Caribbean Beach Resort is a moderate resort at Walt Disney World. It’s maybe best known these days at the hub of the Skyliner. In this post, we’ll review Caribbean Beach, covering rooms, amenities, restaurants, and, of course, the Skyliner. Here’s what we think of Caribbean Beach!
Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort Basics
Caribbean Beach is one of four moderate Disney resorts. If you’re considering Caribbean Beach, you may want to read some of our other posts. We have a ranking of the best Disney World moderate resorts. We also have a guide to all the hotels of Walt Disney World. And here are our reviews of all the moderate resorts (links open in new tabs):
Review of Disney’s Caribbean Beach Resort (you are here)
Review of Disney’s Coronado Springs Resort (Separate Review of Gran Destino Tower)
The Cabins at Fort Wilderness fall into a similar price category, but aren’t technically considered moderate hotels. And if you’d like to see where this resort falls overall, check out our complete Disney World hotel rankings.
The short of the “moderate” designation is that it is supposed to be somewhere between the values and deluxe resorts in quality and price. Rack rates for standard rooms at Caribbean Beach Resort in 2025 start at $268 per night.
As a Disney hotel, guests at Caribbean Beach are entitled to all the perks of Disney hotel stays, including free transportation to the parks. You’ll also have access to Early Theme Park Entry and the ability to purchase and book Lightning Lanes 7 days in advance of your trip, rather than 3 days in advance of your visit date.
Caribbean Beach is an Epcot area resort, located near Pop Century and Art of Animation. This designation means very little. If you’re driving, maybe it might help to know what “area” you’re in. But really what most guests care about, more than location, is transportation.
The resort has Skyliner access to Epcot and Hollywood Studios and bus access to Magic Kingdom and Animal Kingdom. We’ll talk more about transportation below, but the Skyliner makes this hotel a particularly good option if your trip will be heavily focused on Epcot and Hollywood Studios.
Caribbean Beach does not have a fitness center or an arcade. The loop around the resort is 1.2 miles and makes for a pretty nice run, including a pass by Riviera Resort. You can add a spur out and back through the Trinidad area to pad your distance, too.
The theme of Caribbean Beach is—(drumroll)—the Caribbean! In Florida, this theming doesn’t particularly hit you too hard, and there’s a good argument to be made that Caribbean Beach has the tamest theming of the moderate resorts. (Emily once remarked while we walked around that it sort just looks like any other roadside hotel complex in Central Florida, and I’ve never been able to un-see it.)
Not Pictured — Skyliner stations would be just to the left of Jamaica and at the top to the right of Aruba
One thing to know about Caribbean Beach—it’s huge. It’s sprawling, with the farthest spots being a 12-minute walk from the center of the resort. You can view a full map of Caribbean Beach here.
The entire Caribbean Beach Resort comprises six “villages”—Old Port Royale, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, Aruba, and Jamaica. Old Port Royale is the hub of the resort, containing the lobby, main restaurants, shop, and feature pool. The other five villages consist primarily of room buildings, small “leisure” pools, and each has a small beach (no swimming).
Booking Caribbean Beach Resort
For our last stay, we paid $364.50 per night (part of a 25% offer) for a 5th sleeper room. There were no annual passholder offers available our most recent stay. We booked our stay through our recommended travel advisor, Lauren Quirk of Travel With Character LLC.
Caribbean Beach has new Under the Sea rooms (separate review), but as of this update these aren’t bookable as their own category. That review discusses tips for booking those rooms.
Otherwise, you can always put in a room request (the easiest way is to use the chat function in the app, but you can also call). Since Caribbean Beach is so huge with different perks in different spots—the Riviera Skyliner station, the Caribbean Skyliner station, the Under the Sea rooms, the main Old Port Royale area—you might think carefully about your pick. Personally, we’ve never had an issue with any location we’ve wound up at.
Caribbean Beach—Old Port Royale Lobby
On our last visit, we flew into MCO and took an Uber to the hotel. Generally, that’s our preferred way to get between the airport and Disney World, but there are also shuttle options.
Caribbean Beach was significantly remodeled a few years ago, and it still looks pretty good. The entire Old Port Royale area, particularly the lobby, is beautiful.
One feature we love about the new lobby—outlets! The sofas had built in outlets (though only half of them worked), and the lobby has two long tables with built in outlets (all worked).
The Caribbean Beach lobby might functionally be one of the best spots for getting work done at Walt Disney World, but of course it’s still a loud hotel lobby.
Having good lobby space to relax in is really nice. The thing is, with the resort layout, you might actually never make it back to the lobby between check-in and check-out. If you used Disney World’s online check-in option, you might never visit the lobby.
You can catch the park buses at every village, which means you don’t actually need to pass through the lobby during your stay.
One visit, we hung out in the lobby one night and enjoyed a performance by a trio dressed as pirates. They performed a variety of songs, from “Take Me Home, Country Roads” to Coco’s “Remember Me.” On another visit, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto spent some time in the lobby.
Our Room at Caribbean Beach Resort
Note 2: This section reviews the old (pre-2024) rooms at Caribbean Beach. It seems like now Caribbean Beach is working through a refurbishment of all the rooms. These changes are welcome, in my mind, but they don’t much impact my overall opinion of the resort. (And based on what I’ve seen they really didn’t shoot for the moon with these refurbishments.)
Note: Some rooms at Caribbean Beach (formerly Pirate Rooms) have been converted to “Under the Sea” rooms. You can read our review of the Under the Sea rooms here.
I’ve reorganized this review to talk about rooms and pools before transportation…but please do not leave this review without reading about the transportation situation, as having a plan for that is literally the biggest thing I consider when thinking about this resort.
Caribbean Beach’s rooms are part of a design trap that Walt Disney World fell into for a few years (these rooms were refurbished in 2018)—the rooms are more minimalist without really being hyper functional. Our room had two queen beds, but single king bed rooms are also available.
The regular Caribbean Beach rooms lag behind most of the rooms at Disney World as far as refurbishment goes. Even with the 2024 updates I haven’t gotten photos of yet, these rooms are not up to the quality of the rooms at Coronado Springs or even just the “Under the Sea” section of Caribbean Beach. They’re stuck in a more bland minimalism that quickly went out of date (if it ever was in fashion).
Our most recent room was located in the Aruba village, one of the farthest spots from Old Port Royale. This isn’t surprising for a discounted Priceline booking. It was about an eight-minute walk from Old Port Royale.
The room was nice and clean. The TV was large, and there was a good amount of desk space. There were multiple working outlets. Most notably compared to the value resorts, there was ample room for two people to get ready in the vanity area.
The detailing throughout the room is nice without being overstated. A lot of people preferred the previous, more vibrant rooms here, and I sort of get that. I’m a big fan of the highly functional upgrades most of Walt Disney World has gotten, but these rooms sort of dropped their flare for little gain.
With the Skyliner’s two stations opposite the main resort amenities, pretty much each room location has pros and cons. Martinique is maybe the exception, being close to the Riviera Skyliner station and close to Old Port Royale. Otherwise, you’ll be balancing distance from the main amenities at Old Port Royale with distance from the Skyliner.
The Skyliner actually is nearly silent, and so far we haven’t heard anyone in the rooms near the Skyliner complaining about noise. That said, we haven’t personally been in a room under the Skyliner since it opened.
Pools at Caribbean Beach
Caribbean Beach actually has six pools. Five of these are smaller “village” pools in the center of each area. These aren’t notable, so here’s a picture of one.
The feature pool at Caribbean Beach is “Fuentes Del Morro” pool. The comments to this post discuss that ‘morro’ translates to ‘promontory’ or, contextually, ‘fort’, and that “Fort of Fountains” is probably the best translation. See an example of this usage here.
Disney describes the Fuentes Del Morro pool as a “pirate’s paradise” themed to a “colonial Spanish fortress.” Truth be told, it is pretty cool.
The water cannons, water slides, and play area definitely set it above the value resorts. Thematically, you (more likely your kids) might even prefer it to the deluxe pools.
Transportation at Caribbean Beach
Caribbean Beach is connected to the rest of Walt Disney World by bus and Skyliner. Transportation remains the biggest problem at the resort, even with the Skyliner added. This section is long, but I also consider transportation to be the biggest factor in considering a stay at Caribbean Beach.
There’s no perfect order to discuss transportation because every option has pros/cons compared to the others. We’ll do the best we can to keep it organized and start with driving, then the bus, the Skyliner, and then Uber / Lyft / Minnie Vans.
Driving at Caribbean Beach
Guests with cars at Disney World have the best shot at a smooth time at Caribbean Beach Resort. Each village has its own parking lot, so your car should be only a minute or two away. Parking is free, and guests of Disney resorts park for free at the theme parks.
Getting to Animal Kingdom, you’ll usually prefer to drive rather than waiting for the bus, which has to make six (I’ve even heard seven recently) stops around the resort.
You have the Skyliner for most of the day going to Hollywood Studios and Epcot, but if you need to get to Hollywood Studios early enough for rope drop or if you have to rope drop Test Track at Epcot, you’ll want to drive. Keep in mind the nearest Skyliner station might be a ten-minute walk from your room.
Those three drives are all about 10-15 minutes, making them great alternatives to the other transportation options.
Magic Kingdom is trickier. Driving there requires you park at the lot outside Ticket and Transportation Center, and you then have 15-30 minute commute to the park entrance depending on how good your parking spot is and how lucky you time your rides. But now let’s talk about the other option to Magic Kingdom—the bus…
Taking the Bus at Caribbean Beach
Each Caribbean Beach village has its own bus stop. This cuts down on walking time, but adds to bus time. And if you’re in a wheelchair / ECV, you’ll need to get lucky enough for their to still be a spot for you if your stop isn’t first (sidenote: I’m honestly not sure how big a problem this is, but I’d definitely research further if it applies to you).
There is an internal bus that can take you between the villages. This makes most sense for when you have luggage or if you have trouble walking, though. The time to get to your village bus stop plus the wait and ride time will probably be greater than the time it takes you just to walk wherever you need to go.
Last I heard, when the Skyliner is operating, buses run to Epcot and Hollywood Studios only once per hour (I’d check with the resort to confirm they run at all, though). Really we don’t have much of a problem with this as the Skyliner really is quite efficient for getting to those parks during operational hours.
Without the six stops, the bus route around Caribbean Beach would still take 9 minutes
Best we can tell, there’s no definite order the buses will make stops in. Multiple sources report different routes, and even if someone could report that all the buses take one route today, we wouldn’t take it on faith that they’d keep those routes tomorrow.
So, bus is supposed to be the best option for getting to Magic Kingdom…but one trip to Magic Kingdom, it took us 75 minutes to get to the park by bus from our Caribbean Beach room.
You might wonder what the predicted bus time on the app was. The app and sign at the stop both just continually pushed the wait time back by 2 minutes until the bus finally showed up.
Once picked up, it took 35 minutes to get from Old Port Royale to Magic Kingdom. From the Aruba stop (last stop that ride), that trip took 16 minutes.
You should always take individual guest reports with a grain of salt (even though frankly I think that travel time is never acceptable, even once), but I’ve heard similar complaints from multiple people.
I still do take the bus to Magic Kingdom for rope drop in the morning, but from Caribbean Beach, Coronado Springs, and Port Orleans Riverside I allocate an additional 30 minutes to my transit time.
There is one way to avoid the difficulty of getting to Magic Kingdom, and that’s Minnie Vans, which we’ll discuss to end this section, after we talk about the Skyliner.
Skyliner
With the Disney World Skyliner available, transportation to Epcot and Hollywood Studios from Caribbean Beach is incredibly convenient. Let’s start with the good news about the Skyliner before switching to the problems.
There are two Skyliner stations for use by Caribbean Beach guests. The Caribbean Beach station is in the southwest part of the resort, across the lake (Barefoot Bay) from the Trinidad rooms and right across the street from the Jamaica rooms. The Riviera Resort station is in the northwest part of the resort, just north of the Aruba rooms.
The good thing about the Skyliner is that these stations are relatively short walks (five to ten minutes) from most of the resort, and they are short trips to Epcot and Hollywood Studios:
Riviera to Epcot is nine minutes
Caribbean to Hollywood Studios is six minute
Between the two stations is about five minutes
When we’ve used the Skyliner midday to get between Caribbean Beach and the two parks, it’s been amazing. It’s quick, efficiently boarded, and beautiful. For a casual guest or a guest with a longer stay, the Skyliner is a huge perk, particularly from the Jamaica rooms.
That said, there are two issues, both related to rope drop. In fairness, before I spell these out, I should say I don’t consider these big issues. They’ll leave you in a less-than-ideal situation, sure, but it’s nothing you can’t work around. The bigger takeaway is that if you’re only taking the Skyliner in the morning and evening, you might not find it as great a perk as people who are making the additional midday trips.
The Skyliner is not ideal for Hollywood Studios rope drop. The Skyliner usually starts running about an hour before Early Entry begins. This is usually a hair too late to get you a good spot at the front of the pack. That said, my attitude in recent years is that, particularly if I’ve got Lightning Lane Multi Pass (which I always do at Hollywood Studios), the benefits of the Skyliner for Hollywood Studios access overall outweigh any concerns at rope drop.
It’s also not great for starting with Test Track at Epcot. If you don’t have a Lightning Lane for Test Track, your Epcot rope drop strategy might have you starting at Test Track. But the Skyliner uses Epcot’s World Showcase entrance, which is farther from Test Track than the main entrance.
Note: At some point, Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind will stop using a virtual queue and the rope drop procedures at Epcot will change. I’m eagerly awaiting finding out whether guests entering from the Skyliner entrance will be in an okay position to rope drop that ride.
Rideshare at Caribbean Beach
For rideshare at Disney World, there are three big options. Uber, Lyft, and Minnie Vans. Even though these are similar, they merit brief, separate discussions here.
Uber. We’re big fans of using Uber rides to get around Walt Disney World. Uber works the same as you’d expect, but the default pickup/drop off spot is the main entrance to the hotel, which might be a bit of a hike from your room. You can move around the pickup/drop off pin, but the driving directions might not be the best for that. This brings us to…
Lyft. Lyft pickups can actually be set for your block of rooms, as seen in the below screenshot. I couldn’t get it to give this option for drop off, but presumably you’re in less of a hurry to get home than to get to the park.
This is one of the reasons WDW Prep School prefers Lyft to Uber. The reason for this additional feature is that Lyft is the partner with Disney for…
Minnie Vans. Minnie Vans can be booked via the Lyft app and are driven by Disney Cast Members, but they’re much more expensive than Lyft—like…$40 vs. $10 expensive. You can read more about Minnie Vans here.
That said, Minnie Van drivers always offer to drop me off as close to my room as possible, and Minnie Vans can drop you off directly at the front gate of Magic Kingdom.
Shopping at Caribbean Beach Resort
The main store at Caribbean Beach is Calypso Trading Post. Mostly, the store offers what you’ll find at every other Disney hotel—basic travel items (toothbrush, deodorant, snacks), seasonal Disney gears, and some nicer clothing items.
The Caribbean Beach gear was pretty cool, but limited. I particularly liked the mugs and shot glasses. Calypso Trading Post also sells a lot of pirate gear, part of the resort’s attempt to cash in on the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise.
Food and Drink at Caribbean Beach Resort
Caribbean Beach has one table service restaurant, two quick service restaurants, one bar, and three “grab and go” style stops.
Before we talk through the specifics of these, it’s worth also remembering that you could walk right over to the new Disney’s Riviera Resort, which has deluxe-level food and drink options.
Families should note there is character breakfast at Riviera Resort’s Topolino’s Terrace, and adults at Disney World should know the Toloplino’s Terrace bar has been getting great reviews.
Sebastian’s Bistro
Sebastian's Bistro is the table service restaurant at Caribbean Beach. It’s casual dining, so nothing fancy and generally not a good use of a Disney dining plan credit.
Sebastian’s was rarely busy while we were there. Emily had one lunch there. The service was very good. The food was also good, but with Centertown Market having better prices, it might be hard to justify Sebastian’s. If you’re really into seafood, Sebastian’s is going to be a good option.
Centertown Market
Centertown Market is the primary quick service stop at Caribbean Beach. It's not quite a food court, but it’s close. The menu is a Latin / Caribbean / American mix. The food is a half-step above the food courts of the value resorts (you can check the current menus in the app).
The best option for Centertown Market is definitely to mobile order. We’ve been happy to see more and more hotel spots get added to Mobile Ordering at Disney World. With mobile ordering, you won’t have to wait in any lines, and you can just hand out in the lobby or nearby store until your food is ready. Then you just pick it up from the mobile order window.
Spyglass Grill
Spyglass Grill, over in the Trinidad section of the resort is the second quick service stop. If you’re not staying in Trinidad, Spyglass isn't going to be worth the hike unless a unique menu item really grabs you or you have to eat during Centertown Market’s gap hours.
Conversely, if you’re in Trinidad, it's great to have a functional quick service stop nearby. I grabbed a quick breakfast there all three mornings of our last visit. (When you combine the quality of the Under the Sea rooms with the proximity to Spyglass Grill, I greatly prefer those rooms to many, many deluxe options.)
Banana Cabana Bar
The pool bar at Caribbean Beach is Banana Cabana. It’s located between the pool and Sebastian’s. It’s one of the most thematically impressive elements of the entire resort, and it offers a spacious, open-air environment with pretty good views.
You’ll mostly see other Caribbean Beach guests at the bar, but I find it to be a fun enough spot to include on the Skyliner Bar Crawl.
Grab and Go Stops
At Centertown Market, you’ll also find “Centertown Market Grab & Go.” The selection here is passable, with multiple packaged sandwiches available, but still not a good substitute for a meal.
Conclusions About Caribbean Beach Resort
We’re quite torn on Caribbean Beach. Some things it does very well. The lobby is great, especially if anyone in the household needs a place to sit and work or read for a few hours. The food is delicious and unique. And the pool is at least better than those of the value resorts. The Cast Members are some of the best we’ve encountered in Walt Disney World Resort.
But the transportation situation was abysmal. It simply cannot take 75 minutes to get to Magic Kingdom from any point in any Walt Disney World Resort hotel. Centertown Market’s single line for ordering is also problematic during busy times. You could see how these delays really pile up.
As I update this heading into 2025, my love of the Skyliner has only increased over time. This is particularly the case because any problems at Hollywood Studios rope drop are mitigated by Lightning Lane Multi Pass. The big unknown heading into 2025, though, is whether Epcot’s Guardians of the Galaxy Cosmic Rewind will ever drop its virtual queue, and how the International Gateway entrance will be handled at that point.
For families, it’s likely kids will enjoy the pool, and the Skyliner is a fun-for-the-whole-family transit option, particularly if you won’t be exhausting yourself heading to early rope drops every day.
Caribbean Beach isn’t our top moderate hotel choice for adults doing Disney World, that honor goes to Gran Destino Tower. That said, you’re a quick Skyliner ride to Epcot and Hollywood Studios and the presence of Riviera Resort gives you some high-quality dining options.
Caribbean Beach just supports our feeling that the moderates are much closer to “value+” than to anything resembling the deluxe resorts. What this means practically is that we’d budget for them sort of like a room upgrade. If you can afford it for your next trip instead of a value resort, then spring for it.
But if you’re thinking you’d like to “treat yourself”—look to the deluxe resorts or (in our mind) maybe Gran Destino Tower at Coronado Springs. Even though you’ll have to save a little longer, you’ll see much more of a treat visiting one of the deluxe resorts than moving up to Caribbean if you’re traditional a value visitor.
Have you stayed at Caribbean Beach? What did you think?
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