The Hilton Orlando Buena Vista Palace Disney Springs Area Hotel | A Full, In-Depth Review

One of our favorite places to vacation is (not surprisingly) Orlando, Florida. As roller coaster enthusiasts – Orlando is a dream destination for obvious reasons – there are SO MANY theme parks within just a short drive of a central stay in Orlando.

We have stayed at a host of hotels, resorts, and AirBnBs in the Orlando area. Depending on what parks we plan to visit, will determine where we plan to stay.

Last fall, with a visit to Walt Disney World’s Magic Kingdom as the centerpoint of our vacation plans, we chose to stay at a Hilton Hotel that we have never stayed at before.

This is a full, in depth review of our stay at the Hilton Orlando Buena Vista Palace Disney Springs Area Hotel located at 1900 East Buena Vista Drive, Lake Buena Vista, Florida. We stayed at this hotel for 5 nights in September 2024 and this was our experience.

OVERVIEW

To make things easy, I’ll be referring to this hotel as “The Buena Vista Palace” (can we all agree that it has an exceptionally long name?

Looking at The Buena Vista Palace online, we were initially drawn to this hotel for its resort-vibe. If you look at the images posted on it’s website, what you see is exactly what you get. The hotel looks precisely as pictured.

The hotel is absolutely beautiful – boasting 27 floors of over 1,000 rooms and suites.

The 27-acre property includes a MASSIVE pool with tons of seating, private cabanas, a large lazy river, a splash pad for the kids, a large, open grassy area with outdoor games and more seating, and 5 on-site dining locations.

Other amenities on property include a very large, nice fitness center (that we didn’t take advantage of – walking almost 20,000 steps a day across different theme parks was plenty of fitness for us!) There is a small arcade that we did explore during one of Florida’s signature rainy afternoons – a gift shop which includes a lot of things people typically forget in their travels – and there were DVD rental stations located around the hotel.

The Buena Vista Palace is one of just seven hotels on Disney property that is not owned or operated by Disney. So, while it is an OFFICIAL Walt Disney World hotel and you get SOME of the Disney resort perks, you don’t get ALL the perks.
We’ll circle back around to this when I highlight the Disney features of this hotel.

THE ROOMS

Let’s talk about the room:
The Buena Vista Palace is actually composed of two distinct buildings. There is, what they call “The Island” and “The Tower”. The Island is a smaller, shorter building located across from the main hotel, on the other side of the pool. I can’t say what it looks like inside, but from the looks of the outside, the building could use a facelift.

We stayed in The Tower – which is clearly the “crown jewel” of the property. At 27-floors tall, it’s easy to figure out why it’s called “The Tower”.

To be blunt: the rooms are small. I was honestly expecting something more like the rooms over at the Hilton Double Tree (a full review on that hotel coming soon), but nope, these are smaller, more traditional hotel rooms. In fact, they seem almost smaller than normal rooms because they are shaped more like a triangle than a rectangle.

The addition of the balcony really helps the room feel bigger and helps to balance out the size of the room (in my head at least).

Since we are Hilton Diamond members, we got upgraded to a Disney Springs view and when we checked in, the hostess eagerly explained that that meant we’d be able to see the drone show that happens every night above Disney Springs. Of course, we were SUPER excited for this awesome benefit.

We looked up the times of the show and made sure we were in our room, out on our balcony that first night in order to watch the show.

You can imagine our surprise when the time for the show to start came and went, and we didn’t see anything happening above Disney Springs. Eventually, we did see a few drones rise above the HVAC units on the building next to us – and that’s when we realized: even though we did have a Disney Springs View – we were not high enough to see the drones. Talk about a major disappointment!

Our kids were literally crying that they couldn’t see this Disney drone show that we’d promised them and we were pretty deflated over the situation ourselves. So, Derrick went down to talk to the front desk (since they’d specifically highlighted our ability to see the drone show) and they were gracious enough to move us up several floors so we’d be high enough to see the show.

Of course, this meant re-packing all of the bags that we’d just unpacked a few hours earlier, but the move turned out to be completely worth it as we were, in fact, high enough to clear those HVAC units and see the drone show! After moving rooms, we were able to catch the second show of the evening, plus we watched it several more times during our stay.

There are also rooms that deliver a view of Epcot and their fireworks in The Tower. We realized later on in our stay that if we stood in the very back corner of our balcony and leaned out a bit, that we could see those fireworks as well!

So, while the room was on the small side, we honestly didn’t spend much time in our room – because who would with the incredible pool area below?

THE POOL AREA/RESORT

The pool area is what really drew us to book this hotel. We really wanted something more than just “a hotel” – we wanted more of a “resort” experience – and the pool area of The Buena Vista Palace really hits that resort vibe out of the park.

The pool is massive and so beautiful. Lined with lounge chairs and umbrellas and palm trees, it truly is a stunning place to relax. Our kids LOVED the pool and would have easily spent the full 5 days planted poolside.

With the addition of the splash pad and lazy river and hot tub – the pool area (which they call Float Lagoon) really felt like there was always something to do. While having a big, beautiful pool to swim in is fun, having that extra variety to spice things up kept us ALL engaged every time we were at the pool.

We did get approached by a “timeshare” person multiple times while we were at the pool. A lady hit up Derrick on our first day there, another found me while I was walking out of the pool area, heading back up to our room, and then a guy found us on a separate day. We’ve already done the whole timeshare presentation thing (can you hear my eyes rolling?) and we know that our time is not worth sitting under the pressure of what they have to offer – no matter how awesome their offer sounds. So, we declined, declined, and declined again. The timeshare sales people were nice – super friendly and not OVERLY pushy, but it was still kind of annoying to have someone trying to sell you something while you’re relaxing around the pool.

As I mentioned above, adjacent to the pool is a large, green, open area with lawn games and more places to sit and relax.

And right next to that is the poolside bar and restaurant called Shades.

Speaking of which – let’s talk about the food options at The Buena Vista Palace..

THE FOOD

There are a total of 5 on-site dining locations.

Shades is the outdoor bar location next to the pool. We ate food and ordered drinks from there on multiple occasions. It was just so convenient while relaxing at the pool! They offered all your usual drinks plus a great assortment of food – we loved everything we ordered, from the pizza, to the chicken tenders, to the wraps – it was all DELICIOUS and top notch.

Citrus 28 is their “grab and go” food location – if you were simply looking for a quick snack, this was the place to stop. There was also a small cafe, so they would make an assortment of fresh food (think breakfast sandwiches, wraps, cafe-type fare) and coffees. The line here got EXTREMELY long in the mornings, so if you are planning on getting food here before heading out, plan accordingly!

Sunnies is the bar you’ll see upon entering the hotel – it sits right off the lobby. They do have a menu of food, beyond just bar food, making it the hotel’s casual eating location – somewhere between the “grab and go” food of Citrus 28 and
Letterpress, which is their sit-down restaurant. We considered eating there, but ultimately every time we thought about it – we decided to simply eat out by the pool instead (that’s where our kids wanted to be anyway). The food looked amazing every time we walked by though!

According to The Buena Vista Palace website, sometimes they have a Disney character breakfast here?! Which is wow, super cool! However, it’s currently listed as “suspended” and it wasn’t in play when we were there either. I’m not sure if it was just a temporary thing or if it’s seasonal?
And lastly,

Blue is their sports bar (I’m not even sure where this bar is located – we never ventured over to it) and I only realized it existed while I was looking at the hotel’s website in order to create this video! We have small children, so sitting at a bar is not our scene, but if it’s yours – there are several options for you including Blue.

It goes without saying, but there is no continental breakfast at The Buena Vista Palace. We typically try to book hotels with breakfast included, simply because that makes mornings so much easier and we save a lot of money that way ($30-40 every day for breakfast really adds up).

Our secret to staying in hotels without breakfast included is simple: it’s WalMart.
We research which WalMart is closest and on our way into a hotel and we set up a pickup order that we can grab on our way in. We order things we can keep in our mini fridge and heat up in the microwave for breakfast. We typically stock up on yogurts, muffins, breakfast sandwiches – those sorts of things. We also grab drinks for the week and stock up on snacks that we’ll want to eat around the pool and up in our room after a long day of roller coaster riding. Oh, and we always grab a case of water as well.

Not having to buy breakfast every morning and having tons of yummy snacks and drinks on hand saves us TONS of money when we stay at hotels like The Buena Vista Palace.

DISNEY PERKS

One of the reasons we specifically stayed at this particular hotel when we were in Florida last fall (outside of its resort vibes) was for the fact that it’s an OFFICIAL Walt Disney World hotel. Our trip centered around a day at Magic Kingdom, so we knew that we wanted the perks that only OFFICIAL DIsney hotels deliver. Now, you don’t get ALL the Disney resort perks by staying here, but you do get early entry, which is the biggest perk we cared about. Trust me: being able to get into Disney a full 30 minutes before the general public can make ALL the difference in your day! It truly is incredible how much you can do in those 30 minutes and the head start that you get on the biggest attractions that always have the longest lines.

Upon check in, the hotel does give you a coupon book for different shops and restaurants in Disney Springs and they also provide a discount toward the four Disney Golf courses. We are roller coaster people, not golfers, so those discounts didn’t appeal to us, but maybe they’d appeal to you or someone you’re staying with, and if so, they’re 100% worth taking advantage of! Disney doesn’t really offer many discounts, so if you can find them, use them!

The Buena Vista Palace is just a short walk away from Disney Springs (connected via walking path & Skybridge). It’s about a half a mile to walk and the Skybridge is both stroller and handicap accessible with an elevator on both ends. If you have a stroller, definitely bring it! The Florida heat makes even a half a mile walk pretty intense.

The hotel offers a complimentary shuttle to all four Disney parks (which is another way to save money – parking fees at theme parks is a KILLER). Epcot sits about 4 miles away, Magic Kingdom and Hollywood studios are less than 5 miles away, and Animal Kingdom is about 7 ½ miles away (in other words: The Buena Vista Palace is very conveniently located to all four DIsney parks!)

The different shuttle times were posted prominently around the hotel. You do have to reserve your ride ahead of time. This can be done easily from your phone by scanning the QR code on the shuttle information posted or directly from the hotel’s website. You simply select what park you want to go to, how many are in your party, and select what time you want to depart and your return time. We found the shuttle prompt, the drivers super helpful and polite, and loved the convenience the shuttle offered!

CONS

If you’re considering a stay at The Buena Vista Palace, I would be remiss not to mention that they do charge a parking fee, like many hotels located in Orlando do. As it currently stands, it is $35 to self-park and $45 for valet parking.

The self-parking lot is quite a walk away – in other words, you won’t be simply “running back to your car” for something you forgot – it’s a walk.

It’s just something to consider when creating your budget for your stay.

PROS

If you’re looking for a hotel with a resort vibe, The Buena Vista Palace is where it’s at. We dedicated one FULL day of our vacation to spend at the hotel and it was a GREAT. We had such a fun, relaxing day hanging out around the pool! You simply cannot go wrong.

Additionally, if you have plans to visit any of the Disney parks while you’re in Orlando, staying at The Buena Vista Palace gives you a lot of great Disney perks without the price tag of a Disney hotel.

So, the big question: would we go back to The Buena Vista Palace? Absolutely yes. We loved our stay there and we highly recommend it!