bus stop.. (we didn't run we were ok waiting.. ) Knox
We stayed at All Star Movies from August 25-29th, I was SO worried about busses because of all the threads that seemed anti Disney transportation, but I will tell you, we NEVER waitied long for a bus at all. Magic Kingdom has separate busses for each value resort. We shared with Sports and Music for HOllywood Studios and Epcot, but even if a bus was full, another one pulled up within 10 minutes. I loved it!
I was at POFQ in June and BC in August - 5 nts and 8 nts - and had near perfect bus experiences on both trips. And we hop like crazy, so we ride the buses a lot. It actually seemed better in the summer.
